The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

After sixth grade let out, the bus would drop us on Crow Canyon Road, and my friends and I would stumble across the street to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee before the long, lung-searing climb up Greenridge Road. One hot spring afternoon, as I stood under the humming fluorescent lights, brain half-frozen by cherry ice and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” pouring from the store radio, two blonde sisters drifted in like mirages from a Beach Boys song. They were the Horsefault sisters—freckled, sunburned, and perilously beautiful, with high cheekbones and figures that looked imported from a drive-in double feature starring Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau.

“Wanna see our rabbit?” they asked.

Normally, my interest in rabbits was zero, caged or otherwise. But I was eleven, and the sisters had the sort of gravitational pull that makes a boy agree to anything. So I said yes.

We walked a dirt path behind the 7-Eleven, through a field glazed in golden light and peppered with horse droppings that crunched underfoot. Their farmhouse loomed ahead, half hidden behind a thicket of bushes. And there it was: the cage. A huge metal pen with its door cracked open, a thick chain dangling like a warning.

“There,” one of them said.

I peered inside. No rabbit. Just straw, shadows, and the faint smell of hay and mischief. Then came the cackling—witchlike, gleeful—as the sisters lunged, grabbing my arms and trying to shove me into the cage. It dawned on me that I was living a low-budget horror film: The Boy Who Should Have Stayed at 7-Eleven.

They tugged; I resisted. Dust rose around us like smoke as we wrestled in the grass, the air thick with sweat, laughter, and the unmistakable scent of adolescence gone rogue. Chickens screamed from a nearby coop as if alerting the countryside to my peril. Then, mid-grapple, something shifted: the danger took on a strange sweetness. The idea of being locked in that cage suddenly didn’t seem so terrifying. In fact, it sounded… educational.

But the Horsefault sisters, realizing I was enjoying this little apocalypse of innocence too much, let go. We stood, panting, brushing hay from our shirts like dazed gladiators. Without a word, they turned toward the farmhouse, and I trudged home, confused, awakened, and very much alive.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. My body was staging a mutiny.

“Master Po,” I whispered to the ceiling. “I seem to have a new affliction. It’s keeping me up.”

“Your body,” came his serene voice, “is prey to desire. Do not despair. You are becoming one with nature. You should be happy.”

“Happy? I’m miserable.”

“To hide your desire gives it power,” he said.

“Believe me, it’s not hidden.”

“Excellent. Desire is both a blessing and a burden.”

“What’s the good news?”

“It means you’re alive and growing.”

“And the bad news?”

“It never ends.”

I frowned at the ceiling. “Master Po?”

“Yes, Grasshopper?”

“I wish I hadn’t fought them off. I wish I were in that cage right now.”

“It’s too late. What’s done is done. Learn from it. In time you’ll understand your desire instead of fearing it.”

“What if there’s no future for me in that department?”

“You’re eleven,” he said dryly. “Your future is nothing but departments.”

“Peace seems impossible.”

“Remember, Grasshopper,” he said, fading into the dark, “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

“Then I must be radioactive,” I muttered, staring at the ceiling, waiting for peace—or the Horsefault sisters—to return.