Jenz Fifth NaNo Post

“Okay, this is getting a little ridiculous,” I said to Bill as we stood in front of City Hall,
watching the menagerie. The electric neon Pegasus was the most interesting of the lot. It didn’t exactly fly, quite, but it did flap its wings and leap once in a while, carrying it over the backs of the cows and the small stallions and the giant warhorses. The warhorses, especially, were a little ridiculous. I mean they had to be ten feet high at the shoulder, and not even Clydesdales get that big. Or that coppery green.

“They been comin’ in all morning,” Bill told me. “First the one with the wings. Then the two big ones. Then the smaller ones. I think they came from farther away.”

“They did,” I said. “I’m pretty sure they came from the front of the Marriott on
Stemmons Freeway.”

Bob tilted his head and looked at me sideways. “You think so?”

“I’m pretty sure. I go past them every Wednesday to see my shri–er, I go that way a lot.” I squinted at the ten-footers. “You ever hang around outside the Trammel Crow building, Bill?”

“Not much,” Bill said. “Security’s pretty good over there.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was just thinking those looked like the horses from out front.”

Bill looked at me. Looked at the big horses. Looked back at me. “You know
somethin’,” he said, “I think them horses mighta just walked down here from the Trammel Crow building.”

“That’s what I was saying,” I said. And then I thought of something. “Bill. Let’s go see
if they’re still there.”

“If what’s still where?”

I rolled my eyes. “If the horses are still in front of the Trammel Crow building.”

“You go ‘head,” Bill said. “I’ll stay here ‘n keep watch.”

So I got back into my car, drove up Ervay and over to Pearl, and kept going until I hit
Ross. Sure enough. In front of the Trammel Crow building, where two large statues of horses normally hung out, there were two large pedestals where there should have been two large statues of horses. And one security guard on his cell phone, loud enough for me to hear even inside the car; “No! I’m telling you, somebody stole the horses! Yes! Those horses! Yes! Both of them! No! I didn’t see anybody out here with a goddamned crane and flatbed truck! Look, come see for yourself if you don’t believe me!”

Knowing I shouldn’t, I pulled the car over to the corner, as close as I could get to where the guy was yelling into his cell phone. “Hey!” I bellowed, in that tone of voice that brought absolute silence to a meeting of overexcited junior accountants.

The guy looked up. “What?”

“Your horses are down at City Hall. In the front yard. Under my window.” I didn’t need
to add the “under my window” part, but I couldn’t resist.

“Oh.” The guard blinked a few times. Then, back to his cell phone, “Never mind, Jack. I got a line on where they wandered off to.” Pause. “No, I didn’t mean that in the literal sense. I meant that–never mind. I’ll call you back.”

I was about as involved as I wanted to be on this one, so I rolled up the window and drove back to City Hall. The media was already arriving, staking out camps around the fountain. Bill, who had somehow established himself as master of ceremonies, was steering them this way and that. Some police were stringing a much larger string of Crime Scene Do Not Cross tape around the new herd of animals (I’ve heard of animals) that now consisted of the longhorns, the stallions and the Really Big Horses (I could swear one of them was ten feet tall.) The neon-colored Pegasus, in an apparent agony of impropriety, had sort of frozen next to a tree in hopes of not
being noticed. People noticed. You can’t be flashing electric blue and red around here and not be noticed, unless of course you’re a Dallas police officer.

I went up to my office, pondering What This All Could Mean. Loki never warned me
that when I re-ordered all reality, I might inadvertently bring a bunch of statues to life. Was I supposed to do something about this? Because honestly, I was a bit baffled. And it would have been a bit arrogant of me to assume I was the center of the universe, wouldn’t it? Just because all the statues were standing under my window staring directly up at me was no reason to believe any of it had anything to do with me. Furthermore, it was probably just a coincidence. Just because I could remember the Time Before, when George Bush was President of the United States (that one always gave Pandora the giggles; she said it was something about absolute proof of the Peter Principle, which I didn’t get, and that it was probably just as well I was in this world, where he was Commissioner of Baseball, which I certainly did) didn’t mean any of this had anything to do with me. I mean, who was I, anyway? Just some mousy secondary auditor who’d been kidnapped by the gods, done battle with the
powers of Asgard in the form of the Dallas City Council, died and lived to tell about it, and oh yeah, saved all of reality from imminent implosion. Pish. It had ended happily. I had my nice city job, my adorable wife, my fat little house cat, my President DiCaprio. So what if there were a bunch of statues roaming City Hall. It had nothing to do with me.

Thus reassured, I opened my office door. And there, in my office chair, was a short
dwarflike being with hooves and a tail, playing Tetris on my office computer. “About time you got here,” he said. “I’m about to break ten million. No! Don’t say anything! Break my concentration and I’ll curse you for all eternity!”