A Horse on the 42nd Floor
Mike Garry
Smashwords Edition, Electronic Editing,
Published By Wayne Press July 2011.
Copyright © 2011 by Mike Garry
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, either in whole or in part, in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Horse on the 42nd Floor
There was a horse.
Not the normal thing one finds in ones bathroom at 6:30am on a Wednesday morning.
Head down, ears forward, a slurp of water echoed in the toilet bowl muffled by the mass of horse rear — end that faced the door. Joshua, frozen in stunned stature, gripped the doorknob, and realized he did not need to pee that badly after all.
He pulled the door closed again and paced backwards in military rigidness. He gained speed until the back of his knees met the arm of the couch. Flying ass over tea — kettles, his head bounced once, hollowly, on the Turkish rug.
He let it lie there.
Joshua wrapped his silk robe around his monogrammed pajamas, crossed his Italian leather slippers at the ankles, closed his eyes, and waited to wake up.
He did not.
Or more to the point, he would not believe he was awake.
A crash sounded from the bathroom.
He leapt from the ground, threw the door open and beheld the sight of a horse eating a lime green Christian Dior hand towel.
“Excuse me.” Joshua proclaimed firmly and reached out to yank the towel from the horse’s mouth.
A tug — of — war ensued.
It was quite one sided.
With a firm grip, his jaw set, and completely traction less, Joshua slowly slid across the tiled floor. The horse backed up step by step, shod hooves on tile reverberated through the cavernous bathroom until it pressed its rear against the middle glass panel of the two headed shower.
Once the horse stopped, apparently at an impasse, Joshua slipped into barefooted form and readjusted his hold. With one great heave he yanked the towel from the horse’s jaw. The towel ripped cleanly in half. His efforts tumbled him neatly into the two person whirlpool bathtub behind him.
Secure with at least half of its prize, the horse began to chew contentedly.
Joshua reviewed his food and alcohol intake of the night before.
No more than usual.
Joshua tongued at the idea of a robber knocking him unconscious in his sleep and this being a blood soaked pillow hallucination.
He could not consider that a horse was actually in his bathroom.
And then the horse that was not there made a hefty deposit on his designer bath rug.
It smelled.
Like horse poop.
And somehow that made it all real.
Up out of the bathtub Joshua launched himself and ran to his cell phone on the end table next to his bed. Hands shaking he cursed the numbers that moved under his fingers. Four tries and much inappropriate language later, he dialed the accurate three digits in the correct order and listened for the ring.
A low scrapping sound thundered down the hall followed by a crash so loud it could only be described as an explosion.
Phone forgotten, it fell from Joshua’s hand as he ran down the hall to meet the disaster that had left his bathroom and meandered into his dining room.
All that was left in the horse’s path was broken glass and firewood.
Light dazzled from the thousands of crystal shards littering his floor, only dampened by the wooden remains of his eight foot glass topped inlaid mahogany dining room table. The double wide china cabinet that individually lit each of the twelve settings of twenty — four karat gold plated Tiffany china lay dark and splintered, humbly covering the golden carnage that lay beneath.
Joshua chased the horse from room to room, crawling over the broken pieces of the valuable life he had built around himself. Tears stung his eyes, the first time in decades, when the replacement tally surpassed the six digit mark. He stopped counting. He stopped thinking. He heard his phone ringing somewhere in the destruction. He ignored it. Nothing could help him now.
Joshua blearily waded through the debris of his own personal Armageddon.
It ended in his bedroom.
The horse lay on his bed.
Joshua leaned against the door frame and watched the horse. He did not even react when a wet spot spread itself across his silk comforter. He was past the point of flinching.
Joshua watched the horse, its muscles rippled, legs out on one side arced up and down as the horse rolled its body. Spots of color darkened from light brown to dark on the horse’s coat. Then its tail flew up and Joshua saw what looked like small hooves wrapped in a plastic bag that protruded out from between the horses legs.