Infinite Possibilities Outside the Screen by Josh Denslow

A couple of people in the office think he might be a centaur. Is that possible? I say, because what else can I say after a statement like that. Well only if the bottom half of his body is a horse.

When this submission came in, I happened to have Josh’s novel, Super Normal, sitting in my tbr pile. I can’t actually now remember which I read first, but getting to them both more or less back-to-back was a specific kind of treat I highly recommend.

This story is so good. I’ve said versions of this about a number of these stories, but the voice here is strong. So fun, so engaging — it immediately grabbed me and pulled me in and I just felt wholly rapt by the story, the entire, never totally sure where it might go next, always delighted by where it did. And then Aubrey Hirsch’s art! What a treat to get to publish and share this.

—Aaron Burch

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My girlfriend has a new coworker, and she suddenly has a lot more meetings. I’ve passed by while her new coworker’s head has filled her computer monitor, and I don’t blame her for wanting to look. He’s an incredible testament to the astonishing heights the human face can achieve. While in the meantime, I just look like me.

“Your new coworker has set a new beauty benchmark,” I say as we eat sushi I picked up at her favorite restaurant. We’re on the couch with matching plates propped on our laps and our two cats sit in between us.

“I guess,” my girlfriend says. “A couple of people in the office think he might be a centaur.”

“Is that possible?” I say, because what else can I say after a statement like that.

“Well only if the bottom half of his body is a horse.” She uses chopsticks for her sushi, and I use a fork. She delicately lifts a piece of tuna, and my heart is eradicated. I want to ask her to marry me, but I’m not a centaur. Never will be.

“No one has ever seen him in person,” my girlfriend continues.

“Stands to reason then,” I say.

“What do you mean?” she says, and I hear this little annoyance in her voice that I’ve never noticed before.

“Well that he can be anything,” I say. “There are infinite possibilities of what’s going on outside his camera view until someone sees him. He could also have the body of a koala bear or an egret.”

“Those aren’t real things,” she says and goes back to her sushi, the conversation over.

I cut into a California roll, and it falls apart.

*

The next morning while my girlfriend spends longer than her usual amount of time getting ready for a meeting, I go online to look up if centaurs are real. I don’t purport to know everything in this world, and who am I to shut down the possibility of a man with a horse body? Not like the way my girlfriend shut down my koala bear and egret bodies suggestion.

I discover a raging debate in message boards where a lot of seemingly lonely people insist that centaurs exist while a lot of other seemingly lonely people insist that they don’t. The one thing they all seem to agree on is that real or not, a centaur would be sweet and courteous and what can only be described as horrifically well-endowed.

Just last night after my girlfriend went to bed, not long after we finished our sushi, I was looking at my penis and found it overwhelmingly underwhelming. I tried to see it as my girlfriend would see it, like from the point of view of whether she’d be okay only seeing my penis forever, and it looked so small and disappointing in the bathroom lighting that I made sure not to wake her when I crawled into bed.

My girlfriend’s computer dings across the room. I close my centaur research and clear my search history. My girlfriend doesn’t seem to have heard her computer and the bathroom door remains closed, mysterious clinking sounds reverberating on the other side.

I cross to her computer and feel a pressure in my chest. I’m doing something I know is wrong. I shouldn’t look. But I want to look. I’ve never once invaded her privacy. But what if this is the moment where I could skip future heartbreak. Like here I am hoping to marry her one day, but maybe she’s already moving on. While this debate rages in my head, I sit down and move the mouse to turn on the monitor.

And there it is. A message from Bradley Hoof: You ready?

Why did his last name have to be Hoof? And ready for what?

In my heightened privacy invasion mode, I sense a shift behind the bathroom door. I quickly put my girlfriend’s computer to sleep and walk into the kitchen to eat three bowls of cereal and think about Bradley Hoof.

My girlfriend looks so beautiful when she emerges from the bathroom that my disappointing penis shifts in my boxers. She turns her computer monitor away from me so I can no longer see it. And she puts on headphones.

I go for a fourth bowl of cereal, the whole time envisioning it collecting in the fat cells of my midsection like a bunched-up sock around an ankle.

