Brock Says: I’ve begun a weekly writing exercise with another writer, in which we take turns sending each other a sentence and filling in the remainder of a short fiction of indeterminate length. This week, I took the lead.  The starting sentence:

My horse has cancer.

My horse has cancer. They say, “Cure cancer? We can, sir, if you turn on the funding faucet.” The spelling of faucet was different around the time of Farrah’s death. This is totally unrelated, but, do you think it’s disrespectful to jerk off with photos of deceased celebrities?

The fact is, we probably won’t cure it, and most certainly not in time to free my horse. We can cut it out, irradiate it, and fill her blood with bone marrow and hair follicle cell disintegrating chemicals to chase it away, but we’re really just helping it build a tolerance to come back stronger whenever it decides it wants to relapse. I’d say, “Cancer can go fuck itself,” but I’m afraid it might hear me.

This horse has been by my side ever since I rescued her from some Comet-Brand-toilet-bowl-cleaner-huffing junkie who lived under the hobo troll bridge at I-8564578298 and Scrimshaw Pkwy in Grundle, Texas. Even the homeless have horses in Texas. We were simpatico from the get-go. When I sneaked her into my building to feed her oats and barley and carrots and bales of hay, she saw my efforts to be quiet and followed suit, suppressing her clips and clops, and holding back her snorts and whinnies. When I stacked mattresses like I was the princess and the pea, she knew it was so she could sleep by me without my having to fear her trampling me during a distressing dream. When I was kicked out of my building for keeping a horse in a one bedroom 800 square foot apartment, she just looked at me as if to say, “Where we goin’ next, Johnny?” She knows my name isn’t Johnny, but for some reason she thinks it’s funny to call me that. She recites it like she read it in some horse book, or saw it in some horse movie. Truth be told, and please don’t tell her, but I find if funny, too. Simpatico.

When I told her we were moving a thousand miles north of Grundle, Texas, she bought a heavy horse coat for the harsh winter.

She has to sense my fear of her imminent death, but there’s no way for me to explain the source of that emotion. Being a horse, she barely understands illness as a broad concept, so the specific details about how cancer kills will be lost on her. She’ll never understand why I tear my own clothes, spray liquid from my eyes, and puke frustrated cries, cursing the possibility of a god who may be responsible for her uncontrolled cell growth. God isn’t even kind to the faithful. Sheena the She-Horse read her horse bible and treated all the other horses as if Jesus H. Christ might have (the H. stands for “Horse”) and if there is a god, it rewarded her goodness with carcinoma. She’ll never understand my confusion about that. She’ll never know why she doesn’t feel like eating anymore. She’ll never run a hand over the lump on her haunches that makes it hurt too much to stand up. She’ll never know where the organ-grinding pain inside her body comes from.

That’s just one of the benefits of being a horse. Never seeing it coming. God, I wish I couldn’t see it coming.

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