The Sport of Kings: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017

INTERLUDE I

The following colors are recognized by the Jockey Club:

BAY: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a yellow-tan to a bright auburn. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.

BLACK: The entire coat of the horse is black, including the muzzle, the flanks, the mane, tail and legs, unless white markings are present.

CHESTNUT: The entire coat of the horse may vary from a red-yellow to a golden-yellow. The mane, tail and legs are usually variations of the coat color, unless white markings are present.

DARK BAY/BROWN: The entire coat of the horse will vary from a brown, with areas of tan on the shoulders, head and flanks, to a dark brown, with tan areas seen only in the flanks and/or muzzle. The mane, tail and lower portion of the legs are always black, unless white markings are present.

GRAY/ROAN: The Jockey Club has combined these colors into one color category. This does not change the individual definitions of the colors for gray and roan and in no way impacts the two-coat color inheritance principle as stated in Rule 1(E).

GRAY: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of black and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be either black or gray, unless white markings are present.

ROAN: The majority of the coat of the horse is a mixture of red and white hairs or brown and white hairs. The mane, tail and legs may be black, chestnut or roan, unless white markings are present.

PALOMINO: The entire coat of the horse is golden-yellow, unless white markings are present. The mane and tail are usually flaxen.

WHITE: The entire coat, including the mane, tail and legs, is predominantly white.

—Jockey Club Registry

The master of color is the gene. The gene is found inside the cell on the chromosome, coiled material formed in arkan pairs, a chain provided by each parent with the allele a blind toss from dam and sire to foal. Genes, like many tyrants, are small but manifest in a multiplicity of forms. Allele pairs dictate the genotype, which, due to the vagaries of expression, may or may not correlate precisely to phenotype: black, brown, bay, dun, grullo, buckskin, chestnut/sorrel, red dun, palomino, silver dapple, cremello, which subdivide to reflect allelic combinations of jet and raven and summer black; or dark and light and seal browns; slate, lobo, olive, smutty, or silver grullos, and so on; also the white markings, which increase upon the infinite with roans, or the gray of age, or rabicano, frosty, paint, or tobiano; this is to say nothing of the effects of dappling, foal transition, seasonal change, & Etc.

Nature manipulates her colors—or color happens, insofar as the gene has no Mind to mind the gene—either as alleles occupy loci in homozygous and heterozygous pairs, or through the wily machinations of epistasis, where brute dominance shoulders its autocratic way through the old bloodlines, while recessives wait in genetic shadow, eyeing the dominant pairs and biding their time until, in tandem, the recessives in a surprise move—

No, perhaps it’s better to render genetics a descriptive but meaningless math as it concerns the hard colors, these colors being chestnut, black, and bay:

ee

EE or Ee

&

EEAA, EEAa, EeAA, or EeAa

But math won’t satisfy. Why do we always want the story? A dominant allele storms the House of Agouti and seizes half its resources, producing a bay horse, AA or Aa. Most recessive combatants will ultimately join forces with the house to produce the expected black EE or Ee, but sometimes a chestnut, ee, emerges victorious from the House of Extension, outmaneuvering the blacks and dominant bays of Agouti.

One would imagine that mastering the houses—Agouti, Extension, Dun, Silver Dapple, Champagne, and their meddling servants Pangare, Sooty, Shade, Flaxen, Brindle—would allow for the rational construction of color, including the dilutes that form from the hard, fundamental colors. But then there is white. White is less a color than a superimposition. It is a pigmentless pattern, a roan or gray intrusion upon all the hard colors and their various configurations. A white is the only horse without pigment, though even the white horse has dark eyes, WhW. White serves to mask color, though color lives forever in the genes. Therefore, a white horse—or what seems a white horse—is capable of great reproductive surprises.

Ultimately you may breed for color just as you may breed for conformation, speed, strength, & Etc, but the organism itself exerts no will to form. The natural dispersal of color is neither random nor intentional. Which is all to say that there may be tyrants with no ambition for power.

2
THE SPIRIT OF LESSER ANIMALS

On the principle of the multiplication and gradual divergence in character of the species descended from a common parent, together with their retention by inheritance of some characters in common, we can understand the excessively complex and radiating affinities by which all the members of the same family or higher group are connected together.