When Bradley Hoof leaves the house after spending the day talking to my girlfriend on the internet, he has perfect posture and a pressed shirt. And he trots. His hooves sing on the pavement. You ready? he says to every woman he passes.

Or at least, I assume so.

*

I’m currently in between jobs, but my grandfather died last year and left me some money, and now my main goal in life is to make this lack of job thing official. Most afternoons I pretend to go to the local coffee shop and fill out job applications, but really, I go to the movies. If you want to watch a movie every day, you will very quickly run out of options. Many days, I will watch something for the second or third time and there’s something strangely gratifying about it. I feel safe enveloped by scenes in which I know every outcome. I know what everyone is going to say and the consequence of every action. There are no surprises. It’s like the movie is embracing me and cooing to me and telling me that everything is going to turn out fine.

But today, after invading my girlfriend’s privacy, I can’t stop thinking about Bradley Hoof. I don’t want to watch a movie; I want to prove my girlfriend wrong. I want to track down her new coworker and show her that he is not a centaur. He can’t offer her anything more than what I’m offering her. Then I can finally ask her to marry me.

I wish I’d seen this exact movie before and already knew how it ended.

So for once I actually go to the coffee shop, and I pull out my laptop and start searching for Bradley Hoof.

I find five of them in my town. Knowing there are five people named Bradley Hoof drains even more of my virility. What if they all look like him? What if they are all centaurs?

I decide not to contemplate what that would do to my psyche and instead gather addresses.

The first is only a few blocks away. When I arrive at his building, I walk right up to his door. I feel pretty bold. I knock before I can talk myself out of it.

A short, balding guy answers.

“Are you Bradley Hoof?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“No, you’re not,” I say and walk away.

I pick up our favorite sushi again and return home to find my girlfriend hunched over a notebook at the kitchen table. A strand of her hair has come loose and waves across her forehead like a clock. As if letting me know time is running out to man up and move us along to the next phase in our relationship. But the Bradley Hoof impedance has to be overcome first.

“You’re staring at me while holding raw fish?” my girlfriend says.

“I suppose I am.”

She closes her notebook and looks at me. “I love that sushi place, but we’re at five days in a row now. Have you been cheating on me or something?”

This weird half-laugh and half-choke sound comes out of my mouth. I almost drop the sushi.

“I was just kidding,” she says and takes the bag from me. She puts her hand on my shoulder for a brief moment as she passes, and it reminds me how little intimacy we’ve had in the last few weeks. I need to stop staring at my penis after she goes to bed and instead try to put it to use. We can always turn out the lights.

“Last day of sushi,” I say and grab our plates before sitting next to her on the couch. Both of our cats appear as if from some alternate dimension and sit in the space between us. I’m not a huge fan of cats but I have never once said those words out loud. Instead, I let their fur collect on my clothes and sometimes inexplicably in a very annoying way around my nose and under my eyes. Then I have to try to remove it by using my hand like one of those skill cranes at the supermarket checkout where children try to extract toys from a bin.

“How is everything at work going?” I ask after taking my first bite.

“Fine. I’ve had so many meetings lately. My eyes are aching.”

I know I shouldn’t ask but I do it anyway. “Why did you turn your monitor away.”

She sighs. “Truthfully, I found it kind of weird the way you were talking about my new coworker. You seemed fixated on him.”

In an expert move, my girlfriend has turned it around to me. It isn’t that she is hiding anything, it’s that I have been weird about him. The only thing I can do is apologize and assure her I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, there is no way I would find out his name and try to track down where he lives to confront him. That’s what a crazy person would do.

“Oh sorry,” I say. “I don’t even remember what he looks like now. I was probably just trying to make you laugh.”

*

Before Bradley Hoof returns home after an evening of equine debauchery, he trots silently to the street in front of our apartment and looks up at our bedroom window. The wind lightly tousles his perfectly coifed hair, and his animal magnetism wakes my girlfriend from a deep slumber. The window is strangely lit, like she’s in that Dracula movie that Francis Ford Coppola directed. I’m prone in the bed, unable to move to stop her.

