In Raquel’s classroom, picture books proved a challenge. Students regularly confused narwhals with unicorns and vultures with griffins. Decades had passed since even their parents had seen a horse. It had four legs, most agreed, ranged in size from knee-level to fifteen hands, and could hold the entire stature of a man in the reflection of its eye. Raquel threw out the reading lesson, frustrated at the chaos it unleashed. She moved the picture books to a higher shelf. Maybe when her students had grown enough to reach them, she’d be ready for their disappointment. Vaguely she remembered the days as a girl when herds of livestock barreled through town. The vaquero came through ringing a bell for shop owners to pull in their merchandise and pedestrians to clear the walkway for a stream of horns and wide eyes and bellows along the pavement. Everyone held up their devices—this was before the blackout—to watch.
Since then, the herd had reached its sad finale—the last gangly specimens ransacked by a mob of frustrated carnivores, too much for any vaquero on a scooter to manage. The town mourned afterwards, savoring the final bites of what had been salvaged from the carcasses.
In those days, the extinctionglass slowly filled with running sand as families watched, swallowing a half-escaped sigh. The newscaster would list a series of coastal fish species—none anyone recognized, and the emergency alert text would scroll away into the margin of the screen before regular programming resumed. Soon people’s pets began to “run away.” It was in everyone’s best interest—then and still today—to just avoid domestics except for mice and rats. A chameleon wasn’t worth a busted leg or your child’s ransom. Even the bird trade had all but ceased now that habitat loss and a flu had scattered the final flocks to the edges of the map.
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Julie clamored through the door with a bouquet of green onions. “Aren’t they lovely?”
Raquel was resetting the vacuum that had gotten jammed while she was at work. She pulled a hairpin out with tweezers.
“I just came back from the studio,” Julie said. “Look at that.” She dropped a flyer on the table.
It read, Calling All Artists—The Greatest Installation of Our Time.
“It’s already happening. I’m sure. It’s a physical file and everything. Smell it.” Julie spun around. “We’re repopulating the earth!”
The flyer, printed on thin, cream paper embossed with an olive branch, explained in detail: in order to “rehabilitate normality,” artists were tasked to represent the world as it once was. Leaders were funding the creation of hyper-real statues: deer, foxes, geese and all the animals expected at zoos. Once the attractions in town had been populated, the installation would expand to national parks. The flyer called for expert artisans, but there were opportunities for the public as well.
“I’m going to start with opossums. Remember those?”
◊ ◊ ◊
This marked the start of the Great Installation. Skeptical at first, the town paid no mind as the artist collective worked all hours in the community center. But it was thrilling to see the creatures emerge—carted under heavy drop cloths and positioned in and around town. At the first unveiling, crowds gathered and awed at the mockingbirds strung from tele-wires and squirrels drilled into tree posts. The collective unveiled a new idea that day, too. They shared a painting—how the town had once looked, skirting the sides of a full river valley, small rock formations, and forest.
Gradually, durable hand-painted and sometimes animatronic creatures began to inhabit the town and nearby areas. Don’t step on the flowers, signs noted in parks covered with turf and cement walkways. Diorama experts served as consultants in the placement and lighting of artifacts. Poppy fields crushed decades before by overzealous content creators were now reconstructed beds of orange tissue paper wrapped around hundreds of thousands of pencils—even Raquel’s students had contributed to the display. Across the district, towns began competing for the largest installation. It was comforting, the community agreed—like nothing had ever happened—while somewhere the old exinctionglass poured several pinches of sand into the basin. What did it matter? In a few weeks they could have the recently deceased up and at ‘em and perfectly framed in a scenic overlook.
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Julie’s opossum was placed on the fence between Mrs. Henry’s and the faux forest that creaked at a high pitch when the winds picked up. Years into the renovation, it still surprised Raquel sometimes, seeing the black-eyed creature on the way to work after the light rail emerged from the tunnel. There was something in the stillness of it, something in the crafting she couldn’t bear to tell Julie about. Opossums play dead as a defense mechanism against actually becoming so, and Julie had told the story often. Her family had been harvesting roadkill. Then one began wiggling inside her bag, and Julie’s Dad cried out, “It’s a fresh one!” Julie had picked the opossum for this memory. A live animal playing dead; now an inanimate thing playing life.
◊ ◊ ◊
Soon there were sightings of a new installation no one had taken credit for. It had been spotted at the corner of West Street and Dowel, but it wasn’t there when the arts committee returned with the gossipers to find it. Rumors subsided until the grocer found something caught in his hutches.
“It’s a horse!” Mr. Octavo cried, bringing a box to the square. The creature was reactive and mechanically programmed to sneer and hiss.
Children marveled. “Is it really?”
No one could disprove it because no one quite remembered what a horse was or was not. Even Raquel’s books, which may have held the answer, had been pushed so far out of her memory that she didn’t think to make inquiries.
“Alright, how do we turn it off?” the arts committee superintendent asked, peering into the crowd. “It’s illegal to deface community property. This could have trampled the grass or dismantled the birds. We have ordinances, you know.”
Yet again, no one stepped forward.
As a result, it was kept contained until its batteries eventually ran out. Artists admired the craftsmanship of the finally-still thing. Opossums, squirrels, ducks, and an assortment of other creatures had been permitted for display, but this was not among the species historically native to the area. And the town had agreed to an accurate depiction of the past, hadn’t it?
Regardless of its containment, the horse—for it may as well be an imaginary thing—did not remain static. The longer it stayed, the more its condition corrupted, drawing flies and producing a rank fluid which seeped from the boundary and drifted. But within a few moments of the first complaint, it was disposed of in a swift and assured manner.
Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of Now in Color (Perugia Press, 2020) and the chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She serves as a poetry editor for Iron City Magazine and works as the Virginia G. Piper Faculty-in-Residence at Arizona State University, where she leads the Thousand Languages Project and CantoMundo.
