I am Cursed (and it's Horse Related)

The girl sitting across the aisle has a plush doll of a horse on her lap. The toy doesn't capture the animal's gargantuan size, or its horrible teeth, but its eyes— its eyes are perfect. Somehow, with nothing but two brown marbles and some white paint, the toy maker accomplished the impossible. That fear, that innocence, that expression of utter helplessness that I have seen each and every night — it gazes back at me from across the aisle.

The moment the girl notices me staring at her plush horse she recoils. She says something to her mother. The woman scowls at me, grabs her child and moves on to another carriage.

The facemask covers my disfigured nose, but does nothing for my black eyes. I look like a corpse. I take another swig from the flask so I don't feel like one.

Outside the world is condensed into teardrops. Sharp strikes of lightning momentarily light up the silhouette of an ancient gothic city, but most of the train's surroundings are fog strained through rain with the occasional flash of headlights.

Adela gave me an umbrella for tomorrow's shift, so I take some comfort in my forethought to bring it along. That comfort drains the moment I realize how close my re-entry to the tour-guiding world is. My stomach does a full flip when I realize what I have to do before I put on my name badge.

I took my old backpack— the same ratty bag that I carried around for five years of summer rushes. It doesn't hold hundreds of fliers and maps anymore. Inside there are only apples. My umbrella peeks out like a flag from one of the side pouches. A rusty crowbar sticks out of the other side of the bag.

I'm on a train heading out of Prague. I'm on a train heading out of Prague to bring the horse back to its legal owner.

If he wouldn't have ambushed me outside of Adela's apartment things would have been different. If I could have somehow avoided a collision with Jaroslav I would have just fallen asleep on the benches below my apartment. The horse would end up with the police and Jaroslav would have to retrieve it from them. The animal would no longer be my problem and Jaroslav's cruelty towards the horse would no longer be on my conscience.

Yet when I stumbled out of Adela's apartment in the early afternoon, the angry carriage driver was there. Jaroslav had a plan of his own that he wanted me to follow. I wasn't given a choice in the matter.

I'm only riding the train for a handful of stops out of the city, but the moment we leave the last station with Praha in its name all traces of urbanization disappear. Fields that stretch out into eternity spread out beyond the wet Plexiglas. The occasional flashes of lit windows through the fog look like dying fireflies, but I try to remind myself that there's people inside of those homes. People tend to be kind, I remind myself. I try to convince myself that most of those kind people would contact animal welfare if they thought their neighbor was abusing his horse.

Under physical duress, I revealed to Jaroslav what I had learned of my equestrian curse. The horse would appear wherever I had last slept. The problem of returning the animal was simply a question of choosing the right sleeping spot.

He found no joy in being closer to reuniting with his "stolen" property. He only found more anger. Banging his steering wheel Jaroslav insisted that I bring the horse to his house outside of Prague. The animal was always kept in Jaroslav's backyard, like a village dog. There was no stable for me to sleep in. The idea of taking a nap in Jaroslav's home was out of the question as well. It was my responsibility to bring the horse to him and he wanted nothing to do with the logistics of the operation.

When I insisted that I couldn't just sleep on the road, when I told him that the only way that I could bring him back the horse was with a suitable resting place, he got out of the car. For a moment I feared that he would assault me again, but instead he reached deep into the trunk of his beat-up Škoda and produced a crowbar.