Two Shorts
Shane Kowalski
Shooting Horses
I got a new job. I had to shoot the horses. There was a man named Pug who would come over and tell me when it was time. Usually, I’d be watching a movie in a series of movies about people who had clairvoyance and could cheat death. They’d help their friends cheat death. But eventually death would come back around, so they’d have to figure out a way to cheat it again. It seemed endless but plausible. Almost once a movie Pug would come and tell me I had to do my job. I’d pause and start the long walk to the stables. The farm was desolate, barely functional, in some geometrical field of Pennsylvania. I could smell the musk of the nearby cranberry bog in the air. It was never very fun to shoot a horse. I hated my job. It also seemed like a bad use of my skills. I had master’s degrees in Linguistics and 20th Century Transatlantic Literatures. It seemed strange that I ended up here—shooting horses—but also very on the nose in some way. Every time I entered the stables, I could tell the horses knew. I had become death to them. None of them could cheat me. I would have to let them cheat me. Which is why I practiced being a terrible shot in the mornings. In the evenings, I’d train the horses to break a certain way if a gun was aimed at them. Even though it took several weeks, it turned out I was extraordinarily adept at training them not to get shot. I was so good, in fact, that no horses were ever shot. When I aimed at them, they’d run off, making a hard break into the expansive darkness that fogged the fields and hills, hopefully bursting out into a nice, clean daylight on the other side. To protect myself from the wrath of Pug, I would dig a big hole where one might put a dead horse. I filled the hole up with compost, rocks, some plant refuse from my extensive jade, pothos, and monstera collections, and then top it off with a small mound of dirt. The little mounds stretched out towards the end of the farm until you couldn’t distinguish them from each other—it was all just dirt as far as the eye could see. It always made me feel hardworking, like I had done an honest day’s work, like my work was the hardest way to feel like I was being honest.
The Key Is The Key
Barbie is doing my taxes. She’s from New Jersey. Her last name is something Italian. She smokes when her kids are at their dad’s house. Every time they come back and ask her if she’s smoking again, she says, “No, you must have a brain tumor if you’re smelling smoke.” She’ll spend the time researching it on Google. “Phantom smells, see?” she says. Her children read it and weep. Satisfied, she tells them there’s leftover something in the fridge. At night, she doesn’t sleep. She watches a movie about a little girl who turns out to be a vampire. After that, there’s a show about the famous ballerina who murdered her boyfriend. All the mysteries are accounted for, but for some reason she can’t look away. She commends her mother (dead since 2002) that she never murdered her father (dead since 2006). It would’ve been justified based purely on the way he ate his meals alone (wet and sloppy and smacky). One day, she found a strange key under her sick mother’s bed. She went around the house trying it, but it didn’t fit anything. She asked her mother, but by that point she was already half-gone. The key is the key to her whole life, Barbie thought. If only she could’ve found the thing it fit. She’d walk through that door, open that drawer. Something would’ve been different. But for now, she looks over my taxes. She gives me a very sympathetic look, like a desert to an almost-empty glass of water, and says, “I’ve never seen the kinds of problems you have.”