Four riderless horses, white, red, black and pale, and one zebra showed up on my doorstep today.
The red horse bore a great sword lashed to its saddle and the pale horse a scythe. The zebra, unsaddled, free, tossed its mane.
I led them to my backyard. They followed politely except for the pale horse, death’s steed, who peed voluminously on my sidewalk. “Help yourself to some grass,” I said, “But mind the lilac. It’s fragile.” The white horse nickered.
I called my wife. “We have a problem here,” I said. My wife, a practical woman, got to the heart of the matter. “We can’t keep them. Our yard’s not zoned for horses.”
“This seems like more of a spiritual problem,” I said.
I call the rabbi. “Sorry. We Jews don’t do the apocalypse,” he said, giving me the number of a friendly minister. “Maybe he can help.”
An hour later my yard is full. A priest, a minister, the rabbi, and my wife stare at the animals. It’s like the start of a bad joke, but no one knows the punchline. “Well,” my wife said, “if the horsemen don’t show up soon, we may need to find a stable for them.” The zebra lifted its tail and shat on the lawn. “And call the zoo,” she added. The zebra ignored her.
“There’s still time to repent,” said the minister offering a ride home to the priest and the rabbi. They left in his green Prius still debating the finer points of the end of times.
“Let’s get some dinner,” I suggested. “Things always look better after a meal.”
An hour later the yard was empty, with only hoofprints and grassy droppings proving it wasn’t an elaborate hallucination. “Just so long as death doesn’t come knocking in the middle of the night looking for his damn horse,” my wife said. “Amen to that,” I agreed.
Shara Kronmal’s essays have appeared in PLEASE SEE ME and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her literary translations can be found in Hunger Mountain Review and MAYDAY, and her reviews and interviews appear in Necessary Fiction, Chicago Review of Books, CRAFT, and elsewhere. She is the associate editor for longform creative nonfiction at CRAFT. Shara is a retired physician living in Chicago. Find her on Instagram @skron11.
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