The Horse’s Mouth

I opened my eyes. A new world. I tried to get up on my feet, but my hands were hooves, and there were only toothpick limbs beneath my massive torso. I forced myself to stand up on those hooves. It was awkward, my sight was low and I couldn’t stand upright but bowed naturally. My neck was long and heavy, forcing my protruding lips and teeth to deep kiss a mouthful of dirt. It’s bitter! I spat and looked up to see a gigantic ghostly horse staring curiously at me. It did not speak, and several pairs of human hands were constraining it. Is it my mother? My creator?

I don’t know who I am, and I’m jealous that some other people do. Just as I was born in that country, and so born to be the people of that party, I woke up and there I was, in the middle of the first page of the scroll, a world of ruins. I stood on an earth of paper, the shape of my body barely captured by the charcoal dust floating in the air. The sky, the earth, the horse, and I were all in drifting sand. Somewhere I couldn’t see, someone was stirring the floating dust. Paper and charcoal were the corpses of trees--calcined, crushed, dissolved, and finally their mummified bodies were manipulated by someone’s fingertips, giving me this new life. I heard someone say, in the end, it’s still dirt to dirt, ashes to ashes.

Before I could say a word to the horse, the wind blew me forward. I could faintly see a large hand pushing me along, carving out my forehead and lips with its fingertips, sweeping its fingers over my neck and torso, stroking its palms over my stomach, and carefully tracing the direction of my legs over and over again. I was amazed at how fast I could run. Not only could these thin limbs support my heavy body, but they operated effortlessly, from shoulder blades to tailbone.

Someone blew the horn. On the backs of the herd of horses around me, humans with flags called for attention. I did not understand the humans’ words but was pushed by horses to follow after them, and so leaped to the next page of the scroll. Unlike upright humans, four-legged beasts didn’t have many choices of direction. Surrounded by similarly bulky beasts, the only path left for me was a narrow one-way. When I was still a human, I marveled at how few sheepdogs could manage a field of sheep, as they didn’t share the same language. But now, hearing the screaming horns and the unknown cries of humans, I could not control my limbs but kept running. Those sheep must have been trapped in the middle of the herd as I was, moving involuntarily toward the unknown while rejoicing in finally being civilized.

The sky was misty, the earth was dusty, and I wasn’t sure what I was stamping on. The horn was still ringing, and it was the only voice I could understand; when I heard the horn, I had to move forward. In a muddled world like this, I believed that the humans who made that sound were my lord. The horn was right, and marching forward must be right.

As we went, another herd of horses stopped in our way. They are also vigorous, graceful, and beautiful animals. But unlike us, their neck manes were not trimmed. They seemed to be wanting to express something, holding back our pace, but the horns were too loud to allow us to hear them. The horn was still prompting, step over! Step over them! My companions began to crash into the intervening horses. There was no idea of stopping or finding another path because we could only move within this thin piece of paper. As that big invisible hand drew these horses in our way, they became our obstacles. My beautiful, graceful, but misdirected enemy, I imitated my comrade, I bit and tore the kindred in front of me: today I must kill you, step over, step over you. I will trample over your dead bodies because we have always had only one direction with only one choice, so whoever made this decision for me must be right.

Ripping the skin of a horse, blood flooded in my mouth, the blood of my own kind. Swallowing its flesh, I knew for the first time that meat was more tasty than grass. I have heard that in times of famine, humans ate the children of each other, and in times of war humans were simply mutton standing on two legs. The civilized people said that it was barbaric to eat one’s own kind, but having eaten one of my own kind made me feel more human. Lu Xun said they were eating people on every page of their history; I fear that you might eat me today, but I anticipate gobbling you up one day. To taste your flesh, to rest on your leather, and the one who was eaten will soon be forgotten.

I ate the horse in front of me and was eaten by the horse behind me. I felt full when my companions ate, as my companions did I was eaten--we drifted between devouring and being devoured. I no longer felt that I was myself. I was all the horses, and they were all me. The invisible hand no longer carved one horse by another. We shared the same shadows, we were ghosts in the dust, rotating forward in a circle of eating and being eaten.

Swallowing enough of my comrade, I had the strength to stand on my back hooves like my lord. Tearing off my skin and burning away my impurities, I was clothed in the white bones of my lord. Raising my eye level, looking from the human viewpoint, I saw a world beyond my fellows’ bodies. So that is it: at the end of the earth, we could reach the sky--no wonder we were to march toward there. I am going to the other side of the horizon, where it must be heaven.

Trampling over the edge of the page, we broke into the air. Every leap toward the heights was a rebellion against gravity, and if our lord were still alive, they would say that we were sure to conquer the sky. Only cowards would drift along according to that big hand’s will. Our bodies formed the mountains it sketched, treading over each other's backs, soaring higher and higher. We delighted to see the hand panic. Under my lord's guidance, we eventually overcame its uncapturable force. At the peak of this world, birds flew over my head, and wind took away my wishes. Here we are at last. Is this heaven?

Before I could stay in the air for another second, gravity pulled me down into the cold sea. This is not heaven, and the end of the earth is not the sky, but a color melted between water and sky. The water poured down from my nose to the skull, stinging, scalding, and my body started to regret not cherishing the ground it once wanted to escape from. Another horse, believing the sea was our destination, jumped off the cliff and drowned. Corpses floated all over the space, merging into the indistinguishable sky-sea, returning to the ashes that were formed from. Facing death, we lost faith in our lord and in the selflessness of the collective consciousness.