The Way Of the Horse

by Mike Mayak

The Draws for the January 2026Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Fantasy, set at a Skating Rink involving a Plastic Toy Horse. This is what I came up with. And yes, for a flash fiction story it got a little long… —-mike

The horse had been mentioned in my Mom’s Will. It took me a few weeks to find it among her things at her old house. She had moved into a care facility and thankfully it was over in a few months and she hadn’t been herself but she hadn’t suffered.

I guess I had somehow expected her to get better and move back in. I kept the house closed-up, mowed the lawn, paid the utilities, even kept the cable going. She’d never gotten on the internet but I had gotten her to use a cellphone. And then one day in early spring I was an orphan at thirty-five years old. Dad was gone and I was their only son. No real family to speak of, just some distant cousins and a very casual boyfriend.

The horse was a little plastic toy, a fine brown animal about the size of a kitten. Standing there on all fours, looking boldly forward. I think I’d glanced at it a few times when I was a kid but hadn’t given a thought to it. But when it was mentioned in the Will, I started looking and couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until I was home leafing through a bunch of old pictures that I found a picture of Mom as a little girl holding the toy horse. I remembered where I might have seen it.

I went back to the house the next day, not a big house but big enough for one person. I started looking on one of the shelves in the room just off the kitchen. One full of knickknacks and old Christmas cards. There was the horse, leaning against the wall behind a big card showing a snowy church lit for Christmas. I picked it up. It was lightweight, firm plastic. I pulled out a tissue and dusted it off.

“Well, now little horse,” I said. “It looks like we’re going on a little trip.”

As Mom’s only heir, I inherited everything. Her house, belongings, car (which I’d been driving for a few years anyway) and the bank account which was not a lot. Mom had been sensible and lucky but not rich.

There was no money involving the horse, just a request. Mom wanted me to take the horse to where the old Cumberland Stables were just outside of the city. I remembered her telling me that she had gone there to ride when she was a girl. That was mentioned in the letter I got in the Will. A request to take “Dilly,” which was what she called the little plastic horse, to the old stables “and let him have one more run.”

I sighed. I’d passed the stables when I had been in grade school and my folks and I had driven somewhere. I really hadn’t thought of that in decades. I never got into horses and hadn’t any curiosity about seeing the stables again. I remembered that it had been just outside the city limits in a little wooded area with a big, welcoming archway. The trees and grass around it caused Mom to say “It always looked like Summer there.”

The next day I took the horse, wrapped in tissue paper in the passenger seat, and drove out to the stables. I was glad Mom had left the address in her letter to me.

In the intervening half-century since Mom had rode there the city had expanded and swelled around the stables. There were thrift stores and convenience stores and liquor stores as well as at least a couple of restaurants advertising BREAKFAST ALL DAY and LOTTERY SOLD HERE.

And the stables, of course, were gone. Instead, there was an ice skating rink with a big domed roof and a few brightly colored pennants over the entrance. Somehow it looked friendly and inviting and I saw a lady escorting two excited looking children into the building.

I sighed. Well, I could still do this. I was glad I always kept my coat in the back seat. You never knew about Kansas weather. I parked, picked up Dilly and went in. I thought I glimpsed a big tree at the back of the parking lot behind the building, maybe the last remnant of the stables.

As I paid my admission I asked the clerk if he knew about the old stables that used to be here.

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said. “My Boss bought the property when Mister DeLuno died ages ago.”

I thanked him and walked into the rink.

It was cold, of course, making me glad I had the jacket. I sat down on one of the benches near the stairs leading to the rink with the signs NO SKATES ON CARPET. I was sitting behind a padded barrier that was chest-high and I could see the glittering white oval with several skaters. One couple (cisgender, of course) skating around happily, other people of various ages skating by themselves and two teenage boys the one clinging to the wall and the other skating beside him who passed where I was sitting and I heard the skater tell his friend “you’re doing fine!” as they crept by.

I took Dilly out of my jacket pocket.

“Well, Mom. This is the best I can do. Hope it’s what you wanted.” I said.

I set the little plastic horse down beside my feet on the floor.

I glanced out at the skaters on the rink, their blurred reflections on the black, polished wall on the other side. For a moment I thought I saw a taller, larger blurred image on the wall, passing the other images, then there was an indistinct figure racing gracefully around the rink. A brown horse with a rider.

I shook my head and blinked a couple of times.

In that instant, it was suddenly outside, suddenly Summer, bright and sunny and I was on a brown horse, riding through a wooded area at a gallop, hanging on to a young woman from the back of the horse. I looked up and the woman turned around, young, brunette and smiling. It was my Mom, looking about the age she had been when she had me.

“Isn’t this fun?” Mom called out.

I held on and nodded. It was an hallucination I was sure but it was kind of fun.

“I got you here to tell you something,” Mom said. “Some advice. Take the Way of the Horse.”

“Way of the horse?” I said, realizing that in this dream-thing I was a lot younger and my voice hadn’t changed yet.

“Always go forward,” she said. “But always watch and be careful. You don’t always get second chances.”

“Yeah,” I said, still hanging on.

“Don’t let him get away,” Mom said.

“The horse?” I asked.

Mom pointed ahead on the little trail. There was a log blocking the way. Not a big one but still in the way.

“Watch out!” Mom said as the horse raced faster. I held on tighter.

The horse jumped up. Up. Past the tall branches of the tree, into the bluest sky I had seen, into the bright warm rays of the Sun.

“Wheeeeeee!!” Mom called out again as I held on for dear life.

There was a thud and I realized I was back sitting at the ice rink. Gripping the seat tightly. I picked up Dilly and shook my head.

I took the horse with me to my apartment and sat and thought about what she’d said. “Don’t let him get away.”

In the years afterwards, my onetime boyfriend and I refurbished Mom’s old house and kept the horse in a place of honor where we could see it in the morning when we ate breakfast together.

—end—