What am I doing? I am beating a dead horse. Because this horse was supposed to take me to a woman. And now that it is dead, I am beating it’s hooves off.

When you live on a prairie, like me, you do the same things a lot. For instance, Pop is now old enough to involuntarily piss his only pair of pants, so I go down to the river and wash them out. And aunt Harriet asks me everyday when I am going to find myself a girl. I tell her that Little Debbie is the only girl in town. She is blonde, bowl-legged, and twelve. But news has it that there is going to be a woman passing by here within the year, so until then, I am taking the only horse I got, and jump on it like I am in a potato sack race.

Not everything has been the same old though! No! There actually has been some exciting things going on here in our little town of Follett. Like remember when I told you about father’s piss pants? And the river I would wash them in? Well one day that river dried up and now I haven’t seen it in about 4 months. It was a lot of fun seeing those fish jump! For days of fun, I would grab the little ribbons my sister Bess would use for her curly head, tie them around my favorite fish, and every day I would come back to see which fish had traveled the farthest. None of the fish were there though. I like to think that they used their tiny little fins and flew away, but after seeing a lot of ribbons and bones laying around, I assume that they were mangled and eaten by the same grizzly bear that killed my mother and my now dead horse.

Funny story! At first I didn’t know if my horse was actually dead, but after I saw it being thrown around like a dog with a doll, I soon realized he was without a shadow of a doubt dead. And since he was my only horse, I am going to beat him because my town has insisted that I “be fruitful and multiply” with Little Debbie.

After two days, I decided to take a rest from beating my dead horse and went to find fire wood so I could stay warm while beating my dead horse. Since I had no horse, I also didn’t need my wagon, so I chopped it up. But Pop thought it was awfully funny to get up and piss on it while laughing in a similar manner to that of a Pawnee injun war-cry which allowed me to practice my counting on how many days it took for the wood to dry. And Pop’s laughing keeps me on my toes as it makes me more readily aware that while I am sleeping like a rock, the injuns could scalp my head, strip me naked and put arrows in my ass so I could look just like a turkey. This is exciting as I would like to think I would do a much better job being a human turkey than a human being. But until then, I have the opportunity to compare the stench of my dead horse to the easy-going scent of my rotting leg. I couldn’t tell you why my leg is rotting, but what I can tell you is I am beating this damn horse with a cast iron skillet.

“You never know unless you try.” Pop used to tell me this all the time before he started pissing his pants. But boy was he right! I never knew what it was like to beat a dead horse until I tried to beat a dead horse, and now all I want to do is beat this dead horse. Now that I have been beating this dead horse, I realized there is more than one way to beat a dead horse. At first I just began to kick it’s ass then I punched it on the head. And then I made a game out of it where I would throw two rocks, and whatever side the rocks landed on decided on where and how I would beat this dead horse. I could not stop laughing and having so much fun, which had been great because I had no idea when was the last time I have laughed.

I knew I was made to do something great but I never thought it would be this. At first I thought my horse was supposed to help me find a woman, but in actuality it helped me find myself. If you were to ask people I knew in the East what I would be doing now, they probably would say I would be dead. But little do they know, I am actually the most alive I have ever been.