I ate the first child accidentally.
After I knew, I ate the next because the act of eating the child would maybe absolve the act of killing.
I ate the next child because the eating of the child helped hide the murder of the child and meat was sparse and I had not a horse to waste. I was so close.
I ate the next child because of the hunger and because the meat was good, and what other way was there to honor the child in death but to eat the body in celebration of the life?
I do admit—the other children…
I did eat the other children with some delight, forgive me.
I discovered early to keep the horses sedated or they would run away. Something deeply instinctual, I think, in horses, how they resist being bashed, even for their own betterment.
In that way, I think, horses are a lot like people.
There had been many weeks in which, in the mornings, the sun would shine through the trees and descend upon me standing over a mostly rotting, legless corpse of a horse, next to a mostly living, extraordinarily legful horse. Very often seven-legsful.
The eighth leg, the most difficult leg.
So it was with great jubilation I finally, delicately, stitched an eighth and final leg onto a horse for the first and only time.
I was in increasingly short supply of horses and horses were expensive for a person of meager means like myself, and there weren’t a lot of foals to be had what with my sawing off so many of their legs so quickly, which hindered most of the bodily functions of the horses including, most importantly, their reproductive abilities.
But I was certain of my efforts. That hubris, perhaps now in retrospect, my downfall.
So I would gather my horses by sneaking upon them while they slept and bashing their heads with a rock.
If they died, I took their legs.
If they lived, I sewed new ones on.
I imagined the horses waking up a bit groggy, gazing for a moment at their new appendages, giving themselves a delicate shake and trotting into the sunset, returning to me later with sheer gratitude.
That’s how it began, my dream of horsebuilding.
Mostly the horses did not survive. Though that I might revive them.
Often I would return home to my wife, Donna Berne-Pedro, defeated but wistful, soaked in equine blood.
“Perchance to dream,” I would say to her as I looked off in the distance, standing in a dark puddle. She slept separately in a bedroom she locked behind her, telling me she was fearful she might one day awake with horse legs attached. But of course I would never attach a horse’s legs to my wife.
I think now perhaps she had fallen out of love with me.
But did I quit sewing horse legs onto horses and other creatures and sometimes plants?
No! I am Don Pedro, the Horsebuilder.
I committed to my dream even harder.
“Won’t it be wonderful,” I would say, “to unlock the secret of life? To prove it with a horse with eight legs? And we are so close now, but so quickly running out of horses.”
Almost nightly, sobbing, I would tell Donna Berne-Pedro how many horses I lost that day, and she would refuse to let me sleep in the room.
Mostly what she would say is, “I am so hungry.”
I would scoop her a bowl of the stew she had made and I did not ask questions and I would delicately serve us both.
Despite some failures in calibrating the force with which to employ my rock-bashing technique, I always intended for my horses to live rich, full lives, legful or otherwise.
My first horse-with-no-legs I called a snorse, a snake-horse, which was a flub.
All the snorses were flubs.
Without legs, snorses repeatedly failed to innovate new and natural means of locomotion, which should have come instinctively upon the removal of their legs. No snorse ever made any attempt at lateral undulation or sidewinding or slide-pushing or any sort of motive power whatsoever.
Instead, snorses spent most of their time just sort of flopped over on a side, just sort of lying there, struggling to breathe.
I could not saddle a snorse up as a mode of transportation or use it as an amusement at children’s parties, though I tried. I will never forget the look on the children’s faces.
In fact, after the surgical removal of a snorse’s legs, it seemed as if they just gave up, as if their whole lives were wrapped up in those legs, as if their legs had been life itself to them. But no snorse ever ran away, which was a problem with some of my pre-op horses, before I invented the rock-bashing technique.
Once, I even rolled a snorse into a pit of snakes, hoping it might at least learn some rectilinear crawling maneuvers through observation, perhaps even finding camaraderie in his new brethren. Initially, the snakes would nuzzle their giant newfound friends, but the nuzzles soon turned ghastly, which the snorse seemed to allow, not just because he couldn’t move but because, it seemed, he was thrilled to have an ending, to be welcoming his own demise.
My second horse-with-no-legs I called a sea horse.
Sea horses, too, were flubs.
