the speed of light.

It was a brisk cold morning, with the sun still eager to burn; the rivers flowed with blood red rose petals afloat as the wind swept the tears of the trees in circles. In the flourish of distance a stallion, he emerged. Robust and ready though his neigh was thready, a road stood paved. It was as empty as a road could be, foreign to this beast of roads less taken. Clear as the sky, so inviting to walk this horse sensed. No, it wasn’t tethered to the forest and that made for all the intrigue in the world. Unlike the ones that are full of silver and blue and blood red vessels that harbour the two-leggeds, those for the kangaroos and foxes who choose death over life. He looked meaty and tan in the rays of the sun as he trotted along to discover this path that found him. With nothing to stun in the horizon, he began the gallop of his life. Away from everything he had known, away from all of his own. The search growing and growing, as moons waxed and waned; the horizon bare as. With forest left and forest right, no sign of life for the stallion to admire or ask for help when lightning bolts were being thrown. Then the rains arrived, glistening this road that he was on though never enough to tilt the forward-angle of this horse’s head. He remembered so much in the cold just as he did the day of this trip, his eyes matching the weather. The rains only grew more persistent just as the animal was forgetting how to canter. Grey as the clouds that hung and hungry from within, he looked up for a sip of the sky’s nectar but instead tasted watery soot, then he looked down for a puddle in the ground. Unable to recognise this creature with his lifeless gaze, his back cracked as his tail wailed: the horse’s legs bent and broke and rendered him motionless. Eyes shifting away from the nothing-horizon to a blue morpho menelaus with wings made iridescent, this stallion smiled like he had never before. 

by Deepak Sidhu