by Amelia Loeffler
In the dying light of a cold day, the codfish flails in dry air, patina scales winking,
wide eyes unblinking, as a fisherman curls his finger under its gill plate and retrieves a barbed hook from the open mouth.
Four time zones away, two thoroughbreds canter in their paddock, and the earthworms, mistaking the hammering of hoofbeats for pattering rain against the topsoil, surface into the hard-packed, sun-parched dirt.
By the sea, the fisherman drops his cod onto the wharf, where the day’s catch lies in a whorl of silvery shimmer like links of coiled chain at his feet and there, the fish writhes; a dying worm on hot asphalt.
At the same time, in a Kentucky pasture, the smaller of the two horses, a friend’s bay, Dead Ringer, collapses into the yellowing pasture, knees bent at a wrong angle, mouth open like that of an unhooked fish, gasping.
From a bench on the wharf, I watch while
the fisherman uses a stone to deal the cod three blows to the head, percussive like hooves across packed dirt. The stunned fish goes still. I get a call, back home, the horse is dead, heart failure.
Pegasus 