THE HORSE’S MOUTH

Story by the Marshall Arisman

Eohippus is the ancient ancestor to the zebra, although zebras deny that this ugly creature was their great, great grandfather.

“His head is too big, his brain is too small, he has soft, small teeth, and his toe nails need
clipping,” they say. His perpetual toothy smile is the result of hoof and mouth disease that he suffered in childhood.

Scientists call him Eohippus, but he answers to the name Smiley. Because of his size and bad temperament he finds endless amusement in making the other animals feel small and weak. He steps on their tails, spits tobacco juice in their eyes and jabs them with his toes. He is a bully and a boor.

At school, Smiley was the first young equid to have the idea of sawing through the legs of his teacher’s chair. He sprinkled itching powder into the jockstraps of the football team and stretched Saran Wrap over the toilets in the locker room. In the cafeteria he poured salt into the sugar bowls and hot sauce into the ketchup.

The principal of the school, a wise old owl, suggested that joining the Boy Scouts might
redirect Smiley’s actions into a more positive direction. In the Scouts he was taught strip poker, shooting craps and how to ignite farts by striking flints together. One night, while left in charge of the Scout cabin, Smiley threw unopened cans of spaghetti into the fireplace and waited for the explosions which were spectacular and, incidentally, completely trashed the cabin. Smiley was arrested and sentenced to one year in juvenile prison.

While in prison he began receiving love letters from Mary, a dental hygienist who fell in love with his toothy smile on Facebook. Mary was an Epizoon, a beautiful bird with a great body. Not wanting to ruffle her feathers, Smiley graciously accepted the portable radio that arrived in the mail along with dental floss and an electric toothbrush. Every evening, while flossin , he tuned into NPR’s “Marketplatz”. The show’s host is a clam named Sly Fast-ball. Good news or bad news, everybody loves to get it from Sly (when you look up “quodlibetical” in the dictionary you see Sly’s happy-go-lucky face). Sly announced that Bernie Madoff had been arrested! Right then and there Smiley decided that he could channel his aggressive, brutish behavior into the stock market—where it would be appreciated.

One year later Smiley trotted out of the pen a changed horse. Mary, of course, was waiting. Now inseparable, Smiley runs a hedge fund for the Boy Scouts and Mary has started a distance learning program, via radio, to become an Oral Surgeon. Still the practical joker, Smiley is fond of saying “My lovely bird Mary never gets off my back—she rides me about everything.”