 photophilde [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Today: Luke O'Neil, author of the story collection A Creature Wanting Form and the newsletter Welcome to Hell World.
Issue No. 178Out of our misery
Luke O’Neil
Out of our miseryYou saw a series of photos the other day of panicked wild horses being chased by a helicopter. It loomed over them like a bird of prey in contrast against the backdrop of a red setting sun. The image crawled with you into bed and so you reached over for the plugged-in phone and searched around for more information and found an article that said that a dozen of the horses had died in the operation. The rangers had been trying to round them up on federal land so they had made a break for it. One stallion fractured a leg and kept running on its other three for thirty six minutes it said which seemed so sad in its specificity. Who was timing it? No one wants the last few minutes of their life reported in the newspaper. Not even a horse. Eventually they had to fly down closer to the ground when it had at long last collapsed and shoot it in the head. You presumed. It didn’t say how they killed it actually. Probably like that. Putting it out of its misery is what they call it when they kill an injured animal. The story said some of the locals had named that particular horse Mr. Sunshine. It sounded made up but that’s what the story said. Four of the other horses ended up with broken necks. How is that possible? They must have been running so desperately to try to escape that their skeletons snapped under the weight of their stubborn wildness. A freedom we believed we had lent them. That wasn’t ever ours to give.
Terroir We had been bombed so frequently by now that even our children had come to know the category of missile by the sound they made as they fell. The size of the hole they left behind. The sensibility of a sommelier.
Such feasting There are maggots all over the trash bag she said. Likely place for them to be I said but she didn’t find that funny. The bag must have been ripped open by the birds she said. They were spilling out of it all over our sidewalk. I said fine and went out to inspect the scene of the crime. It looked like a swung sword had slashed deep into a guy’s stomach and he had fallen to his knees. I said the line from Lost Boys and she thought that was a little bit funny. I went to get another bigger bag and the snow shovel to scoop the entire mess up into and gagged when I got near the wound. They were so much skinnier than I would have thought. How I picture the concept of maggot. Not mature enough to have fattened yet perhaps. As I shoveled an avalanche of them fell further out of the gash in an off-putting kind of gravity. Like cheap animation. Like when you pour a beer too fast and the froth rises so suddenly and spills over the rim of the glass. A man with a truck was going to arrive soon to take them on a trip to paradise. They had no idea how good they had it. That they would soon be able to fly.
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