Observing that the sea’s most majestic creatures generally operate without legs, I had imagined a new glorious seafaring horse and used a tactic similar to that used for the creation of the snorse, namely, sawing off (most of) a sea horse’s legs and then patching up the places where the legs had been, though for a sea horse I would leave one of the hind legs to act as a rudder, as in boats.
But just as with snorses, sea horses almost immediately act as if the gift of fewer legs is somehow to their detriment, just flopping over, refusing to be cheered, kicking wildly.
When I dragged the first sea horse to the shore, I prepared myself for the sublime, to feel what God must have felt, to see my creature discover the world I presented.
But the sea horses refused to adapt to their new watery confines and promptly sunk in what I can only assume were more acts of defiance, more revolts against life itself.
Cursed creatures.
My dream was not only to develop new types of horses but to improve upon the areas where nature had failed and to uncover the secrets of life, to determine what fundamentally makes a thing a particular thing, at its very core, instead of some other thing.
And as my workshop overflowed with riches in the way of spare horse parts—most especially horse legs, four extra from each snorse and three more from each sea horse alone—and as I found myself becoming a sort of nouveau expert in the field of horse surgery, I began to expand my fieldwork to broader horizons.
Ruminating on the death of my sea horses, I determined that, if I had made any error, it was that sea horses were more horse than sea. To succeed, then, I should not have started with a land-base and subtracted, but with a sea-base and added. With this fact of nature in mind I reversed course and developed the first of what I hoped would become a small school of horse fish, which is to say I took a pair of salmon and stitched each to a freestanding horse leg.
I gathered my horse fish and released them into a small pool I installed in my workshop, but both promptly sank as if weighed down by something, which I assume was the anxiety of influence of being the only two of their kind.
So I created many, many more, but each horse fish refused to eat or in any way be cheered and would soon pass onto another life.
There was also the nine-legged horse spider, which consisted of a spider delicately stitched to a freestanding horse leg and which I planned to immediately release into the wild. But the spider-base of the horse spider was promptly smashed by the weight of its new horsey body.
Considering my developing shortage of horses, I reused the leg of the horse spider to create the horse bee, which was also promptly smashed by the weight of its new horsey body.
I repeated this process again to create the horse caterpillar and the horse moth and the horse butterfly, and on, capturing and sewing and delighting and failing, all day for days, all of the creatures being also smashed by the weight of their new horsey bodies.
One of the problems with being a horsebuilder is that very few people ever expect a person to be building horses out of horses. As such, a horsebuilder such as myself finds themselves constantly explaining.
It makes one feel small, like a child, to have to always be explaining.
And yet, what else would there be to build a horse out of except bits of other horses?
When someone says they are a horsebuilder, it is a failure of imagination to think they build horses out of wood and chicken wire, metallurgy and sculpture.
So when I ran low on horses and traveled to find the choicest haunches and loins and carouse in whatever local public house was nearby, I scarcely ever got a drink and the conversation tended to go something like the following.
I introduce myself, always gingerly and transparently. “My name is Don Pedro,” I might say. “I am a down-on-my-luck horsebuilder. What do you have in the way of—”
And before I can finish my query, someone interrupts. “Like out of wood and chicken wire?” they say. “Or more of a sculpture and metallurgy-type deal?“
“No,” I explain. “Mostly from bits of other horses.”
“Don’t horses come out fully formed already?”
“Of course,” I confirm, “but I do what nature refuses. I select the finest hooves for my horses, for example. Sometimes I remove them surgically, or if a prized horse has suddenly died or been smashed with a rock I just pop off the hooves and take them and then add the hooves onto another horse.”
“Is it hard? To pop off the hooves?"
“The secret is the right hoof pick."
“So you breed the horses, then? At least the ones with the hooves and things you’re popping off?” They are so uneducated in the ways of horsebuilding that they fail to realize how difficult it is to breed a horse who has been bashed in the head and who has got no legs left.
“I build horses,” I explain. “I am only interested in building horses, to discover the secrets of life. I build them out of old and sometimes expired horse parts and also parts of other animals I have available. And sometimes plants.”
And once I have their respect as an educated horsebuilder, I make my pitch: “But as I am a bit down on my luck, I have started taking commissions and in addition to a drink I would like to inquire whether you know anyone in need of a custom variety of horse, specifically someone interested in horses with no legs, horses with additional legs, horses with wings, horses with arms, horses mostly made out of sheep, a sheep with the legs of a horse, a horse with another animal as its tail, a horse with another animal as its tail and that animal is another horse, a horse with—"
And at this point they usually interrupt again. Always, they interrupt.
