A Horse Named Special Take

150 words about beauty

A red stallion, iridescent in the sunlight, stands on thick rubber mats. His coat shines like sequined cinnamon. Raw flesh, days old and drying, dangles from a wound on his chest the size of a shovel blade.

I lanced the abscess, says a tall, rawboned cowboy—proud, somehow, of the carnage.

The cowboy squints through a microscope at a sample of Special Tak…