Chapter 1: HorselessTo be horseless when you are a girl who loves horses is not a good thing to be. It creates no end of trouble. I should know. I’ve been horseless most all my life. Horseless when the sun came up. Horseless when the sun went down.
I was horseless at five. Horseless at eight. And last summer, when I was twelve, I would have gone right on being horseless if my plan hadn’t worked.
I call it my plan, but it was more like a miracle. That’s why I have to write it down. Because maybe if I write it down, it will take its place in recorded history and not go away. I wonder how many dreams stop being true, just up and disappear, because no one ever thought to write them down. Well, I just can’t take that chance.
So here I sit on my bed, pen in hand and boots on, just exactly like I was last spring when it all began. I always have my boots on, even when I sleep. My mom calls me a cowboy, making the sign as if she’s shooting two pistols from her hips.
I don’t mind, because I am a cowboy, and not a cowgirl. That just isn’t what I am. And it’s important to call yourself what you are, just like it’s important to write down the things you want to keep. It’s so important that it’s worth making an oath out of it, only the third oath I’ve ever taken. So here it goes:
I, Nash Eliza West, a cowboy, do solemnly swear that I will write down my story until it has all been told. Hopefully, by doing so, I will ward off history getting any big ideas and burying what has already come to pass.
What happened to me last summer should never be forgotten. It’s as good a story as any I’ve ever read in a book.
Chapter 2: April Fool It all began April Fool’s Night.
I was up late conjuring in my usual position—boots on and book open on my knees. Perched on my bed, I was staring out my window at the Smoke County Airfield and Small Engine Shop behind our house.
If you’d been there you’d have sworn it was the dead of winter. There was snow on the airstrip, and a hump of moon turned the snow silver.
I’ve had lots of practice staring out my window. When I was only six years old, the summer after we first moved to Smoke County, Pennsylvania, I poured my fury at leaving Chicago into shoving my bed across the room. I shoved it inch by inch until I jammed it so tight under the windowsill it was stuck for good. Even my dad couldn’t make it budge.
I wanted my new room to feel like the old one. Back in Chicago, I’d sit on my bed in front of the window and wait for Benny to appear in the almost identical window across the alley. Benny is my cousin and was practically my sister. Well, until she wasn’t.
We sat there every night in the light of our windows and talked, or rather signed, to each other across the alley. Benny is Deaf like my parents, and I’m hearing, but since I grew up signing and talking out loud, to me it’s all just talking.
For at least a year after we moved, I imagined Benny coming on a plane. I’d see it flying through the night sky, its wingtips flashing. Then it would land. I imagined so hard, I could practically see Benny hopping out and waving like mad.
Or sometimes I pictured her arriving on horseback. First, there was just the empty field, then a rush of hooves, and there she was again. It was so real in my mind that I’d wake up the next morning and glance out my window just to check. But I was still and always Bennyless. And eventually, I stopped thinking Benny would come.
But I never stopped imagining horses.
Often it was a horse from whatever book I was reading. A black stallion or cow horse or Chincoteague pony. And once, after Mr. Clyde at the Lamplight Gently Used Bookstore found me an old horse encyclopedia, I managed to conjure one of those horses that looks like it’s made out of gold.
Anyway, like I said, it was April Fool’s Night. There was snow on the ground, and I was sitting in front of my window as usual, trying to conjure a horse. And I was sitting there feeling like an honest‑to‑goodness April fool, because nothing at all was coming to me. All I could see was snow and sky.
But in the end, my efforts paid off. For it was that very night that I first saw the miracle, rearing up and shimmering like a ghost on the airstrip.
Not the miracle itself, mind you, the possibility of miracle. The first hint that my horseless state might finally come to an end.
Copyright © 2026 by Amy Alznauer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
