A Horse’s Head

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He came tumbling down the stairs head over heels cursing as his skull collided with each angled joining of riser and tread, wincing whenever a new step rushed up to meet him, and thinking all the while How dare he do this to me, a good old friend like me?

He was a lanky man of thirty-nine, needing a haircut, wearing a rumpled brown suit and a raincoat that had once been white, falling down the stairs with all the grace of a loose bundle of sticks, lurching and hurtling and banging every bone in his body. Oh you will pay for this, he thought, you will most certainly pay for this.

“And estay out!” a voice called from the top of the steps.

He could not believe he had reached the landing, everything still hurt as much as it had while he was falling. He got up and dusted off first the knees of his trousers and then the sleeves of his raincoat and then he picked up his battered fedora, which had preceded him down the staircase with perhaps even less grace, and rubbed the elbow of his coat across the hat and then set it on his head at what he assumed was a jaunty angle. It was while he was putting on his hat that he discovered his forehead was bleeding, which was really no small wonder, considering the number of steps he had hit on his descent. He thought it supremely rude of the proprietor of the place, a Puerto Rican gentleman named Hijo, which meant son (and he could guess son of what), to have thrown him down the stairs simply because he’d asked for a fifty-dollar loan. He wished he had half the money he had spent in Hijo’s place over the past ten years, make that a quarter of the money, and then to be hustled out the door and hurled down the stairs.

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