you cant make this stuff up

When I was 8 and my brother 6, we dug up a dead horse. Didn’t know it was a horse, of course. Thought it was a dinosaur. Maybe one of those little mean ones. Billy rolled the ribs and the rest back home in his Radio Flyer (we found the carcass about 30 acres out on a 90 acre farm). I carried the skull. Straight to our mother.

Nothing like an 8 year old carrying a big horses head to scare a woman to death. Never mind Billy and his wagon full of bones.

She broke out the bleach and doused everything we’d touched. My mother had mild OCD and Clorox could clean anything….even Lord knows what. (As in…”Lord knows what kind of germs is on that thing.“)

Turns out a few years earlier our funky down the road neighbour, the one who ran the horse farm with 1 horse, buried his pet mare on the wrong side of the fence after she came down with something he had never heard of before.

Yep.

You’d think an 8 year old would have a disconcerting dream or two after digging up the neighbour’s used-to-be horse, but earlier that month we were in a car behind a farmer and his Ford and I spent 14 miles being eyeballed by a dead palomino hanging off his tailgate. (Don’t ask. I don’t know.)

After that, bare bones really didn’t bother me.