Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
On the Talking Horse Circuit
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
A man and a horse plodded down a road beside the Hudson River. The man was not riding the horse–it was much too valuable–but then, he liked to walk. He had only one arm, having lost the other at Gettysburg, and his sleeve on the right side was neatly folded and pinned.
“People think I’m thome kind of clown,” lisped the horse.
The man shook his head. “People come from miles around to see you! It’s just the lisp,” he said. “I’ve been working on a spell–”
“No more thpellth!” said the horse. “I’m enough of a freak ath it ith.”
The man laughed, patting the horse’s neck affectionately. “You’re–aagh!” His foot had hit a stone, and he tumbled forward. He reached out with his single arm to stop himself, but it buckled under him, and he smacked his head on a boulder at the side of the road, bouncing off it to sprawl brokenly in the dust. A thick stream of blood began to pool around his head.
“Thamuel?” the horse said in alarm. “Thamuel! Thay thomething! Oh, Chritht!”
He galloped down the road toward the next village, taking a minute or two to remember that they’d passed one only a quarter of an hour before. Swearing, the horse turned and galloped back in the direction it had come. When it came to where Samuel had fallen, a man was standing there with a sack on his back, prodding Samuel with a toe.
“Stone dead,” said the man. He dropped his sack in the grass by the road, and a few apples rolled out as he turned toward the horse. “And what’s this here?” he said. “A fine beast like you, and no one to claim you?” He looked all around him, smiled with narrow eyes, and grabbed the horse’s bridle.
“You’re a fancy one, aren’t you?” the man said. “Braided mane and all. Well, things are going to change for you now, I’ll tell you that. I’ve been needing a new draft horse. Fancy or not, you’ll pull.”
Avoiding the sight of Samuel, the horse looked away and fixed on the apples. The man picked up his sack and put the apples back in, except for one, which he held close to him.
“Say please,” he said, and he waited for a moment, as though listening for the “please.” Then he laughed, put the apple back in the sack, and began leading the horse back toward the village.
The horse didn’t say a word.
And Then a Curious Thing Happened
Friday, December 7th, 2007
“It all began, you see, when my friend Robert Cloaksworth came to me and said that he had discovered ancient writings about the Door of Chum-Tuun, a fabulous Mayan site, lost for hundreds of years, that was reputed to be a portal to the underworld. Well, we set off to the Yucatan to investigate, and after about six weeks of hacking our way through the jungle with machetes–that’s how I developed such strong arms, you see, powerful as anything–we actually found it.”
“My god! And that’s when–?”
“Oh, no, no. Turned out to be nothing but a legend. We went back to England in a bit of state, really. Cloaksworth had claimed to fall ill at the last moment–all a ruse, you see, for my embarassment. Terrible fellow, Cloaksworth. Never liked him since. But I ought to be grateful, because my disgrace in England sent me travelling to Morocco, where I found a tarnished old oil lamp that I thought I might use as a kind of ornament back home. I took a cloth to it and began to clean it really very energetically, and it was only when a sort of mist began to come out of it that I remembered my Thousand and One Nights …”
“You don’t mean it was a djinni?”
“Well, of course it wasn’t, really. Actually it was a kind of mold inside there that threw out the most incredibly noxious spores. I was so overcome by them that I stumbled out behind the house into the desert and fell there, quite helpless. And just then I looked up and saw a sort of lighted disk descending from the sky, just floating there as easily as though it had no more to do with gravity than you do with a pufferfish, and a sort of door opened in the bottom, and sent down a beam of light that pulled me up–”
“Into a spaceship? They were some kind of aliens?”
“What? Oh, heavens no: it was a hallucination, you see. The spores. Actually, they were really quite poisonous, and I nearly died, but at the hospital there I was cared for by Marguerite here, and that, of course, is how I met my wife.”
“Your wife? But God, man, what I want to know is where you got a second head!”
“Oh, this? I don’t remember where I got that.”