The dead horse has more strength today. It can usually only muster enough energy to lift its head, from where it was euthanized, in the Campo, thirty years ago. But now, no invisible pressure stops it from contracting its throat muscles. No one can see the relief it feels, stretching, fully, after all this time. Even though it cannot breathe.
It’s just as well. The air quality is bad. Wildfires surround the town. The famous race, scheduled for the weekend, has just been cancelled. Everyone alive is upset, everyone dead has their own problems.
For example, how to make it over to the jockey, sitting in front of one of the cafes. He doesn’t look like a jockey, currently, but the dead horse instantly recognizes him as the man it threw off its back, decades ago, during the last Palio it ever ran.
While the dead horse tries to stand, the former jockey looks around the square, trying to identify which of the thirtyish year-old women sipping coffee, alone, could be his daughter. It may be none of them. He was supposed to meet her, Angie, yesterday. But he didn’t leave the mattress. He thought, if I don’t get out of bed, for real, then I can later say, I’m so sorry, I honestly stayed horizontal. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He had to pee, early. Luckily he had some dishware on the nightstand, which he could reach, and did reach, without touching the floor.
He changes his mind, often. He’s aware of this. He enjoys making plans, only to break them, and, conversely, likes showing up unannounced, creating spontaneous plans, where others must change their schedule to accommodate him. And people often do, accommodate him, because when he is not depressed and lying next to cappuccino cups filled with his own urine, he is charming.
In fact, he’s charming the waitstaff, currently. Minutes earlier they were moping around, coughing, complaining about the smoke. But now, they are laughing. He’s making a big enough scene that Angie, sitting across the plaza, notices him, and wonders if he is her father. It was a relief, his absence, growing up. The fathers of all her friends were either too nice or too mean. She didn’t have to deal with any of that. Her mother dated, but none of them lasted. They all looked like tofu. The ones that worked inside, at desks, were soft and deformed. The ones that labored outside were gritty and burned. They all reeked entirely of their surroundings. Were, actually, nothing, inside. They all crumbled before she learned their names.
The dead horse hobbles toward the former jockey. Antonio, Angelo? Something like that. What it remembers is how great it felt, to whip the idiot to the ground. It fell, too. But it was worth it, to see him, in pain, before someone called for the needle. It wanted the earth to swallow him. But the guy landed near the edge of the crowd, and a woman pulled him out of the way. Oh well, at least the man’s legs were twisted, surely broken, thought the horse, just before it died.
Something jostles the former jockey’s table. He shrugs, and continues talking to the waitstaff about the benefits of his tofu scramble. He’s espousing its flexibility, how it takes on the taste of everything around it. How that’s exactly what life should be. That we don’t need keys. We need bendiness. That the spatula to happiness is rubber, not metal.
As she orders another coffee, Angie sees the man, across the plaza, become confused. Waving his hands while his chair, with him in it, scoots around the Campo. He must be her father. He looks exactly how he sounded, on the phone, outwardly jovial, but totally vacuous. Not just lacking any depth but completely unaware there could be depth, that there could be something other than the present moment. Exactly the kind of person that would get thrown off a horse, and have sex with the tourist who pulled him out of harm’s way, and then disappear. Angie had tracked him down, and contacted him, this past Christmas. Not because she wanted a relationship, but money. She had just had a child, her husband was out of work. She thought, why not? The worst he can say is no, and, if so, nothing changes.
When the chair topples over, the former jockey goes with it. He stands up, but continues moving forward. If he had any interiority, Angie thinks, she would call it “against his will.” But he goes with it, propelled by some force, which everyone around the Campo is commenting about, but which nobody intervenes in.
What made her mother, thirty years ago, intervene? Angie imagines her father, back then, falling, and looking placid, on the dirt. No, whatever caused her mother to rescue her father came from her, not him.
Its undetectable bones don’t ache. The dead horse pushes, and keeps pushing the man with its ghost muzzle. It doesn’t think about where it’s pushing, only that it wants to move the former jockey till it can’t anymore, till whatever well of disembodied energy runs dry.
Angie stays where she is. She puts a ceramic mug to her lips, but doesn’t drink. On the cup is a detailed representation of flames. Her flight has been delayed. Her father arrives, at her table, just as ash begins to fall upon the square. Just as the dead horse stumbles. It slips through the cracks between cobblestones, into the center of the planet, where it, at last, inhales. Its lungs are full of liquid iron. It gallops in place. It wins the race.
Thomas Mixon is a Kenyon Review workshop alum, and a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. He has poetry and fiction in miniskirt magazine, Radon Journal, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He’s trying to write a few books.
Lost Balloon 