—CHARLES DARWIN, On the Origin of Species

There was a culling of resources: which represents tolerance of risk, a form of courtship display, i.e., the organism’s ability to assert itself in the war of sexual selection. So, the detritus of the old plantation was sold away: the slump-shouldered plow, a corn planter with its four ugly teeth, jointers and froes and poleaxes and chisels and a thousand antiques lined out for appraisal and bidding on the side lawn, all sold to strangers on Valentine’s Day 1966. Even the old Tennessee Walkers were auctioned off, but purchased by the Millers, so the six were led in a head-hanging line down the drive like bewildered cow ponies off to their first cattle drive, while Henry stood on the el porch, bourbon in hand, watching without regret. At this point both of your grandparents have died.

There followed a reorientation of remaining resources: Stallion paddocks were arranged in two-acre units near the house with a yearling barn erected some way behind a stallion barn. The old whipping post was not uprooted in the redesign of the farm, but left to stand perversely in the path of an emerging thicket windbreak, so the evergreen bushes grew up around it like a rose around its thorn. The Osbournes’ land was purchased when they went bankrupt in the summer of 1968, so the old land of the silt bowl, which had once been Forge property before being sold in William Iver’s generation, was Henry’s and yours once again, and it came with a broodmare band and a foaling barn only thirteen years old and the assurance of hardy grass over limestone; also a sweet-tasting Stoner Creek streamlet that pooled in the bowl, glimmering there like gray ice on cloudy days.

Another note on display: Your father paints the plank fences wedding-dress white instead of black, an unnecessary expense. However, in the wild, male suitors often develop brightly colored, highly ornamented tails or wings that display genetic excess, which is to say wild tolerance of risk (see above), in order to secure a suitable mate and reproductive success. The female, frequently the choosier of the species, selects. Note how in this schema, the male and female are merely avenues to reproduction, dispensable agents of futurity.

A note on the 1 percent: The human is an organism defined by its 1 percent genetic difference from the chimp, which involves improved hearing, protein digestion, sophisticated speech, and all the other necessary conditions of humanity, not least of which is hope: in this case a horse. Hellbent is well balanced with a head neither too large nor too small, situated nicely on her neck over a slim swell of belly; driven by quarters that are strong but not stocky; legs set neither forward nor back but perfectly straight; unimpressive in her first races, but intriguing on paper; a gamble, your father’s roughcut gem, a daughter of Bold Ruler, showing some of his high temperament and nerve, if not his power at the mile and beyond.

But there follows disappointment: dejection at the frustration of design. During Hellbent’s life the broodmare band was expanded then culled, stallions were purchased and sold, mares crossed out and inbred, but there never came a horse that made the farm, or made your father. Hellbent herself became a solid producer of horses, including stakes winners, though a few broke down, overextended in distance by overeager trainers, and one died of colic in the pasture, its guts twisted like engorged ropes, striking its head against the ground in vain attempts to rise, so it had beaten itself to death before the vet could arrive.

Disappointment is compounded by perfection: Henry sees Secretariat, the big red colt by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, at the 1972 Laurel Futurity, then again at next year’s Belmont, where the chestnut springs from the inside and establishes a lead along the backstretch against his rival Sham and ahead of Twice a Prince and My Gallant, firing out the first three quarters in 1:09⅘, at which point Sham begins to fall away under the scorching pace—Secretariat is widening now, he is moving like a tremendous machine, Secretariat by twelve, Secretariat by fourteen lengths—with Turcotte wild-eyed and asking for nothing and the grandstand rising with an oceanic roar around Henry, who stands transfixed as Secretariat takes the only purse of real value, greatness, charging under the wire thirty-one lengths ahead of Sham in 2:24, a record that stands even today.

But your father procured a mate that fateful day in Saratoga: a woman thin as a pin with a glassy blonde bob and lips painted burgundy, displaying near-perfect conformation with only minor defects: pigeon-toed with a hard voice; but also restlessness, the quality of perpetual dissatisfaction, a state which represents a subtle but very real threat to young prior to the age of separation; see Bowlby’s work on maternal deprivation, also Ainsworth, Winnicott, & Etc. You call this woman Mother. She is one-half responsible for your corporeal organization, your particular form of accumulated inheritance. Together with your father, she is a conduit of the great law, the Unity of Type.

And so you were born: into the Conditions of Existence. Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.

