Dispatch from Idaho:

There’s a horse who stands in a field out in the country by where I live. A place surrounded by fields of comatose sugar beets and hard earth; a permafrost, an Icelandic bandage holding back the blood, keeping check on the broken hearted, keeping them cold and unsafe when the locks break and that world comes crashing the gates… And the horse just stands there. A white horse, a sort of mangy horse with tears in his eyes and an unkempt tail that flickers in the wind. And as I pass him on my daily exodus to death, I wonder how he can stand it, just standing there in the bitter cold staring off into nothing; and I wonder what he’s thinking, and I wonder if he’s cursing it all just like me. “There’s a barn there,” I say to him. And there is. Right behind him. A small red one next to the old house where the windows frame pale light and unused chairs and an idiot box flashing mad like a pornographic Vicar Street show. “Why don’t you go inside? Lay in some hay and crawl under a warm blanket?” But he doesn’t move. He just stands there and then I wonder if he’s just merely frozen to death. Dead in his tracks. A block of ice. A heart attack perhaps? I look down at the digital thermometer on the dashboard, and it reads 9 degrees… And the wind is kicking ass and the girl in the convenience store doesn’t even know I’m there; too busy scrubbing the loo until I appear in the mirror and she sells me cigarettes and a smile as my car purrs outside the door… I leave the city behind and head back out to the rural environs through the blowing snow and airstrip landing lighthouse blues piercing the night and when I pass the fenced-in field the horse is still there, still in the same exact position he was when I had left him earlier and I felt sorry for him, as I feel sorry for all those that suffer; but then I get to thinking about something I read, about how stock animals are pretty hardy and they can take the cold and some even prefer it and I think of wolves and I think of huskies and I think of the summer heat of days gone by that I loathed so dearly… And now, which do I prefer? Really neither I suppose. Give me a warm rain and cool nights lying next to someone and loved. But that is gone like vapor or never was. And as I look around through these magical spectacles at the peeps and the unholy world, I find little to intrigue me; so I’ll start a new religion and our god will be a nomadic white space horse who lives in the mountains of Idaho and grants wishes if one simply closes their eyes, folds their arms and talks to him. Perhaps someone will pray for a lover to keep the winter chill at bay. But where do lovers dwell? In the bar? In the grave? In a hookah lounge? In jail? Are they waiting? Crying? Laughing? Happy? Sad? Cursing? Spitting? Throwing furniture out the window? And I think that’s why the horse just stands there, oblivious to the pain of the cold, because he is a manifestation of the horse lord in the flesh. He will forgive us all our sins and grant us everlasting peace.

By

Aaron Echoes August