A Horse Named Liquor (Chapter 1)

A snake attacks a horse! Literary Mystery.

Chapter 1
Cancer devoured the once, young, beautiful, blue lungs of the sky:

God hurled the clouds, underhanded, like a bowling ball . . . like rolling devil-faced plumes in fiery rafters . . . and smothered, from cheek to cheek, the boiling liquid gold smile of the sun . . . high up in her perch.

A chalky stroke of pitchfork-tipped lightning stabbed into the leaf-covered grasses!

The rains crashed down with thunderous applause!

Buckets Full Of Thunder! One After The Other! Violent! Explosive! No Signs Of Remorse!

The rushing throngs of crushing winds stormed up against Berkeley’s house like pissed-off penniless peasants attacking the castle walls and tore off several of the black wooden shutters and flapped the black, iron, horseshoe knocker like a fish out of water and swung the white rectangular sign 1414 by its left top corner and into the mud.

The bushes were short and tall, skinny and fat, some green, some brown; they huddled up against the house: shook, twitched, bent, and whipped in all directions.

The peeling paint curled in places and looked like curly fries—and the smeared moss stains trickled down like a crying woman’s mascara and looked like little tormented faces.

On the left side of the house, the winds, like a twitch of Ol’ Nick’s nose, whirled up the towering, rectangular, gray, brick smokestack and tore off the loose black shingles on the roof and sent them flying into the air like debris in a Kansas tornado.

A red-headed rake slid down behind one of the short, fat, quivering, green bushes. The handle wedged into the garden faucet and vibrated back and forth, sounding like a prisoner clutching his cell bars and rattling them.

Berkeley’s devil cat darted out of the frontyard bushes and galloped through a swelling sea of fallen leaves. She took shelter under Berkeley’s white station-wagon and crouched down like a sphinx and peeked out. She had a coat the color of candy corn. Scratch marks were all over her left eye like she had been in a raccoon fight some time ago. She had an orange collar and an orange metal tag shaped like a sitting cat. Her name was Europa like the ice-covered moon of Jupiter. And her bad eye looked like a miniature version of it like a scuffed up ice-cube.

The sickly-twisted winds decapitated the orange heads of a troop of mushrooms in the frontyard, leaving nothing but rubbery necks, and blowing the heads all over like white storm caps; and ravished a picture perfect row of white, pink and red dogwoods by the sidewalk—as easily as if they were dandelions, blowing the petals up into the air like sea mist, like an apparition haunting the sky.

Long skid marks of wet red leaves like scabs or psoriasis marred the street:

A single pumpkin seed from a smeared smashed pumpkin in the street found its way into a muddy puddle in the driveway by the white station-wagon’s front right tire. Its smallness compared to the infinite sky conveyed a sense of profoundness.

The winds knocked over the blue garbage-can and the green recycling basket. The black lid rolled down the street and hit the curb on the other side. The crushed diet Coca-Cola cans rattled all through the street and into the gutters and floated away with the rest of the debris.

The foot of the storm stepped down hard on Berkeley’s neck of the woods!

In the dark heaving bosom of it, a big, old, two-story, pumpkin-orange barn snuggled up close to a monstrous tree with an extravagant orange headdress—and a chalky stroke of lightning fractured the sky above the dying green pasture!

Inside the barn, under the dim, overhead, hanging lights, past a dozen horses in their stalls, Berkeley looked like the Reaper from behind. She was dressed in a long, black, nylon poncho with a hood. She was shoveling manure into a large, black, plastic garbage-can. The shovel had a long brown handle and a u-shaped head.

Her face never appeared.

The smell of fresh, powerfully-built, horse **** hung in the damp cool air!

Behind her, there was a white Adirondack chair outside one of the horse’s stalls. There was an open pack of red licorice and an open book on it. The book was entitled The London Strangler’s Ghost. It looked to be a demoralizing one thousand pages. The first paragraph on the left page read: They read the book. A book at night in bed. Late at night. All alone. Just a book in the soft light from the bedside lamp. It was called The London Strangler’s Ghost. They became hypnotized. Absorbed. Immersed in the writing. Were told to read between the lines. Literally. Lines between the lines. Floating up from the depths of hell. Fiery Red Font! An unknown language. Then the emerging lines dispelled and the story went on. But was it something or just a trick by a literary genius? That’s how they became possessed. That was the conduit. Those who had written it off as a literary trick died! Their soul was eventually consumed by The London Strangler’s Ghost: The Devil’s Curse: The Fiery Red Font. There was only one way to break the curse.

The thin, black, felt, fork-tipped tongue hissed in the low-whispering currents and the pages fanned out of place.

Soft eerie moaning like a growling stomach churned in the undercurrents of the low-whispering currents.

The buckets full of violent thunder exploded!

The horse in the stall aside the chair and the book and the licorice stirred nervously, unlike the other horses. They were aware of the violent weather, but calm.

He clanked his metal shoes on the hay-strewn wooden floor and bobbed his head up and down on a slant.

Black metal nameplates were on each one of the stall doors and the name of each one of the horses had been engraved in silver. The frightened horse’s name was Blind Licorice. He was a two-year-old, brown, Quarter horse. Mother Nature had taken a paintbrush and had saturated in white and had smacked it down the center of his face.

He repeatedly whined like he was on the verge of going over the cliff of agony.
Berkeley placed down the shovel and walked over to him.

The front doors of the barn shook! but restrained the violent elements of the storm from breaking in.

The thin, black, felt, fork-tipped tongue hissed in the low-whispering currents and its moaning undercurrents as the Reaper fed a piece of licorice to the young blind horse, calming him.