Books: Excerpt

• Share

"Only the skeleton remained before Fabian... Above all other abandoned, useless and decaying parts of the dead horse's body, the skeleton bothered Fabian most. Unlike the animal's skin or blood, the intestines, lungs, nerves or muscles, each a forge of moisture and heat, a furnace of life, the skeleton, with its two hundred and more bones that Fabian had once counted, seemed no more complex than the crude pillars, posts, joints and frames that made up the barn — and no more mysterious.

If the skeleton was the bony soul, the hardened essence of the horse, it appeared, when juxtaposed with the living mass of the animal, rather as its opposite, a caricature supplanting pliancy with rigor, fluency with brittleness, motion with stillness. What would have happened to the horse, Fabian wondered, if, throughout its life, instead of relying on its instinct, the animal had sought support only from its skeleton?"