Or at least, this feels very possible. Or likely?

art by Aubrey Hirsch

The next day, I leave before my girlfriend starts work. We did not have sex last night, mostly because my girlfriend laughed at me when I asked if she wanted to have sex and she said that if we have to start asking each other, then we’re doing something wrong. Instead of going to the movies or to the coffee shop, I go directly to the second address on my Bradley Hoof list. I end up having to take two buses and it takes up most of my morning. I stare out the window the whole time wondering if I’ll catch sight of a centaur out there amongst the regular bipedal people going about their day. It is better than thinking about my girlfriend in a meeting with Bradley Hoof.

When I arrive at the duplex, I know immediately it isn’t the right one. I feel inside that my Bradley Hoof doesn’t live here. I ring the bell with barely any trepidation and wait. Finally a meek man shuffles to the door, his skin nearly translucent. I almost laugh.

“Bradley Hoof?” I say.

He nods the way a meek man with translucent skin would if he was scared to find a stranger at his door.

“Most definitely, you are not,” I say. “Not even close.”

*

By modifying my return route slightly, I am able to pass by the third option and the moment I see it I realize why the other two didn’t feel right. This one is a low-slung house in a more residential part of town. But the gate out front has a wide arch, and there is one of those double doors leading into the house that both swing open almost like a barn. Like a horse could walk in.

I leave immediately in terror.

*

On the way home, I can’t stop myself. I buy more sushi. My girlfriend looks disappointed when I walk in which of course isn’t exactly what I’m going for.

“I got different rolls,” I say.

She closes her computer and takes the bag from me but this time she doesn’t touch my arm and my skin prickles in the spot where we’d connected yesterday. As if my hair follicles are calling out to her.

I get the plates and we sit in our normal spots and the cats appear, and I know everything about this is wrong.

“The problem is you don’t know what my second favorite restaurant is,” my girlfriend says finally. “You feel bad about not having a job and you’re attempting grand romantic gestures but you stall out at picking up sushi and using the word sex when you aren´t talking about filling out a government form.”

“What is your second favorite restaurant?”

“I don’t know. I don’t actually catalogue things that way. I’m just saying. You don’t know it. You should know it, not me.” She pops a piece of sushi into her mouth. “But I love this new roll you got. So good. Also if you want to fuck my brains out later, I have some availability.”

I nod, even as my disappointing penis sends me messages that he can’t possibly reach her brains.

The next day I leave early again to eliminate the last two Bradley Hoofs. The first one lives in a massive apartment building on the seventeenth floor and there is no way a centaur could fit in the elevator or the stairwell. But I have to be sure. When he answers the door at the end of a dim hallway, he’s just a regular guy. Nondescript. Not worthy of his name.

“Someone told me you were Bradley Hoof,” I say.

“Correct,” he says.

“You wish,” I say and then turn to leave quickly but realize the hallway is long and now this guy is watching me as I walk as fast as I can to the elevator and hit the button.

He stares at me as I try to wait for the elevator more casually than I have ever waited for an elevator in my life.

“What exactly are you getting out of this exchange?” the man calls down the hallway.

I figure I’m never going to see this guy again. “I’m trying to feel better about myself.”

“Did it work?”

“Yes. I think it did. A little.”

“At my expense?”

“Of course. It had to be you.”

The man ponders that for a moment and then goes back into his apartment and shuts the door. I think that means I won, but then the elevator never shows up and I have to walk down seventeen flights of stairs to leave.

*

Denying the reality of Bradley Hoofs has become a sort of hobby, and I find myself wishing there were more of them in my town as I approach the home of the last one. A townhome with a door too small for a centaur to fit. I knock loudly, somewhat emboldened after my experience in the apartment building. In the end, it was invigorating to walk down all those stairs.

A man with long hair answers, a beard threatening to take over his face. “Hey man. Do I know you?”

“No,” I say. “But are you Bradley Hoof?”

The man squints at me and leans forward. “You may never know the answer to that.”

“It’s a simple question,” I say, desperate to get to my favorite part.

