Call It Horses

Little Thing; learn to turn in your heels for the steep canyon trails all slated up into white sky. You ride into the desert sun and you sense the scarce river where the river carves in, you go on, I’ll be okay, I’ll live, here in this world.
And when I gathered her in, almost on her final breath, when I held her like that, and the man let me, steadied the horse, and I brought her down slowly from the saddle and caught her whole body soft as a baby, what kind of love would you call that? That’s what I’m writing now to ask you, you who know all the living words. What word? What name? Tell me, what kind of name does it have?

I AM GRATEFUL To Black and Grey Magazine, which published the material on pages 81-82, in an earlier form, as the prose piece “Swine.”
I would like to thank West Virginia Wesleyan College for the Faculty Innovation Grant that offered me time and space to work on this manuscript, along with the Writing Workshops in Greece that offered me the same. I would also like to thank Richard Schmitt, William Schneider, my agent Michael Snell, and Dzanc editor Michelle Dotter for reading earlier versions of the manuscript and helping to bring this novel into being.