Making Light:  Open thread 24 ::: June 18, 2004, 07:25 PM

Teresa, on May 21, in "Taking your own bad advice":

  Oh.  Right.  "Hugged it like a brother."  It's from a novel called Red
  Sky at Morning, in the episode about the dead horse.

  Now someone who has a copy to hand is going to tell me I've
  misremembered it.

Thanks, Teresa.  I owe you for pointing me at this good read.  And
you're not misremembering.  From the Perennial Classics edition, pp.
52-53:

  ...When my chest hit the horse about midships it made a noise
  like an orange being squeezed, and the horse's ribs began a slow
  caving-in movement.  I pushed myself away and my hand went through
  his skin, surprising me so I took a deep breath without meaning to.

  Later, still pale and weak-kneed, I told Marcia and Steenie that
  they didn't need to help me walk and they let go of my arms and
  stood back.

  "A real sport," Steenie said.  "Just threw himself on that horse and
  hugged him like a brother."

  "I didn't realize until now that we've been playing the game wrong
  all this time," Marcia said.  "It doesn't mean a thing until you
  crawl right into the horse."

My only quibble with the relevance to Bush/Rumsfeld is that the
latter's correspondence to a decomposing horse is not admidships.