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, eyes wild, tongue flailing. There’s a mark on its forehead.

Tonight we crowd around it. City council’s giving an award to the man who wrote the book about the statue. The rest of the town’s shown up to protest. We’re upset about all of it — the award, the book, and the statue. Makes us uncomfortable.

We can’t remember what happened in those six months after the statue showed up. Didn’t 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.

It’s a quiet town — the amnesia could be from boredom, but that wouldn’t explain why it feels like there’s folks missing. Nobody we can name, but there’s less of us now than there were before.

We’re still not looking at it, not really. We’ve got our signs and our flashlights and we’re closer than most of us are comfortable with, but we’re looking past it, at where the podium’s set up. The mayor’s saying some words about the man who put the town On The Map, as he says.

Really it was a professor who started it. Came in from New York a couple years ago on some kind of grant to study “Midwestern sculpture.” 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’s forehead. The story ended up in magazines. If anyone put us On The Map, it’s her, but that wasn’t the kind of On The Map city council could be proud of.

So this local man wrote a bestseller in response to the controversy. The book didn’t 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’t even mention the missing people. Its author knew just as much as anyone, which was nothing. But it started one of those “National Conversations,” and soon everyone had an opinion.

A handful of folks at this protest just want to go back to not having an opinion. They don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to think about the unsaid warnings that could have saved that professor’s brain. They don’t want to think about the six months that they can’t think about. But to get back to all that not thinking, they’ve got to hold a sign a while.

But for most of us it’s 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’t move for months before finally getting towed away, no owner on the registration. There’s a footprint in the air of this place, something we can’t see or taste, but still squeezing the air from our lungs.

The author’s knuckles turn white as he grips the podium and tries to speak, but we’re out-shouting the PA system. We’re not as angry about the statue as we are about someone being proud of it. He’s looking at the speech on his phone, but the screen keeps turning off because he can’t 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.

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’t want to look at, but of course we do. This symbol of our delirium.

The cord wraps tighter. The man’s 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.

JOSHUA STORRS is a finalist for the 2017 Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction for his short story, “Holy Ground,” which he sold to a journal that never published it and then disappeared. When he’s 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. Joshua lives in Pittsburgh and goes by @Bloombeard on twitter and instagram.