“You think so, but really you’re talking to yourself. You want to know. Are YOU Bradley Hoof.” The man sizes me up. “And I can tell you, you don’t have what it takes to be Bradley Hoof. You lack the fortitude. You lack the insight. You lack the power. Man, you couldn’t be less Bradley Hoof if you tried.”

Other than the complete burning sensation I felt, I was also a little in awe. He was so much better at this than I was. My throat made a dry clicking sound.

“Have a good day,” he says, laughing a little. And then he’s gone.

*

I’m in no shape to return to the barn door house that most likely contains the Bradley Hoof I’m looking for. I go home without sushi. Without a second-place restaurant. Just my empty hands and my broken heart. Because if anyone knows that I’m not Bradley Hoof, it’s my girlfriend.

As I put the key in the lock, I hear her laughing. The big joyous laugh, the kind where she doubles over and slaps her leg, the one she did at a party and I instantly fell in love with her even though we’d never met.

I open the door and she immediately composes herself. She’s at the computer and I catch a brief glimpse of Bradley Hoof as I pass into the kitchen.

“My boyfriend is home,” she says, and I can’t place the tone. Is it a warning to her coworker to watch what he says? Is it to let him know why she is acting differently? Or is it disappointment? She hasn’t even made eye contact with me yet.

I go into our bedroom and I imagine what it would be like to take her hand and pull her out of her meeting and bring her here, to our bed, and into our past, when we grappled and yanked and then held each other tightly.

My heart rate quickens, my fingertips quiver. I open the bottom drawer of my dresser and open an old condom box where I stashed the ring I bought only a few weeks after we had met. It’s small but mighty. The one lone diamond grabs at all the available light in the room.

The meeting in the other room has ended. I hear my girlfriend moving around the apartment. Still clutching the ring in my hands, I kneel by the door and hold it out in front of me. My whole body shakes now. I look up expectantly, waiting for her to come in.

“I’m going out,” she calls. “Will pick up food from my second favorite restaurant.”

Then the front door closes, and I remain there on one knee until gravity begins to crush me painfully into the floor.

When Bradley Hoof picks up my girlfriend outside our apartment, she climbs onto his back like a heroine in a romance novel. The wind, of course, perfectly tousles both of their hair. I am naked and curled under a bench. My girlfriend whispers and points at my disappointing penis, and then they both joyously laugh as they ride away.

I’m left to wonder how I ended up naked under a bench in this scenario. Still seems like it could happen though. Not too far out of the realm of possibility.

*

The next day, I’m outside the barn doors. I’m ready to defeat the myth. The ring is in my pocket, pressed against my leg. Like my girlfriend is right there with me. After I see Bradley Hoof, confirm his bipedal status, I will run home and propose. There will be much yanking and pulling in the bedroom. I will then continue my job search for real. It’s a good plan that will begin the moment I press the bell.

So I press the bell.

Suddenly time stops. A bird hovers, frozen above me. A woman is half in and half out of a car across the street. The sound is sucked from the world. The only thing happening in the world is me, just me, waiting for Bradley Hoof to answer.

The intercom crackles to life. “Hello? Is someone there?”

“It’s me. I’m here,” I say.

A pause.

“Yes, it’s you,” he says.

“I needed to meet you.”

“I saw you too, outside the screen, during our meetings.” More crackling from the intercom. “I wanted to ask your name. I thought about tracking you down too.”

The ring shifts in my pocket, and I no longer feel it pressing against my leg.

“Are you a centaur?” I ask.

“I will let you in,” he says. “You will see.”

The door begins to buzz loudly as if it has come to life. I hesitate. If I go in, everything will change, I can feel it.

But if I go in, I’ll finally know.

I’ll finally know.

STORY:
Josh Denslow is the author of the collection Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books) and the novel Super Normal (Stillhouse Press). Some recent stories have appeared in The Commuter, Okay Donkey. Pithead Chapel, and The Rumpus. He is the Email Marketing Manager for Bookshop.org, and he has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade. He currently lives in Barcelona.

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ART:
Aubrey Hirsch is a writer and comics artist. You can find her work in the Washington Post, Vox, TIME, and elsewhere. You can follow her on instagram: @aubreyhirsch.   

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Josh about this story!

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