{"id":8020,"date":"2019-01-22T15:05:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-22T22:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8020"},"modified":"2019-01-22T15:05:23","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T22:05:23","slug":"a-statue-of-a-crazed-horse","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=8020","title":{"rendered":"A Statue of a Crazed Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Storrs<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Six nameless months passed before we noticed the statue of a crazed horse on the lawn of the old courthouse. Some could sense we put it there, but none remembered why. Black onyx, it rears back, eyes wild, tongue flailing. There\u2019s a mark on its forehead.<\/p>\n

Tonight we crowd around it. City council\u2019s giving an award to the man who wrote the book about the statue. The rest of the town\u2019s shown up to protest. We\u2019re upset about all of it — the award, the book, and the statue. Makes us uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t remember what happened in those six months after the statue showed up. Didn\u2019t even see it till there were already leaves falling. Only thing anyone could say about that summer was that it was hot. That was eight years ago.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a quiet town — the amnesia could be from boredom, but that wouldn\u2019t explain why it feels like there\u2019s folks missing. Nobody we can name, but there\u2019s less of us now than there were before.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re still not looking at it, not really. We\u2019ve got our signs and our flashlights and we\u2019re closer than most of us are comfortable with, but we\u2019re looking past it, at where the podium\u2019s set up. The mayor\u2019s saying some words about the man who put the town On The Map, as he says.<\/p>\n

Really it was a professor who started it. Came in from New York a couple years ago on some kind of grant to study \u201cMidwestern sculpture.\u201d Ended up going nuts looking at the thing all day. We stopped looking at her, like there was some word of warning we forgot to pass on. She went back to New York and raised some hell at her university over the mark on the thing\u2019s forehead. The story ended up in magazines. If anyone put us On The Map, it\u2019s her, but that wasn\u2019t the kind of On The Map city council could be proud of.<\/p>\n

So this local man wrote a bestseller in response to the controversy. The book didn\u2019t actually answer anything. It condemned the woman in New York and her pretentious attitudes about small town Midwesterners. The book confronted the statue, defended it, said it was a symbol of pride for a misunderstood people. Didn\u2019t even mention the missing people. Its author knew just as much as anyone, which was nothing. But it started one of those \u201cNational Conversations,\u201d and soon everyone had an opinion.<\/p>\n

A handful of folks at this protest just want to go back to not having an opinion. They don\u2019t want to think about it. They don\u2019t want to think about the unsaid warnings that could have saved that professor\u2019s brain. They don\u2019t want to think about the six months that they can\u2019t<\/em> think about. But to get back to all that not thinking, they\u2019ve got to hold a sign a while.<\/p>\n

But for most of us it\u2019s about those missing people. No names or records show anyone missing, but there were gaps in work schedules, shifts with no one to cover them. There were cars in parking lots that didn\u2019t move for months before finally getting towed away, no owner on the registration. There\u2019s a footprint in the air of this place, something we can\u2019t see or taste, but still squeezing the air from our lungs.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s knuckles turn white as he grips the podium and tries to speak, but we\u2019re out-shouting the PA system. We\u2019re not as angry about the statue as we are about someone being proud of it. He\u2019s looking at the speech on his phone, but the screen keeps turning off because he can\u2019t get a word in edgewise. He goes off script. He takes the mic off the stand and charges us with it. He tries to move around the statue to get in our faces — shouting, pointing, not looking at the crazed horse any more than the rest of us — but we move too, circling the statue opposite him, keeping it between us.<\/p>\n

The cord of his microphone wraps around the base of the statue. This thing that puts our guilt in the center of town for us to glance at every day — to catch out of the corner of our eye as we eat breakfast across the street — something we don\u2019t want to look at, but of course we do. This symbol of our delirium.<\/p>\n

The cord wraps tighter. The man\u2019s circles get shorter. The statue of the crazed horse stays between us. We are a vortex spinning round a bottomless pit. Falling closer, the friction lights a fire, and we drink his words like fuel.<\/p>\n

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JOSHUA STORRS<\/strong> is a finalist for the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction for his short story, \u201cHoly Ground,\u201d which he sold to a journal that never published it and then disappeared. When he\u2019s not shaking his fists at the sky and cursing the name of God, he makes comic books with his friends, which you can read at JoshuaStorrs.com<\/a>. Joshua lives in Pittsburgh and goes by @Bloombeard on twitter and instagram.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joshua Storrs     Six nameless months passed before we noticed the statue of a crazed horse on the lawn of the old courthouse. Some could sense we put it there, but none remembered why. Black onyx, it rears back, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":8017,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8020","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-25m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8033,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8020\/revisions\/8033"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}