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 Dog Boy helped Phillip lead Charon's Crossing out of Stall 28. He mooed for her and she blew the air from her lungs in response. The walk to the paddock was no more than five minutes and all the while Billy Greene paced nervously in the Jockey's Dressing Room. He prayed that nothing would happen to the horse in those five minutes. No stumble. No bleeding. No nothing. Just five minutes passing from the history of the universe. 300 seconds. One twelfth of an hour.
The resident mouse in Stall 28 peeked from out of her dung tunnel. When she saw Charon's Crossing leaving, she left the tunnel and carefully arranged the straw on either side of the dung. She could relax now. She had time to carefully weave the straw so it was tight enough that no stray raindrop would ever collapse her tunnel again.
After Phillip left with Charon's Crossing, The Dog Boy went around to the other stalls to visit the horses that weren't running in the final race. For some, he would moo and for others he would bark or purr or chatter. On his way back to Stall 28, he created a symphony of dozens of animal noises to serenade them. Most of the sounds were recognizable but some were from distant and ancient times. He included a passenger pigeon, a screeching pterodactyl, a dodo bird, and a wooly mammoth. The nervous horses, the ones with the flared nostrils and swishing tails, gurgled quietly while they listened. It was as if they had just been washed and brushed for the perfect amount of time. Their bristling manes rippled once or twice and then lay flat against their necks.
The microbes, the little beasties from East Baltimore, had the most important job of all that day. In steps too tiny to measure, they would nudge every other creature on Earth to move over, move on, or move out. They were God's great levelers. After arriving, these intruders settled on top of the dung tunnel and began to fulfill their life's mission. By the time they finished, the mouse's master work of engineering would be obliterated.
Broken beyond repair.
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nothing is always
Rules, too, are sometimes meant to be broken beyond repair. Obliterated, if you will. Or at the very least tested. And when you're desperate, breaking rules can be the only path to success. That's true on the last day of a meet and even truer on the day after the last day.
Billy Greene stuck his foot in the stirrup and Phillip Staffe gave him a boost. Whether it was due to excitement or nervousness, that push was almost enough to send Billy completely over the horse and onto the other side. He grabbed the pommel just in time to steady himself and then he leaned toward Charon's Crossing and whispered, "We're gonna get 'em today. A guaranteed world record."
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