Jess Bowers’s short story collection Horse Show (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2024) invites readers to visit “that little golden age between the horse and the automobile, when we still had wonder” (14), even as its narrators puncture the tableaus they artfully weave by pulling back the curtain on the strings and pulleys continually whirring outside the proffered frame. In “The Mammoth Horse Waits,” a story that brings to mind Thomas Jefferson’s hopes to refute French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s claims of American degeneracy with an oversized moose, a London rival of P. T. Barnum fallen on hard times hopes to reverse his fortunes by countering Tom Thumb with General Washington, a “noble steed” with an “ironclad American will” supposedly “found galloping among a herd of mustangs on the Great Plains” (4-5).
In many of the tales, horses offer kinship and fidelity as well as liberation from cultural constraints. A suffragist triumphantly rides a white metal horse at the Steeplechase on Coney Island “astride” (19), while a thirteen-year-old girl manages to at least briefly escape her grief and her Uncle’s advances riding the blood bay “perilously close to the gingerbread-thin rail that separates the track from open sky” (22). Their ‘real-life’ counterparts, however, are not necessarily afforded the same freedoms, whether that’s being coerced—as in the case of the psychic horse, Lady Wonder (49-64)—or even turned into completely expendable commodities. In “Shooting a Mule,” Bowers artfully contextualizes a disturbing 1912 photograph of a mule decapitated in the name of “instantaneous photography” and revenge after kicking one General Abbot in the thigh. “One Trick Pony” recounts filmmaker Henry King’s demands that a stuntman’s horse (Babe) defy all instinct, impatiently forcing the creature off a cliff as the cameras roll, sacrificing its body and breath to a false narrative that turns outlaw Jesse James into a hero.
Another story examines the cost of the “American dream” when the grandfather, the hard-working “eldest son of a once-thriving Pennsylvania poultry dynasty” (40) toppled by Purdue, digs a pool in his backyard during a drought, an enterprise that loses all its luster after a neighbor’s horse is lured to its “lush clover halo” and drowns—her costly longing affording the family an uncomfortable glimpse of their own (44). For the show to go on, bodies must accrete: General Washington crashes through the stage, Babe is sunk with “a thick slab of gneiss” (35), and Miss Sugar bobs “like a foundered canoe” before her “bare shoulder” sinks beneath dirt and shale (46), while a Midwest Utilitor meant to be less trouble to take care of on the farm than horses—“‘it works for you’” (102)—inadvertently kills a man using it to bury an old, deceased horse—the horse and man remaining tellingly in the ground while the machine is pulled back out. Ultimately, Bowers’s collection convincingly relocates Heaney’s use of the bog as a reservoir of meaning and memory (and alternative to the prairie) back to the prairie itself, tenderly exhuming what “does not curate neatly,” what has, “like so much American detritus, been deemed worthy of preservation but not display” (68).
