“Walk” by Mina Austin / Post Road Magazine
- Short Story Shoutout
- Jun 9
- 4 min read
What we've got here is failure to communicate.
How often do you think about theme?
It’s a thorny subject for writers. Some consider the thought of it the first step on the road to preachiness. Others think it vital.
I’m in the second camp. What are you writing about, after all? Even that question could do with some dissection. There’s the specific subject you’re addressing—in Mina Austin’s “Walk” (3,200 words) in Post Road Magazine, that’s working to understand a horse’s affliction so that it can be cured. But there’s also something bigger; the larger issue or idea that your specific subject gestures toward, aka your theme.
To my experience, fully realized themes are best deployed as apparitions. They float like ghosts through great works. We catch fleeting glimpses of them, just enough to feel their presence, but not so much that we feel the heavy hand of message.
According to Hollywood lore, movie producer Sam Goldwyn, upon being told by a thirsty screenwriter that “You have a chance here to bring a great message to the people”, replied “From Western Union you get messages. From me you get pictures.”
Seems to me there’s a great story waiting to be written about Western Union, as long as it has nothing to do with messaging, thematically.
There are quite a few ghosts floating through “Walk,” all of them fascinating and moving, but thematically that ghost is communication; how hard it can be to establish it between people, never mind between people and animals. How hard it is to really listen.
Chad is the name of the horse in question and right from the story’s start, the narrator (Chad’s handler) is face-to-face with the irascible veterinarian Dr. Morris, a tall, imposing man who presents immediately as angry. The narrator’s response to that anger is “saying nothing, having arrived after all this time at the art of nonresponse, so we pass from what isn’t an exchange to the horse himself.”
The issue of communication is then with us throughout. Chad can’t speak (insert your Mr. Ed joke here, you know you want to…), so we’re left to infer what we can from the possibility of Chad throwing himself on the “ground to roll, a horse’s try at self-management of pain,” or with the worrying fact of his uneaten grain, or the “small mountain of shavings out in the run-in shed,” which imply that Chad is using his forefoot like a backhoe to obsessively dig at the floor. “Pain drives him to it. Because he can’t speak, Dr. Morris explained of Chad once, with unusual intuitive flare.”
Then there is the narrator’s employee Emilio, a Mexican for whom English is a second language. Emilio “reports[…]in the shorthand we both use, verbs hamstrung by tense and agreement when switching each to the other’s language, Chad no finish grain.” When that dynamic is paired with Dr. Morris’ terse, dismissive pronouncements, “what Emilio hears are sounds that shatter in the air, undecodable.”
(Apologies, I’m on a cheesy Youtube-clip bender today).
So how will Chad’s malady be diagnosed, never mind treated, in the face of this seemingly inescapable lack of communication? This is the story’s engine.
Austin keeps us perched between Dr. Morris’ acumen (along with the capability, and fallibility, of the nearby large-animal hospital) and her narrator’s hard-earned wisdom gleaned from presiding over a succession of horses that have suffered on their way to having “gone down.” First among those fallen horses is the ironically named “Wise Talk,” whose dark history clouds the idea of what the large-animal hospital can offer.
We toggle back and forth then, between promising developments and relapses until another miscommunication leads to the overfeeding of grain to Chad, which might have fatal implications. I won’t blow the ending for you, but I will say that Austin leaves us with a firm pronouncement from Chad at the close. A crystal clear response to the idea of “going down”, a quotable the horse straight-up “said”, according to our narrator.
Wise Talk from Chad.
Everything above would be enough to recommend this fantastic story, but Austin gives us the additional gift of outstanding prose. I’ve noted before in these posts that I’m not a fan of flowery language (they’re often a diversion from immersion, a “bump” out of story). But much of what’s composed here walks a tightrope between lilting lyricism and meaty poetry that will disarm even the most hardcore purple-prose-phobics.
I’m going to string a few of them out here because they’re the best advertising possible for Mina Austin’s work:
“The air was summer thick. Above us, stars looked sparse and random, delivered by slingshot.”
“Fall around us was in full tilt, lances out at tree tips that held yellow banners tearing up and off in a south wind: the browned yellow leaves of willow oaks flying by; the broadness of hickory leaves, gold. And the larches in the swampy meadow hanging on in shrill mustard with some green needles still tight as tight.”
“In early November, heavy mists gathered halfway up a rise of the pasture to the south like a long, ghostly hedgerow. Saturn, if I had it right, moved away from a comradely spot to the side of the moon and slipped farther westward. In that direction, just beyond the fence that closed off the biggest pasture, the mist found a different home. It rolled itself up along the ground to something the size of big loops of wire on top of a penitentiary wall.”
Testify.
Post Road Magazine was founded in New York City in 1999, but other than that fact and a listing of the names of the writers and editors that power them, their work alone (including “Walk”) defines them. A good sampling of that work is available for reading via their website, along with access to their issues for purchase.
Post Road is currently closed for submissions, but use that link to check in on their status and submit early as submissions are capped.
Many thanks to Mina Austin and Post Road Magazine for the trot, canter and gallop of “Walk.”
~*~
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