Cover Photo: photo by princessrica/flickr
photo by princessrica/flickr

Breaking the Horse

God has given you a special task, they said. Save your mother’s soul.

The Evangelical Christian Homeschooling Group in Alexandria Township, New Jersey, took a lot of field trips. We went to the dairy farm, the chocolate factory, and every museum in the surrounding area. Once, my parents woke me up in what felt like the middle of the night with hushed, excited voices, explaining that this was a field trip, and drove us to a remote house in the woods, where a man my dad had met through work made miniature horses in his basement. I still remember the lamp-lit glow of his subterranean workshop. He handled the horses that he had created with an incredible gentleness, as if the magic they possessed was beyond even his understanding.

Kerry Cullen's fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, One Teen Story, Monkeybicycle, and more. She is an editorial assistant at Henry Holt and she earned her MFA at Columbia University. She is currently revising a novel about sex, god, and Christian rock.