'The Nightstallion' by Guy Narcissus
Guy Narcissus is the anti-hero of the novel 'GUY vs. GAIA'. He was once considered a satirist of note, like Nicholson Baker, but fell from all grace and now writes and narrates flash and microfictions, when he is not blocked, that is.
2/13/20251 min read
THE NIGHT STALLION
Only fair: the wife had helped him realize his dream to become a literary novelist, so he would buy her a black stallion. They travelled from Midland City to Maine to buy the Arab colt, called Azrael.
Six months old – black as death, but for the white star on its forehead – it cost six thousand dollars. The breeder threw in a companion horse, its gelded half-brother, for nothing, eight legs for the price of four. He named the gelding, Sleipnir – after Odin’s eight-legged horse.
He stopped writing every day, and just plain lived life on the plains. Knowing nothing about horses, he helped her prepare a field and stable. He paid laborers to erect a wire fence. He helped feed, water and muck-out the colts every day for three years. He had some fun teaching Azrael and Sleipnir, these strange sons, to play soccer. When Azrael slipped and slid under the wire one night, he cut the colt out, unhurt, just a scratch on the withers. The wife was so happy with him. ‘You saved our son.’
Being. And nothing, else. He was coping with his wordlessness, until he read that stallions could live for thirty years. That was the final straw. He left the wife, the horses, the dung-heap, and fled to Oregon to write. She sued for divorce, threatening to ruin him. He wrote a Post-Natural novel to spite her, The Nightstallion. This vision of relationship breakdown in what was left of Nature was critically panned as ‘worse than nightmarish’: The New York Times reviewer even invented a new word in the English language to describe it: ‘nightstallionish’. That neologism, that single -ish, finished him as a serious novelist. Now, he writes darkly comical Flash Fiction, for the audio market, narrating it in hoarse whispers.