The Quarter is a cutting horse and the Morgan is a generalist. The Kentucky Saddle is a smooth ride, the Connemara a great jumper, the Mustang an independent. The Mongolian is an ancient primitive and the toady Exmoor is exceedingly rare. The Akhal-Teke has endurance, and the Belgian Draft the strength of ten. But only the Thoroughbred can claim to be the fastest horse in the world—and here it was resident in their lush spring fields, bathing in the sunlight, calling antiphonally over Henrietta’s head as she spent herself each and every day on her father’s holdings, his very earth.

Her eyes were always open.

She saw wheat rounds as they rolled off the tongue of the baler.

Doves lined into the air when a cat came and parted the grasses.

Clouds were piled and red-tipped like a sunshot mountain range inverted.

The faces of the tall horses were riddles.

Perhaps her parents could discover their meaning? Her father was not in the stallion barn, not in the orchard, so she ran in search of her mother and found Judith in the master bedroom, reclining against a landslide of silken pillows, magazines fanned around her, speaking urgently under her breath on the phone to one of her sisters. With her pale skin and blonde hair, she almost disappeared into the sheets the way fences vanish into snow in the wintertime.

Henrietta barnstormed the room, her arms wide. “Mother, I want to know why—”

Judith shrank into her pillow, covered the receiver with one palm, and said, “Jesus, Henrietta. A little warning next time.”

“I want to know—”

“Hold on,” her mother said into the phone, struggling to sit up straight and pressing the receiver between her breasts. She gathered herself, arranging her good-night smile, cheer like bright paint over irritation. Then she leaned over, offering her cheek. “Henrietta, you know I don’t like it when you yell indoors. Now kiss me good night. Did you say good night to the horses?”

Henrietta sighed, her question abandoned. “Yes,” she said very simply, leaning over the magazines, crumpling their glossy pages as she kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Good girl,” said Judith, clearing her throat. “Now go to bed, and your father will be in shortly to tell you a story. Go on.”

“Okay.”

But when Henrietta straightened up from the bed, her mother said very suddenly, “Henrietta, wait—tell me, did you have a good day?”

“Yes.”

“And did you have fun?”

Henrietta shrugged. “Yes.”

Then, Judith’s crystalline blue eyes narrowed. “But—are you happy?”

Henrietta laughed the evergreen laugh of the very young; of course she was happy. It was the natural state of childhood.

“Well, good night.”

She was almost through the door when a hard, desponding voice halted her one more time. “But you would tell me if you were unhappy, right?”

Impatiently: “Yes, Mother.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Then only a dark, empty space remained where the child had stood. Sighing so loudly that Henrietta heard it on the threshold of her own room, Judith said, “Yes, I’m still here.”

This is your story, Henrietta. It was 1783, during the waning heat of the Revolutionary War. Thousands of soldiers had already died on the field, or were injured in their drive to beat back the British. Your great-great-greatest-grandfather was one of those injured at Yorktown, and he received a bounty land warrant offering him surveyable acreage west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This whole area was part of Virginia at the time, and that’s why we are Kentuckians first and Virginians second and Christians third. Well, Samuel Forge was more than eager to go. The state of his birth was too populous and too loud, and he was saddled with a pioneer’s roving mind, which demands space. So Samuel set out west and brought with him a slave, who was smart with black magic and a very fine cook, and together they traversed the mountains. But those mountains were dark and forbidding. The two of them followed the old buffalo blaze and battled mightily against the elements, wary of Shawnee to the north and Cherokee to the south, because in those days a scalp was very valuable. The way was rough and full of dangers, but Samuel persevered. When they finally reached the Gap, they discovered a cave, an opening right there in the sheer wall of rock. Now his slave had a special feeling about this cave and wanted to explore it, but first they needed protection from the gods, so they sacrificed four bulls that they found wandering around in the open land around the Gap, and then his slave led the way down into the dark. This was a cave that led to the underworld. They wandered in the dark past Dread and Hunger and Want and Sleep and Toil and War and Discord, who had wild, long, horrible hair and was the worst thing Samuel Forge had ever seen, and they walked past the Tree of Dreams, but it didn’t catch any of Samuel’s dreams. He was too slippery and his dreams too big to be caught. Down, down, down they went until they came to the milling crowds of the unhappy dead that gathered on the bank of a river as wide and muddy as the Ohio. A boatman rowed them across the river, and they walked onto the fields of heaven, and all the noble dead were alive like gods. They crowded around him with stories on their tongues, but Samuel Forge had come to look for only one man—his father, Andrew Cooper Forge, who had died back in Virginia and never again seen his son once he’d set out to make his own way in the world. Samuel wanted his forgiveness for past wrongs, and he did indeed discover him there on the green underground fields of heaven. The old man was making a census of all his descendants, and had in trust all their futures and their fates, everything they would be and everything they would do, all the Forges, who in their time would march out of the cave into the bright daylight on the Kentucky side of the Gap. He was gathering his numbers, and I was there and you were there, even though we hadn’t come to be yet—

