Come the White Stallions

Derek’s eyes misted over as they were prone to do in his last days and the recurring image of the white stallions galloping at him from the convergence line of the narrow forest track was before him again. The image had recurred periodically throughout his long, dull life, at times the only thing that set his heart racing and his emotions jangling on what could have been if he’d made other choices. It had been a comfortable life, and how so he had come to despise that word—Gemütlichkeit—comfort. Smug mediocrity. The goal of his father. The goal he’d let his father impose on him.

And what was the outcome? He had been gemütlich—so comfortable that it had numbed and smothered him. It still was smothering him. He would died of suffocation from it. One thing was clear—he would soon die. His father couldn’t buy his son’s destiny from that, just as his father hadn’t been able to accumulate enough, been dull enough, to build a barrier against his own death.

Derek had to go back fifty years for any sense of when he’d actually been alive, happy, fulfilled. And when he thought on this time—the brief time with Michel—was when the dreams of the white stallions came to him.

The dreams had changed, though. They were becoming more ominous. The expression of the stallions’ faces—their snorted tufts of breath, the foaming at the mouths, the wild, malevolent blazing of their eyes—became more pronounced as they reached him and parted on each side, with each succeeding dream seeming to come closer to him as the brushed by. And over the last year—since he had received a death sentence—the black-clad figures astride the stallions were forming greater substance with each succeeding imagining. The men in black. Swinging shining swords, swishing them ever closer to his head as they roared past him.