The Night Mare

By Erica Plouffe Lazure

The winner of the Cycle 2 Magic Monday Contest

My horse is a dream horse. My dream horse is named Satin and she's the color of cotton candy and when she neighs she sounds like Taylor Swift and Pink and Pegasus all rolled into one. Her hoofprints make heart shapes in the sand when we ride on the beach, and last month she gave birth to a little foal, who is also pink and who also neighs pretty pop songs and who eats cupcakes and spaghetti for dinner and lives in a pink canopy stable with a princess net sash, and I keep a special gold hairbrush just for her when we go riding on the beach because she loves it when I plait her long gold tail into a million little braids, and one day, when the sand filled with hoofhearts, the baby'”we called her Baby'”sprouted wings and turned a pale shimmering blue and rose up, neighing her musical neigh and frolicking the way a foal with wings might frolic if it could airdance, gallop on the sea, sip the froth of a thousand waves, until Baby whinnied high like a song at Christmas and a whale leapt up and gulped her down, into the deep blue of the sea, and now nobody will ever believe I owned a little blue winged horse, and all I have now is Satin and all Satin has is me, so we come to the beach nightly and wait for Baby's return, for her little hoofheart imprints on the sand.


Erica Plouffe Lazure is the author of a flash fiction chapbook, Heard Around Town, and her short fiction has appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the Greensboro Review, Meridian, The Southeast Review, American Short Fiction, Litro, Flashthe International Short-Short Story Magazine,  Smokelong  Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches and lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.