The Mare

Dante

He is a funny man, even if he doesn’t say anything funny, just the way his hairy uni-blond brows go together when he’s trying to think of what to say. Before my mom got her crazy idea of going upstate to open a can of whup-ass, this guy on South Park was saying, “Black is beautiful, tan is grand, but the white man is the big boss man!” And I thought of the eyebrows.

But at least when a human came on the phone, she was nice and waited for my mom to find an envelope with the name of their town on it while I told her about going to see my sister race. But I remembered the name of the place anyway — it was like a name in that book about Unfortunate Events. And it was very unfortunate, forty dollars to get there, not even coming back, and we didn’t know where the race was or what time it was or even if it already happened. I expected my mom to say hell no, but she just sat like she was dreaming, and then said, Tell her to make the reservation with the credit card.

But I called Paul before we left and he said to go someplace else, and I didn’t tell my mom because there wasn’t time to get on the phone again, and then the subway sat in the tunnel and we only had time to get the ticket out of the machine so we wouldn’t have saved money, and then my mom didn’t understand when we got to Poughkeepsie and I told her, “I think he said to get out here instead.” She said, “Why?” and I wasn’t going to say “because he wanted us to save money” because then my sister’s ass would not be whipped alone. Even if my mom looked like she forgot about that, she just stared out at Poughkeepsie like she was still in that same dream.

So I thought when we get there and he’s not there she’ll ask me to call him and I will and he will come to where we are. And she won’t know I was stupid. Which is what happened. Except the phone was dead.