“Why don’t you just breed and sell regular-type horses?” they want to know.
“Who would want any of those other horses?”
And soon after I am asked to leave the establishment without ever even receiving a drink.
No one ever seems to believe in what I, Don Pedro, a horsebuilder, can do.
After one such trip, stumbling back home exhausted from another night of failed solicitation, I stopped to pet and feed and visit with my menagerie of horse-derived animals, though as usual they appeared unhungry and lethargic. Most of them, in fact, did not move at all, so demoralized they were on my behalf.
They loved me so.
Then I heard the thunderous laughter of my wife, Donna Berne-Pedro, in the distance, and I approached our home and glimpsed her smiling face through the window, and then I squinted, and then I froze.
And I saw, approaching behind me as reflected in the glass, a mob of torches.
I had become aware by then of the rumors circulating, so I ran.
And I ran.
Me, Don Pedro, the Coward.
Based on what I overheard as I hid in bushes and ditches, the authorities who first investigated my workshop described the scene as “an unspeakable horror.” Their sensational descriptions only served to entice their audience, most especially (I think) those with prurient interests in hooves.
The authorities would recount a cast of desecrated creatures, always changing depending on the teller and time of day, sometimes with a gallows joviality but more often with what seemed an earnest despair. Their favorites to recount were a horse body sewn to a flock of crows (a horse murder), a horse body with an additional horse head attached to its hind quarters (a two-way horse), and various foliage attached to various horse legs (my garden of horse plants).
“I had no idea what he was up to, until it was too late,” was all my wife, Donna Berne-Pedro, would ever say. My betrayer to whom I would still give everything.
Then: “But at least he has disappeared.”
And they might reply to Donna Berne-Pedro, as if she needed comforting: “You are so strong.”
Or at least that’s what I heard.
Sometimes I would overhear, too, during particularly late-night tellings of the stories about me, the stories being told to an especially empathetic listener, someone who might really see me, who might find themself falling into a mildly inebriating moment as if on the cusp of fitting all the final few pieces together, of feeling themself almost making sense of all the world’s deep, hurting, beautiful possibilities.
“Oh, Don Pedro…” they would respond, some semblance of sympathy in their voice, some gasp at recognition. But then they would stop, realizing further comment would be met only with suspicion.
And after that, they stayed quiet.
More often the story ended with head-shaking exasperation.
“The sheer number of baby arms,” they would say. “And the horse with all of the baby arms sewn in where the horse legs should have been…”
I, Don Pedro, am among the first of my kind, which means my ancestors were surely not horsebuilders. Beyond that fact, I know very little about who I come from, where I came from.
I grew up in an orphanage on a working farm.
There was never enough on the farm, but we always had plenty.
What I believe—the story we were told at the orphanage, the story that had been passed down, the story I know somehow to be true—is that, long before us, there was a world in which people lived with great abundance, but the abundance was never enough to satisfy. The people created more and then more and then, somehow, they grew so large, larger than large, larger than giants, and they blocked out the sun.
And their world exploded into a million little pieces.
On the run, in the forest, I came upon a clearing. Beyond was an array of benches, sparsely populated. I considered hiding but glimpsed a leaflet nailed to a tree.
It read:
Timidly I scuffled in and took a seat toward the back.
Father Pinkie was small, rosaceous, and completely hairless. I remember wondering whether the world ever once knew a hairless horse, and I made a note for a new creation.
Father Pinkie’s voice thundered a sermon I have memorized, as I heard it almost daily at my short time with the Church.
He began: “For the day of calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon the earth make haste. And we are but little fingers, little bags of skin.”
Two men would then enter the congregation from the forest, carrying long sticks with feathers tied to their ends. From the aisle, stone-faced, they would begin tickling under the noses of those gathered.
“We have always been exposed to destruction, to slip, as one who walks through the compost of a banana plantation,” Father Pinkie said. Sniggers from the tickled would begin sneaking out and generally continued for the duration.
