Connor Fisher: TESTIMONY • Cleaver Magazine

Flash by Connor Fisher
TESTIMONY

I never touched the horse in question, although, at various points in my life I have, largely against my will, been made to saddle, groom, ride, and stroke horses. I did once approach the horse—an allegedly beautiful animal, brown and dappled with white spots along its flank—but that was from a distance. The horse and I were separated by a fence, and the animal was halfway across a large field. The horse appeared indifferent to my presence although the cowboy, the man who had teased and cajoled me until I approached the horse in question, and who had been my lover two summers prior, when I had worked as a ranch hand after fleeing my brutish boyfriend one black midnight, his furious screams ringing in my ears; this cowboy had assured me that the horse was not indifferent but exhibited tremendous curiosity about my presence at the edge of its field.

Two weeks later the horse was dead and I, in gossip-riddled circles, was named as a suspect. Yet I have never made death threats against any creature, living or dead—not even against my repulsive one-time boyfriend, a man who would routinely lock me in our bedroom when he left the house and, on occasion, threatened to burn me with a cattle brand—and have myself only once received a threat of brutality, although this was in a foreign country and may have been the result of a breakdown in translation. The poor young man who, I believed at the time, threatened to remove the skin from my body with a paring knife and then remove my lifeless head, may have merely been inquiring if I could point him towards the closest fruit stand, although his body language and demeanor were undeniably hostile, and the knife he grasped in one fist came, at multiple points, uncomfortably close to my own throat.

I feel the utmost pity towards the horse in question, the creature having had its head removed from its body, but I am in no way knowledgeable about or responsible for this gruesome act, the likes of which seems highly derivative of a scene in a famous film in which a horse is decapitated for the purpose of, if I remember correctly, intimidating a corrupt filmmaker. Yet it is questionable whether it can be said that real life is derivative of art, life being, at its core, a sequence of events that happen without apparent connective relation rather than a series of scripted and planned actions to be performed by professional actors in an imaginary world. I have never taken pleasure from a living creature’s death and am profoundly opposed to the way the horse was killed, especially since the animal possessed tremendous loyalty, if the cowboy can be believed, although while I knew him, this cowboy possessed a bad habit of using superlative language rather thoughtlessly. I was, to him, the most elegant and the most sensual of paramours: praise which I took to heart until I encountered the cowboy in the bed of another man, making passionate love, upon which occasion I withdrew a book of matches from my pocket, lit one, and placed it beneath the still-bouncing bed of the cowboy and his new lover, and I admit that I did not look back as I left the cowboy’s home, a trailer that, in retrospect, was filthy and poorly maintained.

But surely there are worse ways for the horse to have died than even the horror of decapitation, such as being slowly drowned or asphyxiated, such as burning to death while hobbled, such as ingesting a poison that left the animal paralyzed and in tremendous agony. If I had—God forbid, but I must pursue the line of thought to its conclusion—if I had killed the horse in question, I would not have used a blade or a garotte but would have pressed the barrel of a pistol, clean and black, against the horse’s temple and, while the horse ate an apple from my outstretched hand, I would have pulled the trigger smooth and slow and killed the horse at once with the merciful tip of a bullet.

Connor Fisher is the author of A Renaissance with Eyelids (Schism Press, 2024), The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and three poetry and hybrid chapbooks including The Unholy Moon (salò press, 2024). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His writing has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Random Sample Review, Tammy, Tiger Moth Review, and Clade Song. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.