The horse screamed first.

It’s an awful sound. It peeled and cored and quartered me, like new fruit.

I flinched, and dropped the plate I was drying, and it smashed loud against the floor and I flinched again. That’s all I could move, for a moment. Even if I were all grown and wise with a head screwed on good and tight I would have done the same thing, it's only natural, anyone would. Even you know the feeling. Right? When dumb fear bites into your ribs and bloats your heart up with hot mud and hot metal, and the whole mess of it sinks out the bottom of your chest and past your stomach and into your legs and through your feet, and welds you to the floor? You know the feeling, don’t you? It’s a small hell but it’s there.

“That wasn’t..?”

I was still stone by the time Alex got her wits back. She looked a little pale, and was trying to peer out the window over the sink, and then I’m not sure what else, because I was already gone. “Ava!”

The sidedoor gave way for me and I was sprinting towards the stable (the Morgan screamed again, ripe and heavy with anger, and then Dominick screamed too) with absolutely nothing in mind. At least not that I can remember. I might have been thinking How far did he get him out? or Maybe he slipped off in time? or something else like that, trying to piece out what was happening before it had the chance to happen and hurt everything into nothing.

Then I saw them in the field and sweet God, it was horrible to watch. Make no mistake. It was awful. I think mostly because it was almost beautiful too. Or maybe I feel that way now, seeing as I’ve got enough foulness in me to think such a thing at such a time, with the awfulness of it and everything. I didn’t mean to though. Awful things strike you full of awe, and if you’d seen it you may have done the same exact thing. Words defy the sight.

The Morgan - sweet God the Morgan. He was lit up like New Year's. He was a war of himself. All fury and bone and sinew, twisting and braiding in a mangled tangle just under the bourbon gleam of his coat, and still screaming. Varnish and tarnish and tyrant. It would have been a rare treat to watch, and enjoy, if Dominick hadn’t been so crooked and quiet on the grass under him.

From there - well, I’m still not entirely sure what I had planned to do once I got there. Distract the horse? Fight him off? Throw Dominick over my shoulder, and? I don’t know. I didn’t know. Everything was rushing to get through at the same time, like the people in the door of a theater on fire, so I never really knew what everything was. Maybe the way I saw it, was that it wouldn’t really matter what I did once I was there, if I never got there to begin with. It’s what seemed most important I guess is what I mean.

Fifteen or twenty yards off when I was close enough for the Morgan to catch notice and turn towards me, he made a wall of stone with just the look of himself and I hit it and stopped dead. No tripping or stumbling, even. I just stopped dead. Teeth and eyes and firestorm. God, but he was stunning.

The tendons of his legs cinched and clenched and wheeled him around sharp, and powerful, that deep neck and solid body coming at me like a dowsing rod and I stood and watched and thought how awful it would be if Dominick was dead. If he had died. With a skull all caved inward like a bowl or a spine crumbled up into stupid useless lumps in his back. If he was dead I knew it would be the closest to murder that I would ever get.

Awful. Just awful. A nightmare come real.

But when the rifle cracked, and the brass-and-velvet muscle of the Morgan’s chest tore open like taffy, and big ripe gumdrops of blood came down and sprinkled Dominick and the green grass all around him, and the scream shriveled to a squeal and then a gurgle and then nothing, it was every bit as ugly.




I stayed in bed the next few days, so I can only give you the broad strokes of what happened after. One of the stableboys, Brody, a real crackshot if evidence is evidence, he was the one that got the Morgan. All the way from the stable. Pop probably gave him a raise or vacation or something for being so bold and quick to save his youngest daughter. I wasn’t sure what to think of it.

Dominick turned out fine. Just fine. Ripped up like a roadmap with about as many lines, and a broken this and fractured that and a nice big dent in the shelf of bone over one of his eyes, but other than that, he was just roses. I wasn’t sure what to think of that either.

And no, I don’t know if Pop ever compensated Mr. Connelly or what. Was the Morgan getting killed off enough to call it squash? Or maybe Pop forked over whatever horses he’d been eyeing, free of charge? Or I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Connelly wrote him a check for his boy dragging out one of the race animals and getting it shot. I’ve yet to ask. I don’t think I’d be satisfied with any answer.

At some point while I was still in bed, soaking quietly in this sort of thinking, Mama poked her head in and asked if I wanted to come say goodbye.

“No.” I didn’t want to do anything.

The hall-light had turned her into a shadow on the wall, and I watched it think for a moment. Surely, surely she was about to press me. Was about to tell me to get over myself and get some manners, that a little moving-around would do me good. Snap the lightswitch on. Rip my covers off. Something like that. And I got ready for it - I got ready to argue her. But then her shadow shrank away and the door clicked shut and I wasn't ready for that.

Then it was just me and the dopey evening light. I never knew cotton sheets could choke you so bad. They made scraping noises when I curled up against my knees, and I thought for sure, for sure, that I’d never be able to fall asleep this way. That I’d just lie here for a few more days or so, staring at the wall, waiting for it to stop drawing itself into pictures of boys folded up like butcher hats and horses busted up like animal crackers. But I must have eventually drifted off, because then it was morning, and the big glittery dragon racehorse trailer and its owners were all gone.

This was all awhile ago, though, so things have more or less smoothed over. You know. Just evened out. I think on it sometimes when I find myself turning idle, but not much other than that. Mostly I wonder just what it was he was expecting, just how he saw it playing out, I mean. All the in-between. I’m more than certain how he pictured the end of it. Probably something like, him swinging off the Morgan’s warm granite back, smoothly as cream of course, and giving me one last sharp city look. Watching me, on purpose, saying with the polished-up look of himself This is your fear and your fear was nothing. Letting those oily eyes grease up his words and then push them in as deep as they would go. Then rattling off back to California. To Anaheim. To his racetrack, in his glossy foreign car. Instead he rattled off to the doctor in a field truck that could have just as easy ended up a hearse.

What did he make of that? What did he think when he looked back on it? What sort of feeling was it, right then, the one that lit up in the pit of him, in that place where his heart and his throat came together, the moment he saw it was all gone bad? I still wonder. He was a piss-poor gambler, with a chiseled-up face and ugly centipede scars crawling all under his pretty glossy clothes. Can you run a racetrack that way?

This wondering doesn’t do me any favors, though, so I try my best to keep from turning idle and thinking on them. Around mealtimes in particular. There are only so many excuses I can invent for a lost appetite, and it might raise a strange mood at the table to say that everything would turn to blood in my mouth.

I wonder how much of it’s the Anaheim boy’s. And how much I’m to blame. And I know it’s a foul thing, but I can’t help hating him for that.


((I completely forgot about this story until about half an hour ago. It's the last ~1400 words of an ~8000 dealy that I never quite finished about a year back. There's all that development stuff and exposition junk and etc., but it's also like 7000 words, and it's also pretty shoddy, so I'll just have to wait and see how well this trimming right here airs out. Hopefully the story is still there!

The Morgan is a breed of horse that was used specifically by cavalrymen in the Civil War!

I seem to really like horses, but only when presented as lovely vehicles of injury and indifference and the casual chaos of nature!))