“And as we walk through these slippery places, peels on all sides of us, we cannot foresee one moment whether we shall stand or fall the next, and when we do fall, we fall without warning. Surely we didst venture into slippery places and as we are liable to fall ourselves, without being thrown down by another, as we who walk on slippery bananas we need nothing but our own weight to be thrown down. So the observation from the words that I would now insist upon is this: ‘There is nothing that keeps the festiguous at any one moment out of stitches, but the mere anticipation of a better joke. And by the mere pleasure of God, I mean her mirthful pleasure, hindered by no manner of difficulty, are we tickled by her delightful hands.’”
Festiguous nodding would then ensue.
“The truth of these observations may appear by the following considerations:
“One. There is no want in our mirthful God to cast solemnity upon us and drag us into desperation. Just as we find it easy to knock twice or groom a shaggy dog, so it is easy for God, as she pleases, to make a mockery of our lives. What are we, that we should think to stand before her, at whose antics and jocular capers make the earth itself quake, and grimace, stone-eyed?
“Two. We deserve to be ribbed, the drollery of our existence so irresistibly festiguous. Divine laughter says of the trees that bring forth bananas, ‘Peel them, lest someone slip.’ The amusements of divine laughter are every moment brandished over our heads, and it is nothing but the tickling hands of a mirthful God that holds them there.
“Three. Them that laugheth not is condemned already to desperation.
“Four. Doubtless, with many who are now in this congregation, who may be stoically listening in the back, for example”—and here, that first time, Father Pinkie made eye contact with me—“God may be delaying a farce of gags and pranks and quips, not because she is lazyish, but because the bananas are still ripening on the tree.
“Five. The banana stands ready to fall into our mouths, and the peel tossed aside, at what moment God shall permit us to slip. The peels belong to God; they are under her dominion. If God should withdraw her hands, by which armfuls of peels are restrained, and they would in one moment fly upon us, freeing God to tickle us hastily and without clemency as we slip and slide into jocular delectation.
“Six. There are in the souls of laughless people the foundations of tricks and capers that, if let loose, would release such shtick the earth itself would erupt, and it is in the wisdom of our mirthful God that such infinite jest be restrained at her leisure.
“Seven. All the means there are of cracking wise and witty banter out in the world are so in God's hands, and so universally and absolutely subject to her determination, that levity does not depend at all on how well we josh or tease.
“Eight. There is clear evidence that a person cannot tickle themself and expect bursts of laughter, that if it were otherwise we should never see a clown or jester. So how laugheth the wise? even as the fool.
“Nine. All pains and contrivance which we use to escape toward gloom, while we continue to resist the delirious furor of violent lenticular undulations, do not secure us for one moment from the squeaks and murmurs of snickers and sniggers and muted horselaughs, repressed waggery or subdued merriments. Like foolish children we may miserably delude ourselves in our own schemes of dejection and despondency, and in sudden destruction find ourselves the punchline.
“Ten. It is plain and manifest that whatever puns a person makes, whatever parodies a person writes, whatever satire a person finds themself living, until there is belief in the possibility of a joke, they will not laugh.
“Therefore, let everyone that is not now laughing, awake. The mirth of Almighty God is now undoubtedly tossing bananas over a great part of this congregation.”
Father Pinkie would then step away from the pulpit and a basket of bananas would fall from the treetops.
“Everyone take a banana,” he would say, and we would, emptying the pews from the last row to the first, in single-file lines, proceeding to the front. Before receiving the banana we would bow our heads and giggle.
We ate, and tasted the bananas were good, and we tossed the peels aside.
After the first service, so impressed was I that I approached Father Pinkie with questions I considered to be of great consequence.
“Father Pinkie,” I said. “Do you have a moment for an outsider?”
And Father Pinkie said: “We are only outsiders on the outside. Here, we are on the inside, Don Pedro.”
I shook with adrenaline at his recognition.
“You are the one they call Horsebuilder,” he said.
So relieved was I that Father Pinkie did not call me Child-Eater that all I could do was laugh.
Father Pinkie wanted to know, on behalf of the Brotherhood of Animal Alchemy, whether I was successful as a horsebuilder, whether I truly was able to create new life, to form new creatures from nature’s refuse, to breathe into that which had expired, to make them laugh again.
“Tell me first, Father Pinkie,” I said, “whether you believe it possible that there is more to the world than we can ever know.”
