LUCAS MANCINI

Every opportunity to witness the talking horse is met with uproarious public support. In the stadium a layer of bodies jostles over staircases and rows of seats like ant trails. The sell-out crowd usually doesn’t fill its seats until deep into the first act—it’s a long haul event, a slow burn to start. Horse speech. And all along he’s down there, stock still, stood behind a condenser mic complete with horse-sized pop filter. A splitscreen on the Jumbotron shows 3/4, tail, flank, and bird’s-eye shots. The horse has always been kind of a wet blanket despite his appearance: always a gorgeously dappled skewbald Vanner with ghostly furred hooves, crimped blonde mane, and robust muscular build. Harlequin cover material, Fabio made horse. So he even speaks with the accent (not Fabio’s), irreproducible in text by someone who has never spent any length of time in Ireland, much less Travelling. Music latent in the voice, but there’s no groove to the horse’s lectures that moves anyone but himself. And it is always a he. Calling himself a warhorse, pleading for a metallurgist in the audience to turn the carbon of his flesh into carbon steel, steel his nerves like he’d steal a car, spoil a horse, spare the cowboy. Audiences are fond of calling the horse schizo, for which they can be forgiven, popular abuse of the term notwithstanding, given that the horse’s word salad, slant rhyming, and rapid transmutation of one subject to the next altogether read as the genuine article.