Thick white cold cream jars. Leather shoes. Baby shoes. Plastic baby doll legs. A long silenced New Year’s Eve noisemaker, 1945. Half a soup bowl from a diner called Fran’s.
I pick up a clouded glass spice shaker embossed with a “P”. Salt, it smells of salt, the beach of moist flour and yeast. I search the scatter for the top and find a tiny toy mouse, minus an ear. Seaweed plugs the other.
A guy fishes knee deep in the bay. My father shouts, “What’s running?”
I think, maybe swordtail is not, like my dead tropical fish Henri he flushed down the toilet this morning. The half the cat didn’t eat.
The fisherman calls back, “Walleye!” Henri eyes nothing but cat guts now.
“I’d rather eat a dead hedgehog than anything out of that water,” my dad yells, pleased with his local banter.
We meander the exploded trash bag of a beach and stop at what remains of the old slaughterhouse. All those dead horses. I kick an ivory bone out of the sand.
The tideline is choked with horseshoe crabs. Tagged. With a number. Someone cares. We pick our way past and don’t talk about Henri. Chunky bottles hang from a spiky tree. A couple catch the rain, others the sun.
Sheree Shatsky is the author of the novella-in-flash Summer 1969 (Ad Hoc
Fiction 2023). She is a contributor to MAINTENANT 17: A Journal of
Contemporary Dada Writing and Art ‘PEACEFIRE’ (Three Rooms Press 2023).
Ms. Shatsky attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer
session 2021 and was selected by the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship
Program as a Spring 2018 mentee for flash fiction. Her work has appeared
in numerous journals and her microfiction was nominated for Best
Microfiction 2022 (Splonk Flash) and Best Microfiction 2020 (Fictive
Dream and MoonPark Review). She is a Tom Petty fan.
'Dead Horse' was first published in The Journal of Radical Wonder on 7 July 2022.
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