Next to me I know is a horse, but I cannot see it. See it as you do, that is. To me a horse is a creature of a thick black line that adopts a gradient from head to hoof. At the head are grays like wet gravel or like frost on a morning sidewalk. At the hoof are blacks like the eye of space. I know my horse is tired because its grays hang low – it’s head is bowed. Black flickers up and down its strong straight form – it is exploring the soil below it.

I take a sigh on my cigarette and hold it between me and the horse. The thick black line that is my horse is screened by the trailing flat of the smoke from my mouth. You out there understand forward and backward, concepts I cannot fathom but have come to accept from observing you observing I. I, who has two eyes, my horse, who has one. To know my horse is to know its plane of existence. Moving past or around my horse isn’t a conceivable motion, I just move away from or towards it. Out there in your space stretched and fattened, you walk above, below, under, and on top of horses. You encase your horse along a dimension that is senseless to my horse and me. I don’t envy you.

Why does my horse bear a saddle as if requesting to be sat on? Why do stirrups dangle, seeking to be held taught? It’s easy to look at worlds with fewer degrees and to think them constrained, to project oneself inside and envision a claustrophobic nightmare. Constraints, though, are the pillars of the creative. In you’re world you must haul buckets full of constraints around just to navigate a meandering causeway. Why do you sit on the saddle as if it was designed for your rear? Why do you fight the stirrups with your round toes as if they require your guidance? If the power’s above gifted me with all the strength of the universe for a day, I would use that power to gather all the horses in worlds of three, four, and eight dimensions and guide them to the comfort of my land of two. But, alas, I am a simple soldier on a simple plane and can only stare through my imagination at the appalling sadism in your bloated land. Now, move on you ghoul of extraneous planes. Fly along directions unsettling as ghostly channels and leave me to smoke in my wood with my horse.