Bret Anthony Johnston, “Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses”
“His daughter’s first horse came from a traveling carnival where children rode him in miserable clockwise circles. He was swaybacked with a patchy coat and split hooves, but Tammy fell for him on the spot, and Atlee made a cash deal with the carnie. A lifetime ago, just outside Robstown, Texas. Atlee managed the stables west of town; Laurel, his wife, taught lessons there. He hadn’t brought the trailer—buying a pony hadn’t been on his plate that day—so he drove home slowly, holding the reins through the window, the horse trotting beside the truck. Tammy sat on his back singing made-up songs about cowgirls. She named him Buttons. No telling how long he’d been ridden in circles at the carnival. For the rest of his life, Buttons never once turned left..”
—
“Two by two the animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way. Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.”
—
“The first summer I was at grad school in Iowa, my boyfriend and I told each other we had an open relationship. For him this meant he was in
New York City, where he went out to clubs and sometimes found some company for the night, and sometimes, if the man treated him badly, he called me to console him. I would listen and think about how we were supposed to live together that summer and how at the last minute he had decided we could not live together. We could live near each other. I had decided it wasn’t worth a sublet in New York in addition to the rent I was paying in Iowa, and so I stayed, moving into a dark second-floor apartment in an old Victorian with a view of a park that regularly filled with beautiful young men. These were college men, to be specific, men who played sports like wrestling and football and all of the things meant by the words ‘track and field.’ There were swimmers too, and they often worked at the pool as lifeguards, as I soon discovered, where they would sit on their chairs like kings, an aristocracy of sex.”
—
“High Wire, Dream of
Climbing, he is, the steep ladder’s steps. Up-upward climbing, thirty-seven, -eight, -nine feet with a gay reckless smile for the motley crowd below. Climbing upward in jester’s red-striped costume, miniature bells on cap tinkling gaily. In triumph, climbing the steep narrow ladder toward the “sky”—(of course he is not such a fool to think that that Kodak-cerulean papier-mâché sky could be real)—and with remarkable agility managing to straighten his (creaking) knees and stand (shakily) erect on the small platform.”
—
“I wanted to capture that effortless French feeling so I made ratatouille. Afterward the apartment smelled like Provence, if what Provence
smells like is eggplant burning in the bottom of the oven. There were tomatoes left over, so I used them to make lasagna. It called for part-skim ricotta, and when there was some left over I tried not to lose heart. Was there no way to get anything exactly right? I made pancakes with the ricotta. I used a fancy recipe with lemon from a book with the most beautiful pictures. After the pancakes were done I had extra lemons. Making lemonade seemed too on the nose, and anyway enough was enough, so I threw them out the window.”
—
“In my grandparents’ attic there is a ghost named Levi. He is an old general from an old war, and he built the house a long time ago. We
know he is there because he once put his hand on my Aunt Sarah’s throat. She screamed and screamed and woke everyone in the house. She wasn’t harmed, but no—no, I wouldn’t say he is harmless.”
—
“Cel is in the green room pre-interviewing the devil-boy when the first reports of the shooting come in.
The devil-boy’s name is Ezra Rosenzweig, though Cel has been told repeatedly to address him only as Damian. He has a black odalisque neck tattoo and thumb-sized subdermal horn implants; Cel keeps expecting these to twitch expressively, somehow, like the ears of a small dog. But the devil-boy’s horns do not move, and alongside his shaved eyebrows they contribute to an expression of general impassivity, so Cel doesn’t quite register the extent of his surprise when he stops speaking of Satanic baptismal rites and says, ‘Oh, shit.’”
—
“In 1919, the big green house at the edge of the village still had all its porches and the fanlight above the front door. The gazebo stood at the back of the garden, across the path from the cliff; the fountain worked, the flagstones were level, the tools in the garden shed gleamed. The broad downstairs hall connected library to double parlor, dining room to kitchen to pantry: a useful arrangement for the open houses the Durands held each year the week after Christmas, to thank their employees and please the neighbors.”
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