Pieces of a Horse

I went to visit a farmer that I knew. When I got there, I found him out in his garage, all excited about a wooden crate that had come in the mail. He was prying the lid off the crate with a crowbar when I walked up. I heard the crack of wood and the creak of the nails wrenching free. The crate was packed with straw, and the farmer dug around a bit and pulled out the leg of a horse. He brushed the leg clean of a few loose pieces of straw, and he held it gripped with both hands, satisfied with the length and the weight and the feel of it. It was a rich brown with small patches of white. "Look at that shoe!" he told me, flipping the leg around so that the hoof faced me. The smoothest, shiniest silver horseshoe was fixed to the hoof, looking like it had never taken the slightest step on dirty ground.

He explained to me that this was the last piece he needed to make a horse. He'd ordered it all through the mail, one piece at a time, and crate after crate had been delivered to the farm over the last three months. I was baffled by what he was telling me. I pointed out that a horse was a living creature, born of its mother, and growing bigger and stronger with time. It wasn't something that you could order in pieces through the mail and assemble together. But the farmer, he just laughed at my ignorance and gave me a little wink.

I followed him out to the barn. There was a large open area in the front, and he told me to wait there while he went in the back where the stalls were. I sat down on a bale of hay and gazed up at a large gap in the boards of the roof where the faded light of the cloudy day shone through. I rolled my eyes at the thought that the farmer was somewhere in the back, putting together a horse. But twenty minutes later, I heard that unmistakable snort and I looked up to see a brown and white horse come trotting through the doorway that led to the back of the barn. It looked over at me with its large dark eyes, and then it swung its head low and trotted past me out of the barn, out into the open field. As it passed into the light, I caught the gleam of silver off its hoof. It had on that same, perfectly clean shoe.

But all the same, I figured the farmer was pulling some kind of prank on me. Maybe this was a common joke among farmers. The old assembled horse routine. I figured I'd find him in the back, standing in the empty stall where the whole horse had been all along, still holding the horse leg that had come in the mail, laughing until there were tears in his eyes. But when I went in the back, there was no one there. I called out the farmer's name, but no one answered. It was cool and quiet and dark, and all the stalls were empty.

The door to the last stall was open, and I found all of the farmer's clothes in a heap on the floor inside the stall. I looked at the clothes and I looked back down at the doorway that the horse had went through, and I started to put it all together. The pieces of the horse were like a suit that the farmer had put on. He had put the torso of the horse around his midsection, slid the hind legs on like boots and the fore legs on like gloves, slipped the horse head over his own head, and fixed the tail to his own hind end. Doing so, he had actually become the horse. Not just wearing the horse, he was changed somewhere in the heart of the horse's being. I realized that this was how all horses came to be, born out of some unique sense of freedom that only a horse could offer someone willing to order one piece by piece through the mail.

There was a soft rumble of thunder and the rain began to pour outside. I went back out to stand in the open doorway of the barn, just enough inside to still be clear of the rain, and I saw the horse out there in the field. It was getting agitated by the rain and a little spooked by the thunder. It trotted around in an uncertain circle, not sure of what to do or where to go. Finally, it sought shelter under a tree that stood alone on a small hill, and I watched as it reached up and picked apples from the tree with its teeth and stood eating them, perfectly content.

By the Jailhouse

As I was strolling down a boulevard, enjoying the spring air and admiring the small trees that had been planted every few feet along the sidewalk, I came upon the stone building that served as the county jail. I happened to glance over as I was passing the front steps of the building, and I noticed a woman with curly, bleached blonde hair across the street, crouched down and hiding behind a hedge. Her eyes were just over the top of the hedge, and she was staring intently at the front doors of the jailhouse. This struck me as strange, almost comical, and I was curious about why the woman was there. So, when I got to the corner, I spent a few moments pretending to contemplate the bronze statue of the town's founder that looked out over the five point intersection, and then I casually turned around and went back the way that I had come, so that I could cross by the woman once more.

As I passed by the jailhouse again, there was a young man wearing sunglasses and a grey jacket, hustling down the steps. His shoulder bumped into mine, nearly knocking me to the ground, but he didn't stop to acknowledge me there. He didn't even seem to notice that he had ran into me. He just stopped at the curb, glanced quickly up the street, and then hurried across to the blonde woman hiding behind the hedge. She came out to meet him with her arms wide to embrace him, her black heels clicking against the pavement as she shuffled her feet, and a shopping bag dangling from her left hand. I shook my head, thinking that it had been silly for her to hide like that, as though this had been a carefully orchestrated jailbreak rather than a legitimately scheduled release, as though all dealings of any kind with the county jail required skulking about and hiding behind bushes.

The young man was clearly the blonde woman's boyfriend, and even he asked her what she was doing over there in the bushes. But he didn't really bother waiting for an answer; he just shook his head. He snatched the shopping bag from her hand and peered down into it. "What the hell is this?" he asked her, his raised voice carrying across the street. He drew a blue sequinned dress up out of the bag, holding the price tag for her to see. She fidgited in place and fumbled in her pockets for a cigarette, and they both immediately launched into what seemed like an old, old argument about money.

I started to move on, feeling too conspicuous standing there and watching this couple argue. I could hear the blonde woman behind me in tears, her high-pitched voice carrying over her boyfriend's low grumbles. She told him about all the places that she wanted them to go, fancy restaurants and nice stores, maybe even plays and art galleries. Somehow the sequinned dress was some necessary component of these fantasies, the key to the whole thing. She wanted them to have a new life, glossy and brightly colored, smooth and elegant. "And now you've ruined it, ruined everything!" she told him, stamping her heel on the sidewalk. Things were supposed to go a certain way when he got out of jail, when he came out and saw the dress, and already, from the very first scene, he had deviated from that long reel of celluloid images that she had hoped to see unwinding far into their future.

I heard the paper crinkle of the dress going back into the bag, and I glanced back to see the boyfriend put his hand on her arm to calm her, to comfort her, to tell her that he was sorry. But she had her head down, stubbornly refusing to be consoled. Their new life would be just like their old life, that picture perfect moment in the candlelight with the waiter holding the bottle of wine would always be just beyond their reach, always belonging to someone else, somewhere else. But they started away together down the boulevard, her sullenness subsiding as she rested her head on his shoulder. I just shrugged and turned the corner onto another sunny street.