They were cold a lot, and slippery, and hard to climb up.
Three horses, statues, at the edge of Rouge Park.
Made of brass or something. I didn’t know then and I don’t care now.
But we loved being on them.
Me, and Bobby, and Deon.
The horses were supposed to represent the contributions of animals to American life.
One was in a full gallop, a Pony Express horse. One had chains hanging, as though it pulled a plow, one stood stiff at attention with a badge on its saddle, representing mounted police horses.
We didn’t care.
We rode a city bus to school.
All three horses, in our mind, were gonna take us somewhere different.
Better.
We would get on the horses and pretend we were all kinds of crazy shit. Cowboys of course, but train robbers and heroes saving women tied to tracks.
When Sami’s Lotto Food Stamps party store on Schoolcraft burned down we pretended we were riding to an oasis, except the oasis was full of lipstick red Tahitian Treat and Suzi-Qs were the fruit of the trees.
The cops would shoo us off the horses, or the Parks and Rec lady would.
We could read the damn Keep Off sign, but we didn’t care.
The cops were too busy to arrest us, and the Parks and Rec lady couldn’t catch us.
One day I noticed that the climb up wasn’t a challenge anymore.
We had started to grow into our fake horses.
It was the same day that Deon said he didn’t want to be on the police horse anymore, because his father had joined the Nation of Islam, and the cops were the enemy.
Bobby switched horses with Deon and we took off in our minds, to climb up a trail to a mountain that had gold hidden in it.
We were high up in the mountains when the Parks and Rec lady started screaming at us to get down.
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