Are you awake, Henrietta? When you lie so still like that, it’s as if you’re dead and if you’re dead, then I’m dead too, because you are the very pupil of my eye. Are you listening?

Yes, Father. I’m awake. I’m always listening.

“All I want is a little pleasure.”

Pleasure: a sensation of enjoyment, satisfaction; the indulgence of appetite; sometimes personified as a female divinity. Considered by most to be the opposite of pain.

What was there to do for pleasure on a Sunday in Paris, Kentucky, 1983? The only thing that didn’t drive Judith completely and utterly insane was to spend a quiet hour in the Paris Cemetery. The space reminded her—granted, in peacefulness only—of the Tuileries and the Jardin des Plantes, which she had enjoyed when she was pregnant with a teenager’s hope and limitless expectation but not yet pregnant with Henry Forge’s child. She had at first tried to take Henrietta to the park in the center of town, but the girl was relentless, pressing endlessly for a push on the swing—One more push! One more! Mother!—then Watch!Watch!Watch!—so Judith couldn’t read the real estate section of the Times, and she was forever stubbing out fresh cigarettes to attend to the girl, who made a mess, an absolute, irredeemable mess of her own clothes and her mother’s sanity. What she was coming to realize, but what no woman was allowed to utter aloud, was that there was no guarantee your child would be adequate compensation for the life you gave up to have it. More and more, life looked an awful lot like a hoax perpetrated on women and designed to further men’s lives at the expense of their own.

“All I want is a little pleasure.”

What did Henrietta know or care about any of this? She had plenty of pleasures, such as the cemetery’s Gothic chalk gates, white as the Cliffs of Dover, through which broughams and phaetons once rattled under the old sign: It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment. When her mother stopped their Mercedes to light her first cigarette of the hour, Henrietta—free, unmolested, wild—would run out among the graves to trample on the dead, skipping over their complaints and concerns, their dreamy chatter and arguments of confinement, their hate bred by close quarters, not so different perhaps from her parents’ ferocious arguments, which she heard when she was tucked in her bed at home. The dead had nothing to break or slam except their dull coffin lids. Her mother had the dishes of life and the doors of happenstance. And a voice for shattering windowpanes.

“Jesus,” Judith said, “this place is just unspeakably boring. It simply defies words.” A great, trembling ash broke free from her long cigarette and floated alongside the car.

Henrietta looked about in confusion. “The cemetery?”

“Everything, Henrietta. Every last thing.”

“Mother, why do you smoke?”

“It keeps my weight down,” Judith said distractedly. “I mean, please explain to me how I ended up here. I lived in Paris, honey, the real Paris. The only Paris. Sometimes I can’t believe I bought Henry’s pack of lies and … traded Paris and Deauville for this.” She shook her head and lowered her chin. “Just promise me that when you grow up, you’ll know exactly what you’re choosing between when you make your choices. Men like naïve girls, and there’s a reason for that.”

Henrietta gazed up at her mother’s delicate profile. “Can I have brothers?”

Judith’s finely sculpted head snapped round, her brilliant eyes nearly sewn shut. “Did your father tell you to say that to me? Did he put you up to that?” she said.

“No—”

“God, I can’t stand men. It’s always all about them. They’ll even use their children to further their own ends.”

“Daddy says—”

“Go play, Henrietta! Please! Just give me a few minutes of quiet.”

Yes, go play among the graves, turn cartwheels over those tucked into their grass bedding, snatch at any excitements they left behind. Find the sloping declivity with Lavinia’s cenotaph, under which she lies with dusty eyes closed, hands folded on her cancerous breasts. What pleasures she once flung away in her dying, Henrietta, take up now in your mouth.

