The Horses (November, 1998)

Kim White
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The vet asked if I wanted to see them. I said, “Yes.” So she took me up to the roof.
“They’re getting much better,” she said, and pulled back a tarp that was big enough to cover a swimming pool. Underneath were the horses. Cut into four separate parts and wrapped in plastic like sides of beef, “quartered,” as she put it. “Dividing the body speeds recovery,” she explained. For some reason this made sense to me, even as I registered how horrifying it was.
The horse parts looked up at me. They seemed sad, as if they’d given up, and frightened, as though about to die. I couldn’t say anything against the method because the vet was so sure about it, and also they weren’t my horses.
She covered them again. The horses were packed together on a rickety wooden platform that sagged in the center. We sat on the edge of the roof looking out over the city. The vet chattered about why the basement spaces were no good: “The environment has to be dark, but with occasional sunlight. And the space must be alive, awake, and exposed.”
I looked out over the roofs where ballerinas were fixed in stockades, astronauts were buried up to their necks in sand, and all the lions had been shrunk and bottled, hundreds of bottles roaring and glistening on the roof next door.
“Nothing is in the basement anymore?” I asked. “Nothing,” she replied.
A shrill whinny. A horse head peeked out. The vet spanked his nose and pulled the tarp over it.

Kim White is the author of a collection of prose poems, Scratching for Something, and the novelette, Diurnal. Her work is anthologized in Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. She holds an MFA from Columbia University.