| What can be written about the death of a hideous horse? An ode to her rotten, caramel-colored teeth? A paean to her sunken backbone, a manual detailing the production of catmeat and glue and viola strings, archivally bound in whatever’s left of her sad, spotted hide? Sick to think, for a mare I barely knew. But funerals demand words, and the wrong ones are already being whispered over the body heaving in the dirt—barbiturates, euthanasia, penetrating captive bolt gun.
She was on senior feed, dead broke, a plug, a hack, bomb-proof, and every other easy euphemism horse people have for desperately old. I’m told she struggled through the summer’s last beginner class, the “horse show,” with purple sidewalk chalk coloring her carousel tail and ribbons clothespinned to her stringy mane, children giggling in cowboy hats. They said she collapsed during the egg-and-spoon race, her bony knees buckling like wet cardboard, her last tiny rider snatched from the saddle, their egg smashed and forgotten in the dirt. It took a full ten minutes to raise her—four people lifting her belly, a fifth tugging her lead rope to coax her, jelly-legged, back toward the barn. The mud lot was as far as they got before she fell again, her pink nostrils wet and flaring. No further, they said, no more.
I am standing just shy of the disaster. I am trying to make up for missing her climactic collapse, for being in the lobby when the curtains came down. I am at the gate with a camera in hand. The shot seems Vaselined, blurry, a bit hard to see. But I am here for the needle. I am here to snip off her Technicolor tail as her fried-egg eyes finally flutter shut. O, Claudia, we barely— | | | |