KEEP PLANNING – James Callan

The carousel at the carnival carried forty-eight handcrafted horses. Beyond their gnashing teeth and ugly gums, down the shaft of their moaning throats, a mechanism with a tube to a bottle churned the soapy water inside to discharge what looked like froth on the muzzle of overworked mounts. They rolled their wide eyes in great pain or terrible fear—a quirk of the designer to make the animals look as if they heeded the whip; a lashing sound added to the music amid the revolutions of the grand and gaudy machine. Of the forty-eight steeds, there were twenty-two mares, sixteen stallions, and ten young colts. Of the forty-eight steeds, all of them had been broken, each one with the heavy hand and brutal boot of a grouchy gaucho. When it comes to wooden horses, steeds of stone, there is no carrot or the stick. There is the hammer and the chisel, the waterboarding and the brand. The art of pain perfected by the cruelty of a master sadist, suffering captured in a carnival ride by the skill of a master craftsman. The mares were made from hardwood maple, with malachite eyes and hooves hewn from hickory. They were mothers in the late stages of gestation, with milk trailing from their udders with every orbit of the machine. Swollen at their sides, heavy in the womb, they harbored dwarves and contortionists, little men and athletic freaks who fit without difficulty or bent their bodies into pretzels so they could ride from the inside. Sleeping or eating, indulging in the perversity that they nestled between the skirts or pantaloons of mothers or their children, the carneys smiled in the belly of the beast, unbeknownst to the patrons who rode them round and round. The stallions were sculpted from soapstone, with amber eyes centered by ancient mosquito pupils. Fossilized tree sap echoed eons in their marmalade gaze; an all-seeing insect that once drank the blood of a brontosaurus. The stallions were vampires by night, sarcophagi by day. In the hollow drum of their ribcage, tucked behind their robust shoulders, deep in the cavern between their barrel and flank, they housed the dismembered bodies of those who had seen too much—the visitors who gleaned one too many secrets, or simply those whom the boss wished dead. The colts were carved by carnies, softwoods like cedar and spruce. Their eyeballs were eight balls taken from bars and billiards across the Bible Belt, used in ritual stonings—a sadistic spectator sport—before being fitted to the sad skulls of the young wooden horses. Obscenely large, like an alien’s gaze staring down from above, its huge head hazy against the unfathomable glow, the operating table, the helpless child strapped upon it, reflected in the twin black pools above a mucusy slit that must be the starman’s nose, eyes like oil-stained oceans, and in them, as clear as bad television, its laser scalpel splitting a sternum like a diamond falchion striking overripe fruit. Compound optics as big as burger buns; deranged demonic dragonfly eyes, their pupils flashing with white paint and a black number 8. With more mystery at their center than the core of Saturn, more rage than the Eye of Jupiter, each colt’s cold stare swirled with ominous omens and putrid portents. Soap-sud foam, with a hint of red food coloring (just like a genuine dying horse!).The young steeds were fashioned to be smaller, making them suitable for little children.

*** James Callan lives and writes in Aotearoa New Zealand. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Apocalypse Confidential, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, trampset, and elsewhere. His newest collection, Fish Out of Water, is available from Anxiety Press. 31 October 2026