“There is always more, Don Pedro.”
“And tell me, too, whether you believe it possible that the secrets of nature may one day be revealed, that our reach may one day meet our grasp?”
“We shall never know without effort, Don Pedro.”
“And tell me, too, whether this knowledge, should we find it, need be nurtured and protected, that it service nature rather than destroy it?”
“Yes, Don Pedro.”
And I told Father Pinkie that, though my efforts had mostly failed, I did arrive with a prophecy, which I was compelled to reveal.
“Once upon a time in the forest,” I began, “I stumbled over a root and tumbled into a crevice. I tried to stand but found myself sinking further and further. I was no longer on firm land nor at sea, but stuck in a sort of mixture, a sort of sludge.
“I looked around to find I was not in a crevice at all but atop a sort of heap.
“And since I could not climb up I rolled farther down, not knowing whether this event marked the end of my short life. I rolled and rolled and while I was rolling I found myself accumulating strange loose trinkets, sticking to my body and my clothes, finding their way onto my person and into my pockets. The heap ended at a river which became my escape.
“At the river, I emptied my pockets and bathed and took inventory of my new collection. Among that inventory was one item of interest, which I have never previously revealed.”
Father Pinkie’s eyes grew wide.
“This item is my prophecy and my proof and my inspiration,” I said. “This is what has moved me beyond any other, to push toward discovering the secrets of life. What has driven me ever since to pulling the legs from recently deceased horses that had been bashed in the head. How I know a horse can be more than a horse.”
From my pocket I revealed to Father Pinkie a rectangular block, smaller than my hand, and pressed my finger to it. The device illuminated a wonder beyond imagination, one I still sometimes doubt I actually saw, a horse in vivid detail, speaking:
The block went black and refused to announce itself ever again.
Father Pinkie then invited me into the Brotherhood to study in mutual learning and advancement, that I might share my knowledge of horsebuilding and reciprocally learn from the Church, and I agreed.
Our first morning together, before I was baptized, Father Pinkie led me around the Church, introducing me and sharing in their research, which had extended beyond our mutual interest in animal alchemy.
What most impressed me was the twins.
“These are the twins, Thomas and Tomas,” Father Pinkie said. “They are in the midst of developing a new levitation technique. While experimental, many in our congregation have witnessed their success.
“First, Thomas picks up Tomas, and concurrently, Tomas picks up Thomas, and together they float, each carrying the other. Their greatest achievements so far have been produced in bodies of water. Also downhill, and also horizontally. They continue to research ways in which they might float directly up, through the trees, each carrying the other.”
I immediately became a true believer.
The next morning, Father Pinkie awoke me with a question: “May I finger you, Brother Don Pedro?”
Groggy, I extended my arm straight up in the air, as if to shoo Father Pinkie away, which allowed Father Pinkie to find the hair in the pit of my arm, which he caressed and swirled until we shared a smile.
“You have been tickled by God,” Father Pinkie exclaimed. “I am not God but we are each one of her many fingers. And one’s greatest hope is to be tickled by God, to laugh in the face of everything.”
And so I was baptized into the Church.
Father Pinkie’s teachings continued for several weeks.
One day, he approached me with his index finger held straight up in the air.
“We are all fingers,” Father Pinkie said.
And so I was enlaughened.
“What is a finger but a great conduit, Don Pedro?
“And that finger leads to the finger of your arm and the finger of your shoulder, the finger of your body, the fingers of your legs, the fingers of your feet.”
And so I was enlaughened.
“What more is your brain but fingers?” Father Pinkie said. “From everything a finger comes, to everything a finger goes.”
And so I was enlaughened.
One day Father Pinkie held up the index finger of one hand, and a banana in the other hand.
“What, exactly, is a banana, Don Pedro?”
“A finger,” I said.
Father Pinkie peeled the banana and took a bite.
“You are a fool,” he said, and so I was enlaughened.
“The fingers of your hand lead to the fingers of the rest of you, but not all fingers are cylindrical.”
Father Pinkie held out his palm, flat and facing the sun, fingers extended.
“In this way, a group of fingers leads to another plane.”
And so I was enlaughened.
Another day, Father Pinkie again held out his palm, flat and facing the sun, fingers extended.
He then extended his opposing index finger, planted it in his palm, and curled his other fingers around it.
