It's Still Life

White Horse

And he doesn’t even like horses.

Moreover, he hates that he’s called the horseman without a horse.

He backs away from its rising height over him. This white horse rearing up, its voice of thunder is a shockwave, and the guys are sitting over there on a railing watching the whole scene play out as if it wasn’t really happening.

“Are you sure that beast ain’t one of the four?’ says the guy holding on to his hat as a dust devil skips along the paddock, a plume of silt rising like a biblical pillar of salt.

And just like that he hears the voice of his old Sunday School teacher quoting Billy Graham about the first horseman rides a white horse, carries a bow, and wears a crown to conquer the world. The harbingers of the apocalypse; last judgement and the end-time warned his bouncy-bosomed teacher who everyone assumed lived and slept in her pink polyester dress. That woman scared him to the extent that he developed a fear-based-hatred of every horse that passed his line of sight.

And every horse knew it.

“Hey, maybe you’d be better off breaking in a rocking horse,” jokes the guy with the hat.

He turns and glares at the guy with the hat, “Go to … “

… and that was his last thought as that white horse came down on him like God’s end-of-days.

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