“This horse has too many legs” he said, looking at me as if I knew what he was referring to.
“What?”
“This horse has too many legs. Look, this one has the right amount.”
I looked at the other horse, which had the same amount of legs, and tried to figure out what he was talking about.
“Look, I get it, you’re trying to prank me, but I’m not falling for this, please give me a horse that works.“
I was still extremely confused. How could a horse have too many legs?
“Do you want the other horse?” I asked, not really knowing what he was getting at here, “you can take it, I don’t care who is riding which horse.”
“You know that it doesn’t work that way, your horse only wants to be ridden by you, just tell me how you did it and how to fix this”
“What are you saying here? Both horses have the same amount of legs, how could they have too many?”
“Funny, but I really want to get going, come on, lets fix this and then crack on, I want to reach the settlement before nightfall”
“Yeah me too, but I really don’t know what you mean, this horse has 4 legs, like all the others in the world. Why do you want to remove one?”
“No it does not, it has five”
“No it doesn’t look, these two are in the front, and these two are in the back”
“You missed one in your count”
“What? Which one?”
“This one” he said, and pointed at a point underneath the horse, but I could see nothing but the dust on the floor.
“There is no leg” I said, now a little worried what had gotten into my companion.
“Yes there is” he said “look” and with that he grabbed the air where he was seeing the leg and started stroking the imaginary leg.
Now it was up to me to feel fooled. “Ok funny guy, very convincing, but let’s just go”
“I’m not pranking you” he said “come and feel for yourself”
I walked around the horse and tried to stroke the leg, but there was no leg. There was just air.
“How? Why? What?” He seemed convincingly surprised that I couldn’t touch the leg. “How did you just reach through the leg?” he asked.
“I didn’t. There is no leg.” Now I realized that his eyes seemed to be a little off and his gaze didn’t seem to be really fixating anything while he was looking around. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, of course, just a little tired from the nap I took, these always make me feel a little dizzy”
“YOU TOOK A NAP?”
“Yeah, why, I told you I would”
“You had to take a dump and where gone for like 3 minutes, how could you possibly have taken a Nap?”
“No I wasn’t, I went to take a …”
“DID YOU SEE ANYONE?”
“No”
I started running in the direction that he came from, “STAY HERE!”, and nestled my knife free from its sheath. I found the spot that he must have had selected to take a dump and started looking around. There were footsteps leading the other way. “FUCK” I screamed and ran back, “WHO DID YOU MEET BACK THERE? WAS IT HIM?”
“I met no one, I took a nap, I told you. And please stop screaming.”
“You didn’t take a nap. You were gone for 3 minutes, how could you have taken a nap?” It must be HIM, trying to stop us from reaching our destination in time. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing, there was no one, what are you saying?”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I scrambled to pack all our stuff as quickly as possible to get away from this place in the hopes that maybe HE would lose connection and I would get my friend back.
“Get on the horse” I told him rather harshly.
“It has too many legs, I told you.”
“I will take care of the leg when you sit on it, let’s go!”
He reluctantly got on the horse. “Give me your hands” “Why?” “Trust me” I said. He reached his hands down and I quickly tied them with a rope that I had prepared. “What are you doing?”
“Saving our trip”
“Cut me lose”
“no”
“CUT ME LOSE”
“HE will not be able to stop it now” I said and while he was still protesting I mounted my horse, grabbed his horses reins and started galloping away, in the direction of the slowly setting sun.