* * *
But I am not so fortunate. I wake with astart to the sound of destruction and mayhem. There are horses in my apartment,crashing through the windows and rearing high enough to scrape the ceiling withtheir hooves. My coffee table and flat-screen are toppled and smashed beneathsharp hooves. Their eyes are wild and rolling.
This time I am not dreaming.
I manage to grab my coat and boots fromthe hall outside my door and flee the apartment into the night. They drive me,their roars echoing in the streets. They call to each other, herd me toward thesubway station with snorts and gnashed teeth. I barely make the last inboundtrain, and sit alone in a car in my boots, sweatpants, and a t-shirt. Outside,they gallop and lunge, thudding against the windows. A shod hoof smashes at myface and cracks the Lexan. I change to the Green Line and emerge again at NorthStation. No one sees the horses but me. If I try to move in any direction buttoward the park they rear and block my path. I hurry down Causeway toward thewater.
* * *
I am back on Commercial Street, but notthe one I know. It takes me a minute to get oriented. The park is gone,replaced by the elevated train, the city paving yard, and piers. The street iscovered with rail tracks. Stevedores and carters load horse carts with heavybarrels and crates. The air is heavy with the smell of coal smoke, manure, andthe metallic tang of blood from the slaughterhouse. Underneath it all is a deepand permeating scent that is overwhelmingly cloying. The neighborhood is busywith activity. Italian women hang their laundry from tenement windows in thehazy air. A group of children walk home from school on the sidewalk.
Ahead stands the brick facade of thePurity Distilling Company. It is dwarfed by an enormous brown steel tank,taller even than the elevated tracks of the Atlantic Avenue line. It must benearly fifty feet tall and a hundred across. There is a rumble and I look forthe train that must be coming down the track but there isn’t one. People pausein the street, unsure of where the sound is coming from. The rumble becomes thegroan of straining metal, the machine-gun popping of steel rivets. With athunderous explosion, the steel plates of the tank give way and a massive,ponderous wave of dark brown syrup courses from the ruptured vessel. It expandsoutward, tearing down the buildings of the paving yard and twisting the steeluprights supporting the train tracks. The wave washes across Commercial Street,eight feet high, impossibly fast yet languid at the same time and breaksagainst the tenements at the base of Copp’s Hill. Within minutes the whole areais a thickening pool of dark brown liquid filled with debris and bodies. It isover my knees. I wipe it from my face and taste molasses. It is everywhere. Inevery direction, it looks like the aftermath of a storm surge from a hurricane.Buildings lie in sticky ruin, or in half collapse, torn from their foundation.I cannot see the children in their school clothes.
Forms struggle in the congealing mass,impossible to tell if they are men or women, or even human beneath the surface.And, above it all, I hear the horses screaming. They have been torn from theirharnesses and ripped from their carts. They flail and thrash, struggle toregain their footing on broken legs, but they cannot. It is a swamp and itpulls them under. I try to help, to grab one by its bridle and pull it up butit is too heavy and the molasses too thick. I can do nothing. Across the yard,dark figures roll and reach up, a hand or hoof breaks the surface and thensubmerges again. The horse before me snorts and tries to blow thick brown foamfrom its nostrils but it is filling up. The weight of the molasses presses onits ribs. I can see the scars of lash marks on its back beneath the sweetness.It chokes. Its lungs fill. Its eyes are deep and brown and filled with terrorthat it cannot voice. I tell it that it will be o.k. and tears run down myface. I slouch down in the mire and stroke its sticky head while it dies.Around me, I can hear more horses crying out for help, but I cannot reach them.My hand is covered with a mass of hair and syrup. Chicken feathers from acrushed slaughterhouse float gently in the air like snowflakes.
People come. Firemen, locals. They tryto pull the people from the swamp, but the horses remain glued in place. Thelast one moving is a powerful draft horse, perhaps a bay beneath the treaclebut impossible to say. It turns laboriously, hitched to the Catherine Wheel ofits dead harness-mate in a tangle of reins and straps, with a splintered yokebetween them. It circles the corpse of the other horse in a sluggish orbituntil it can no longer move and, finally, settles slowly into the mire. By thetime the sun begins to set, men start to shoot the horses that remain aliveuntil the screaming stops.
They are all dead. Dozens of them.
They are all dead, now.
* * *
The vision of the flood recedes throughthe sepia of old photos and then I am back at the jobsite. The crowdedtenements, the elevated train, and the ruins are all gone. The park, quiet andbeautiful against the water in the night, remains.
The horses remain as well. Vaporousforms in the streetlights, their breath steams, and steam rises from theirlathered backs. They stand in a loose semicircle, eyes rolling. I try to moveto the side but they snort and rear, and press me back. I scuttle along thesidewalk in shaking hesitant steps, afraid of what revenge they intend to takeupon me. They pin me up against a low stone wall by the entrance to the boccecourts, standing over me, hooves stomping against the concrete, echoing intothe night. It is strangely quiet for the city, other than the sounds of thehorses. They part, and another human is backed against the
