Chapter 4: The Man with the Moon in his Teeth

Part 1/2

Down the way, and to the right a bit, there was a little tin trailer sitting next to a pond. The pond drained itself down every spring, summer and fall, into a little salt-crusted ring of mud baked by the sun. And beside the pond there was a very old, very lonely horse, whose eyes were turned inwards. He reflected, percepted nothing but himself, except for any seductively prickled weeds that drew his teeth outside of the barbed wire fence.

The girl called him Jehoshaphat, because he was very, very fat. In the late summer afternoons when the cicadas beat their drums heaviest, she’d pass by and look at him. Battered and beaten by the sun, she would hold a single, wilted dandelion through the fence wires—a little brown hand lifting up a burnt offering to the mad king. That’s what she thought, but her Sunday school kings were a little confused.

Every almost day, the horse stood in the little field and looked up, down, and around. Around the time each day that the sun took itself home, he’d walk himself over to the back porch of the trailer to see if there was anything worth eating. The door, burnt orange and crackling with heatstroke, would sit there quiet. This was the only time that Jehoshaphat thought about anything other than himself. Would it open? Would it fall? It sat silent, nothing happened. No sound except the pops of paint bubbles pimpling under the sun.

The man who opened the door, five minutes later, hardly seemed to be a man himself. Maybe a puppet, carved out of black walnut, with smile-grooves nicked deep into his cheeks, and heavy sheepskin eyebrows, white and flicked upwards towards the sun-shot sky. It seemed as though he’d been turned one time too many in the frying pan and then forgotten over too high heat. But the whites of his eyes were eggshell splinters against a cast iron skillet, crescent moons around a twilight sky, nail clippings scattered across blued linoleum.

To be continued.