Halloween 3: The End of the World

Vampires aren't scary, really. They've become too suave and world-weary to be ravenous killing machines. Zombies never were scary, except for maybe "The Serpent and the Rainbow." Werewolves only frighten me if I have to housebreak them.

But nuclear holocaust? It was scary even before that incredible dream sequence in "T2."


I'm always attracted to the dark side, but "The Horse" is dark for a reason. Japan is the first and — so far — only post-apocalyptic society. It's no wonder Japanese culture seems so weird to us. The image of the tortured flayed horse makes the loss of human life far grosser and more shocking.

The Horse

Philip Levine

for Ichiro Kawamoto, humanitarian, electrician, & survivor of Hiroshima

They spoke of the horse alive   
without skin, naked, hairless,   
without eyes and ears, searching   
for the stableboy’s caress.   
Shoot it, someone said, but they   
let him go on colliding with   
tattered walls, butting his long   
skull to pulp, finding no path   
where iron fences corkscrewed in   
the street and bicycles turned   
like question marks.
                              Some fled and
some sat down. The river burned   
all that day and into the
night, the stones sighed a moment   
and were still, and the shadow   
of a man’s hand entered
a leaf.
           The white horse never   
returned, and later they found   
the stable boy, his back crushed   
by a hoof, his mouth opened   
around a cry that no one heard.

They spoke of the horse again   
and again; their mouths opened   
like the gills of a fish caught   
above water.
                  Mountain flowers   
burst from the red clay walls, and   
they said a new life was here.
Raw grass sprouted from the cobbles   
like hair from a deafened ear.
The horse would never return.

There had been no horse. I could   
tell from the way they walked   
testing the ground for some cold   
that the rage had gone out of   
their bones in one mad dance.