The Dog Boy, a 39-year-old man child, is being forced from his home. He has nowhere to go. Charon's Crossing, a failed racehorse, will be put down unless she wins her next race, but she has lost each one of her previous 64 races. The worst is certai...
The roof of Barn 6 had always leaked. Though the leak was worse in Stall 28, no one complained. Well, that's not quite right. No person complained. The mouse living there was quite unhappy. She was a master builder and she had just finished tunneling through some horse dung. The dung tunnel was the last section of a runway that went all the way from one end of the stall to the other. The structure was beautiful to behold except that the steady drip from the roof kept knocking over the stalks of straw that she had propped up against the walls. Those stalks formed the longest part of her tunnel and she squeaked her annoyance each time she had to leave the security of her tunnel and rebuild what the rain was destroying.
The Dog Boy watched this entire process. He barely blinked his eyes as the mouse mended the walls of the tunnel. Whenever she came out to work, the boy mooed like a cow. It was such a pleasant sound that the mouse as well as the horse who lived in Stall 28 (in fact, all the horses in all the neighboring stalls) relaxed when they heard that sound. The Dog Boy was a master at keeping animals calm.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The Dog Boy
No one could recall the exact date that The Dog Boy arrived at Pimlico. It happened out of the blue like the afternoon mail being dropped through a slot in the front door. It was probably sometime in the late winter, but it's hard to be certain. What the residents of the backstretch knew for sure was that the horses liked the boy. Fractious horses liked him and so did sluggish horses, as well as smart horses and dumb ones. They all liked The Dog Boy and his assortment of animal noises.
The boy was born with the name Syracke Fanner, but that name never stuck. When he was much younger, he would greet each day by barking like a dog. Occasionally, he would roar like a lion. Way back when, it was rare that he would moo like a cow but then he moved to Barn 6. All the animals living there felt lucky that they had survived another day when they heard him gently mooing.
No one at the track knew the child by his real name. To them, he wasn't Syracke Fanner or even The Dog Boy. He was simply New Boy and he was their personal secret – the stowaway in Barn 6. If he was going to stay and help them calm the horses, it was best not to talk about him, though. Especially not to Reverend Wilson, the track chaplain. Reverend Wilson, you see, was a stickler for rules.
"No one lives in the barns. No one. Never."
The Reverend had said these words so often that you almost wondered if he had found a way to sneak that rule somewhere inside the Ten Commandments. It was like he had added it in after slicing off honoring the father or the mother and thus leaving space for one half a commandment. Or maybe he just slipped it in between no killing and no adultery where it might not be noticed.
Regardless, the rule was the rule. No one could live in the barns. No one. Never. And everyone who worked in the barns took it seriously. After much experimentation, the solution that worked best for them was to disregard what they couldn't change. Whenever Reverend Wilson was around, they ignored the animal noises or perfected that distant look that children master when their teacher is looking for a volunteer. If the situation was particularly dire, they would shuttle the boy from barn to barn so he wouldn't be found. The Dog Boy had never been happier.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