The time-tattered granary loomed across the road.

When she approached birds, they all fled heavenward.

Chips of cloud formed scissors. They threatened to cut every thread in the world.

In joyful horror, Henrietta grasped up a single flower and raced back to the car. Her mother sat resting with her chin on her hand, her elbow on the window chrome. Her face had regained its equilibrium, but as the girl approached, her brow drew tight.

“Henrietta—have you been lying in the grass?”

The girl slowed, her mood suddenly veiled, her lips pressed together so tight they puffed out, showing a faint belligerence.

“Have you been lying in the grass?” This time the voice was not so sharp, but it seemed to shake with a strange and mysterious grievance, which the girl sensed but could not understand. “I’m not interested in putting you in a new dress every hour of the day. Why do you always do that?” And then turning to the windshield and saying to no one: “Why does she always do that …?”

Henrietta said, “I brought something for you.” She held out a yellow carnation, soft as a horse’s muzzle, its edges already curling and tea-stained with decay.

“Henrietta,” Judith admonished, “did you steal this from a grave?” but she reached out and gently lifted the flower from her hand.

“No.”

Her mother couldn’t help it, she smiled. “Get in the car,” she said, and her daughter came round dutifully and slid in beside her.

“Grandmother says hi,” Henrietta said as she struggled with her seat belt.

Judith reared back slightly. “Don’t say things like that,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

“Okay,” said the girl. Then she said, “Did you know that if there were only two elephants in the world and they mated, in five hundred years there would be fifteen million elephants?”

“You’re only seven,” said Judith. “Why do you know anything about mating?”

“Daddy told me. Mother, what if you had to spend your whole life being chained to a tombstone, and you couldn’t get anybody to unlock your chain?”

“My God, Henrietta, what awful things you think of,” said Judith, the delicate plane of her brow wrinkled up in distaste.

“Probably nobody would want to be around you, and wild dogs would come and try to eat you.”

“Well,” said Judith, starting the car and remaining attentive only by an anemic and diminishing force of will, “maybe you could train the dogs and name them and then they might leave you alone.”

“Wild dogs don’t have names, silly!” Henrietta cried, and she laughed uproariously, and her mother just bent her head slightly away from the sound of that shrill and disruptive laughter, a sound she herself could not remember ever having made.

But their horses did have names. In the early spring of each year, Henry led his daughter out to a pasture at the rim of the bowl, where three or four mares were turned out with shiny new foals—copper and bay and a dappled gray almost white. Unlike their dark and calm dams, they sprang about, bouncing here and there and spending their small energies. They were comically, even absurdly, composed with root beer barrel knees and cannons thin enough to snap over a grown man’s thigh. Their eyes, like their legs, were set awkwardly wide, their tails as short and bushy as the tails of rabbits.

Henrietta was reading by her fourth year, and by the time she was eight, she was attendant to the namings, standing beside her father with a stenographer’s notebook and a pencil, marking down his choices like a small actuary. She balanced her book on the second plank of the fence while Henry rested a loafered foot on the first, his freckled forearms crossed on the top plank, as he gazed out over the dams and foals. Casuistry passed near, her foal peering curiously around her, its head already framed by a halter, though it was merely days old.

When old Jamie Barlow appeared beside them, leaning on the fencing and flicking up the frayed brim of his ball cap, Henry said, “What do you think of this one? He’s by Motor Running over at Dale Mae Stud.”

Barlow was sanguine as he considered the foal. “I’d say that’s a mess of feathers, but no bird.”

“I was asking my daughter,” said Henry, and if there was anything in Barlow’s silence then, Henrietta was too young to sense it. “What do you see, Henrietta?”

With her pencil tucked behind her ear, she said, “He’s okay, I guess?”

Henry shook his head. “A horse I see, but horseness I do not. He’s inbred to Casuistry’s line, but he looks hackish, pedestrian. I don’t see the right balance of bodily weight and light bone.”

His daughter was barely listening. At her feet, the grass roiled and shook with its invisible machinations, teeming with life’s orchestra. The blades of grass were little bows making its music. The green there was so sincere, so undiluted, it rivaled the sun for intensity.