And so I was enlaughened.
However difficult my rock sedation technique was to develop or master, it was not difficult to learn from observation.
There was the first part, the selection of the rock, and then the second part, the bashing.
I learned the bashing technique from watching my wife.
The first bashing had been meant for me.
At first, I did not much consider the origin of the piles of baby arms that appeared in my workshop. I thought perhaps they were carried in by a bird.
But their existence did give me urgency toward my purpose. I hoped that, with more study, I could reanimate all that had been lost for so many, to reassure them that their abandonment was more than a punchline delivered by a cruel, laughing universe.
The fear of waking up one morning with another creature’s appendages in place of one’s own runs deep in some people.
That fear runs deep, especially, for those living in close quarters with a horsebuilder.
I do not blame Donna Berne-Pedro for trying to bash me.
The first bashed baby was the bashing meant for me.
I did not know we ate the baby.
I did not know the arms were a sort of offering.
While I applied my knowledge of bashing to horses, Donna Berne-Pedro’s bashing fed a sort of appetite deep within her that must have previously been dormant.
Her bashings, I believe now, were a simple manifestation of those appetites to which she ultimately had grown accustomed.
She could no more stop bashing than she could stop breathing.
When a person first starts doing a thing, anything that goes wrong has only happened the one time. Once is not yet a pattern. And by the time a pattern emerges, a person tends to just accept its necessity.
One day, after meditating on what I saw inside my workshop the night I fled, I approached Father Pinkie.
“Father Pinkie,” I said. “I have a dire question.”
“Lighten yourself,” he told me.
“Father Pinkie,” I said. “You teach that laughter is the most serious matter of all. That there is only one serious philosophical question to consider, which is: Willst thou be tickled?”
Father Pinkie nodded.
Then I said: “Father Pinkie, you also teach that if one is going to make belief, then to believe in mirth. That God may tickle the least festiguous into chortles and guffaws at any moment, that even the least festiguous among us deserves to be cast into divine giggles. You teach there is nothing that keeps good people at any one moment from laughing, but the lack of hilarity.”
“Yes,” Father Pinkie nodded.
“But what do you teach of the delight of the mean-spirited prankster? Of those who believe in wickedness, the laughter of cruelty, the laughter of belittling? What of the disembodied cackling echoing across the darkness, the perverted joy of deviance? What of the predator, the murderer? What do you make of those who find ghastly delight in their somber choices? What, Father Pinkie, do you make of the one, face red with blood, splattered in excrement, who holds up a victim of dismemberment and steals away their still-beating human heart, who bites into it like an apple and gleefully tastes that the meat is good, and then laughs like thunder, pulsating and giddy with complete surrender to darkness, to violent submission? Who is evermore thrilled with bemused chuckles that the next victim waits helpless and panicked, watching?”
“But that is not laughter,” Father Pinkie said. “That is the sound of tears, screaming.”
And so I was enlaughened.
Not long after we, Father Pinkie and I, had shared all that we could share, a report from a Brother of the Church came in that an eight-legged horse had been spotted not far away.
My spider horse.
It was so fast and free that it could not yet be caught, but it was delighted and frolicking, I was told, and I accepted the mission to find it, to ride it speedily home, to further our studies, to determine what makes a thing a thing and not something else, to perhaps revive all we had lost, to redeem myself and my wife in the eyes of our God.
And so I record these thoughts—I, Don Pedro, the Horsebuilder—here, along this river, brooding on the coming of a new, unknown world, thinking of my eight-legged wonder, and when I first attached those four additional legs.
I have come a long way to this dock and the spider horse seems so close it feels impossible that I have so far failed to sit atop it. Perhaps it has circled back behind me, somewhere back in the vast obscurity, where the dark fields of my former life roll on under the night, or whether it has leapt forward, swimming into an orgastic future.
But I believe in the eight-legged horse, the climactic waves of discovery that birthed him into this world. The horse eludes me now, but that is no matter—tomorrow I will attach more legs to more horses, and they will run faster, stretch their legs out farther, and one fine day—
Robert John Miller's work has previously appeared in Propagule and is new or forthcoming in places like Bending Genres, HAD, X-R-A-Y and Maudlin House, available at robertjohnmiller.com.
Read Robert’s story in Propagule 5 here.