Tuesday's Prose

Sometime late in the evening of a Wednesday the wandering horses appeared.
No one knows why. It was a child who saw them first, five grazing in the one
remaining vacant lot. No one in that subdivision has horses. They have dogs,
and the dogs went bats. When the horses appeared the old widow woman who
lives in the sagging cottage next door stood in her front yard and wept with
arms upraised to the sky. No one knows why. The same widow woman who says
hellelujah in conversations with her neighbors. The same neighbors who visit
with her mainly due to Polite 101 but always wonder - Isn't the word hallelujah?
Although polite, none of her neighbors are godly. Their parents tried to be but
the children have put away such attempts. A young man from the local dying
newspaper came to do a story about the horses. That's news. At the neighbors'
urging, his story included the widow woman who wept with outstretched arms because surely they were connected. She warmed to his scripted interview and
the young man found her hard—not crusty or eccentric but simply a straight
shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom. That, and the habit of adding this
hellelujah to her thoughts, much like a refrain. As for the horses, she'd no idea
why or where they came from. But the arrival surprised her and nothing had
surprised her in a long long time. As for the weeping, she felt it the natural
response to such wildness, as in her body did it without consulting her mind.
There's nothing to lose with a dying newspaper so he asked one last question -
Isn't the word hallelujah? The old widow woman laughed. That? It's my variant,
a made-up word to contain the detritus of my faith. That’s what she said: detritus -
he noted that. He thanked her for her time and turned to leave but not before
she said Nietzsche's in the ballpark. The truth is that which does not kill us makes
us stranger. Hellelujah. He left the visit feeling a bit back on his heels, a feeling
he later realized to be surprise, and nothing had surprised him lately that he
could recall. By Sunday morning the horses were gone. No one knew where to.