Henry reached down and, with a gentle but firm hand, turned her head forcibly back to the matter at hand, and it made her squirm. He was too enthusiastic, like a candidate on the hustings. “See how thick his legs are already? That’s cold blood and not at all what we’re aiming for. This is selective breeding we’re engaged in, nothing random about it. Evolution is a ladder, and our aim is to climb it as quickly as possible. We’ll most likely geld him.”

“That Motor Running ought to be a kill shot,” said Barlow, shaking his head. “Don’t know how come we can’t get a winner out of him.”

“Call the foal Castrato,” Henry said suddenly. “Write that down. Castrato out of Casuistry.”

Kastroto, she wrote, sounding out the word with the tip of her pencil.

“Now, take a close look at Hellbent’s foal.”

Henrietta peered between the planks. Hellbent’s foal was darkly red as a steak with a blaze and two white kneesocks. She bucked out with gangly legs and lunged gamely at the neck of her dam, who brisked and shone in the light.

“That’s a mighty good-looking filly right there,” said Barlow.

Henry looked down at his daughter. “I’ve been waiting for the right mare to send over to Secretariat, but I’ve wanted the best materials to work with. We’ll have to see if she runs as good as she looks. I’m sure they’ll think I’m breeding too far up the ladder—”

“Nah, she’s got the Bold Ruler look, good hind end, smart face—”

“And perfect legs.”

Barlow reached down and with no warning swung Henrietta up and positioned her on the top plank, so she was facing the man, who smelled of dusty hides and cigarettes, which she was soon rooting for in his breast pocket. She discovered one, slipping it from its pack, but he playfully knocked her hand away, said, “That ain’t Christian. You be good or I’ll take you home and let my old lady straighten you out. She always wanted a little girl.”

“No,” she said, grinning.

“Oh my, yes,” said Barlow. “She’ll fix you up. Raised four wild and woolly boys, think she can’t handle you? You ain’t got any kind of wicked she can’t bring to Jesus.”

“No!” she cried.

Henry reached over and ruffled her reddish hair. “You’d still be my little Ruffian.”

“What’s a Ruffian?”

Henry turned a considering eye on her. “The best filly to ever run the race. You’d have to go back to the turn of the century to find another one like her.”

“She was smart?”

“She was beautiful.”

“Can I go see her?”

“No …”

Henrietta’s brows gathered to a V of disappointment. “Why not?”

“Well, honeypie, she broke down,” said Barlow.

“But doing what she loved most,” Henry interjected.

Barlow grinned. “Blessed are they who run in circles, for they shall be called big wheels.”

Staring at his new filly, Henry said, “For the great, death dies.”

Henrietta sighed and looked up at Barlow, who was gazing down on her with a curious expression on his face. Smiling ruefully, he hoisted her off the plank fence and into his arms, so she was enveloped in the physical warmth of a grown person. She looked over his shoulder in the direction of the green expanse of the bowl with its promise of free play, and because Henry caught her longing glance and it worried something in his mind, he reached down and rapped gently on her head. “Knock, knock,” he said. “Are you there?” She nodded, and with her feet returned to the fields of Henry’s confidence, she did as she was told, taking her pencil from behind her ear and writing down six potential names for each foal, names that they would then send to the Jockey Club for consideration. Their first choice for Hellbent’s foal was Hellcat and in a few months’ time, they learned the name had been accepted.

Henrietta would remember the storms that came two years later in the spring of her tenth year, not because the farm was so altered, which it was, but because her mother did not come home. Around dinnertime the sky grew flavid and discontent and earth colors seeped up from the soil into the atmosphere, where clouds gathered, mossed with the green cast of tornadoladen storms. A siren wailed in town, the sound bowing in and out as the gaping mouth turned to the four corners of the county. Everywhere horses pranced with their ears up to catch the rising wind, barn cats skulked for shelter, cows bellowed in alarm. The trees shook and flung their glossy leaves into the changing light and the sun, a useless and retiring thing, slinked away. The farm was swallowed into the dark of the storm and it was terribly still, then the silence was staved in by a mighty crack and the rain began to fall. In their stalls, the horses cried. Lightning forked across the sky and inflected downward to the earth, where it lashed its electric tongue on trees and housetops and cupolas and lit the rolling eyes of the animals and the entire achromatic world.