Page 56 of My Wild Horse King

I haven’t been on a horse in at least ten years. Maybe twelve. I didn’t miss it at all. The skin feels strange against my hand, all disconnected from its body, and without a saddle or bridle, I feel like I could go sailing off at any time. I grab a fistful of mane, and then I empty the gun of bullets, cringing a little as they clatter on the pavement, and throw the empty gun at the jerk who started all this.

The sirens are closer, closer, growing ever closer.

I kick the mare and grab her mane with my other fist as well. “Let’s go before the cops get here.”

She doesn’t take off, though. She ducks her head down and snags a bag off the ground with her teeth, and then she leaps forward. No saddle, and I haven’t ridden in ages, so when she starts to really move, I nearly slide off. I shift until I’m crouched a little lower, my legs coming forward to try and balance my upper body a bit. I’m sure she’s hating the feeling of all my weight falling on her shoulders, but she’s going to have to deal with it.

“Katerina, right?” I sigh.

She snorts, which is probably the best she can do, with a bag handle clamped between her teeth.

“How on earth did you wind up with six men holding guns on you?”

She tosses her head.

I deserve that. This isn’t exactly the best way for us to talk. “Alright, here’s our plan.”

Before I can explain anything, a police car turns down this street and stops. He rolls his window down. “Hey!” the officer shouts. “What on earth are you doing, weirdo?”

“Door dash keeps raising its prices,” I say. “I decided to grab my Italian food myself.”

His jaw drops.

I salute him. And thankfully, Katerina continues to walk.

“Hey,” the cop shouts again. “You can’t just ride down the sidewalk.”

Adrenaline starts to pump through my system. Is this story going to be even harder to explain than my interference with a bunch of criminals? Am I still going to make the news, but in an even stranger way?

“Oh?” I turn back and look at him over my shoulder, tugging on Katerina’s mane so she’ll stop. Thankfully, she does.

“You can only ride horses in the street, with the flow of traffic.” The cop points. He doesn’t comment on my lack of bridle or saddle. He doesn’t comment on the fact that my horse is carrying a bag in her mouth, either. I seriously doubt there are laws about any of that, which is good.

I ask Katerina, with pressure from my right knee, to step into the street, into the barely-long-enough space between the two idling cars. Blessedly, she does. I wasn’t sure she was trained to interpret signals from a rider.

Would she be, when the horse is actually a person? Ugh. This is so awkward.

“Be careful,” the cop shouts, and then he turns his lights and siren back on and heads down the road toward the intersection we just left. I wonder what he’ll think when the witnesses there tell him a golden horse was in the middle of the whole ruckus.

Luckily, two blocks down, we reach Central Park, and Katerina listens as I nudge her forward. The second we can, I send her into the center of a bush and slide off her back. “Phew,” I say. “That was a really weird hour.”

Shemelts, then. I’m not sure how else to describe it, when a sixteen hand mare sort of swirls down into a perfectly small woman, wearing camel slacks, a mahogany blouse, and a long, flowing scarf. She shakes off, for all the world, just like my mom’s horses used to after rolling, and then picks up the bag she dropped. “Well. That was strange. I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell anyone you saw me, because I’m on my way to Icel—no, wait. I’m not telling anyone. Forget you heard that.”

Now I’m the one whose jaw is dropping. “You’re kidding, right?”

Just then, a strange tingling sensation blankets my entire body. It’s like my leg fell asleep, but instead of my leg, it’s every part of me. I drop to the ground, pulling my knees up against my chin while my teeth chatter.

Then just as suddenly, the feeling’s gone.

When I glance up at the motion beyond Katerina’s head, it’s a runner, and his face is bizarrely obscured by strange black splotches. A sick feeling forms in the pit of my stomach, like the sludge that accumulates on the rubber liner of the washing machine.

“Oh, no,” Katerina says. “You saved me.” Her eyes widen.

“But it was at no cost to me,” I say. “So that can’t—no way.”

“What happened to your arm?” She’s looking at my right shoulder, the one the BMW clipped, and I turn to look down at it.

Somehow, the bumper tore my jacket and gashed open the skin. It’s not a huge cut, but it’s bleeding pretty consistently. The swear words I use are a mixture of Latvian, English, and Russian. It’s how my dad always swore, and I haven’t done it in a very long time, but it feels fitting.

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