“Five Horses” by Tyler Hein
Tyler Hein is a fiction and screenwriter from Edmonton, Alberta. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. He received a 2017 StoryHive television grant and was shortlisted for the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. His first novel, The End of the World, is due for release in 2023.
Author Foreword:
The bringers of the apocalypse are present, yet they mostly act as obstacles or distractions on the narrator's way to work. He's become so grinded down by reality under capitalism that he barely recognizes he's living in the end times. Additionally, the horsemen are aligned with modern realities to further highlight how our world allows and accepts these harbingers.
Five Horses
Pestilence was directing traffic by flinging arrows at the heels of slow walkers along my morning commute. Bless her. The world is less of a drag since everyone started walking about fifteen percent quicker for fear of loitering too long in raw air. I follow her on social, mainly because of her horse. She’s always posing with him, his decaying body, its partially visible skeleton, the grim smile of exposed skull.
Pestilence was the first of the four to appear, a few years back now. Honestly, I can’t really remember the time before. So much has happened since her arrival that it’s reduced my memory to swirling fragments of light and shadow like a faulty camera. Pestilence is a bit of a nuisance, but she's endurable. Hell, many of us welcomed her. She thinned out traffic, and the empty roads gave us all a place to put our loneliness. Now, War. War is a different story.
It’s ridiculous what we allow him to get away with, especially once he usurped leadership of the police. Now he personally investigates and clears any wrongdoing by him and his department. I guess violence built into the system never counts as violence so he’s free to tramp around the neighbourhood with a fiery sword hacking down anyone who gets too near or pushes too hard against the margins. The last few months has seen him embark on a tour of the talk-show circuit. Sometimes I fall asleep listening to War moan about his problems with addictions, latent trauma, trouble at home, the stress of the job, how if we’d all just follow the rules it wouldn’t need to be this way. It’s plainly obvious he’s trying to rebrand his image because he hasn’t been able to get laid (which has only made him more brutal by the way). He has his diehards, but I can’t stand the guy. He’s the reason I’m even going into work today.
My manager called me ranting about how we were understaffed. Apparently War bisected Devon for calling him ‘maidenless’ at a protest outside the police department. I’ll miss the guy, he was good craic, but he should have known better than to poke at power. Even if Devon wasn’t publicly shredded there would have been another reason. It’s always something with somebody. Nobody wants to work. And why would they? I don’t, that’s for sure. But ever since Famine moved into my building the price of rent and groceries shot into the stratosphere like a Bezos rocket, so the superiors know I’ll come whenever they call because I can barely pay the weekly interest premiums on my student loans. Most everyone I know is stuck in this limbo, of working double to go half. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, having a whole generation realize en masse that we’re dogs stuck chasing a ball that was never thrown.
I’m told I’m lucky since I even have a job. I’ve worked at the same restaurant for nearly ten years. The walls are covered in pictures of old Presidents and most of the staff are nice in a paid sort-of-way. About a year ago it was bought by Disney, repackaged as part of their Disney+ lifestyle subscription, and now taking selfies inside it is considered culturally necessary, so now it’s filled with a mix of the new gentry (celebrities, YouTube critics, social media mavens) and the dregs (nurses, teachers, ugly children).
My manager was waiting at front of house. I apologized profusely for not realizing I might be needed. He made sure to wipe his soles on the carpet before raising each foot closer to my lips when I bent to kiss his shoes. He’s one of the good ones. On Sundays he pretends not to see me sneaking bites from the guest’s unfinished plates before I toss the leftovers into the incinerator. Nobody eats for free on in the House of Mouse.
Death was already seated in my section, munching on his second bowl of complimentary bread. I used to be star-struck by him because, like, whoa, he’s Death, but now not so much. He’s always here, I swear. Seeing Death doesn’t strike the same awe it once did, and he’s aware that something about being up close to him elicits a gentle pity. He looked so paltry alone in the booth, breadcrumbs rock sliding down his chest. Just another lonely old man yearning for carriage back to his more virile past, to when people would fawn and beg and sing the praises of big bad Death and his super scary infinite nothing. I wasn’t in a stroking sort of mood. What’s supposed to be such a raw deal about him anyway? What end is he even the harbinger of? The four of them came down, and I stayed clocking into work. It puts the end into perspective a bit, don’t you think?
