The Last Horse in Town
Daddy! Daddy! Come and play!
The Last Horse in Town
Childhood Calls
“Daddy! Daddy! Come and play!”
“Come see my horse! I made it myself!”
“No, my son, I have work. Another day.”
“But please, please! I’ll show you my new toy, I built it myself!”
“I don’t have time. Understand!”
“…Okay…”
And the child grew older.
And older.
No more calling: “Daddy, Daddy…”
From time to time, the tired father asked himself, feeling guilty somewhere inside, like a scratching on the back that he could not reach:
“Why doesn’t Arin come to ask me anything anymore?”
Then he thought: It’s better this way. More time for me and for being with Vanessa, their stepmother.
The Hollow Family
Arin and Sol, his sister, were abandoned to the wilderness of the internet jungle.
No one ever held them in their arms.
No one ever listened to their stories.
No one ever knew them by heart.
Their family was as hollow as their last name: The Hollows.
Once, children had ponies or fed horses oats in the stable.
Arin and Sol had no horses, no hay, and no stable.
They had only glowing screens, cheap distractions, sweet and empty like white sugar, useless and poisonous.
Arin and Sol grew older and older.
They never really knew their father.
And they were glad not to know their stepmother.
Mutually glad, I can say.
Vanessa Hollow
Vanessa was an influencer, parading every minute of her pitiful life on YouTube to thousands and thousands of strangers living by proxy in a fantasy world instead of living their genuine life.
She was the prototype of the hollow modern woman, without any depth, only masks. Inside, her heart shrank beyond the point of visibility. Maybe, if somebody took a microscope, they could find a ghost of a soul inside her.
Everything was appearance. Obsessing over the incidence angle of the light on her sophisticated foie gras menu, while Sol was eating cereal as always in the dark corner of the kitchen. Yoga and meditation were not tools to better her soul but to sharpen her teeth when hunting for followers. She lived through her image.
She ignored Sol as you ignore a beggar on the street, happy to pass by as fast as possible.
She ignored Sol as she ignored her Soul as a matter of fact.
She never had time for Sol when she became a teenager.
She never explained the first “girl tips.”
Never showed her how to brush her hair.
Never helped her with her style, even though style was her job.
Never spoke to her about relationships.
Never empowered her as a girl, as a mother should.
Sol’s Invisibility
Sol learned early that invisibility was survival.
When she got her first period, she bled through her school uniform and walked home in shame, legs pressed together.
Vanessa was filming a “Morning Routine” video in the bathroom, ring light blazing.
“I need help,” Sol whispered.
“Shh! I’m recording.”
Sol found the pads herself. Like she figured out everything else.
When other girls talked about their mothers teaching them makeup, showing them how to walk in heels, and explaining what boys really wanted, Sol nodded along, lying.
She learned from YouTube tutorials, same as everyone else in her generation. But the other girls had mothers to ask questions when the tutorials ended. Sol had only the comments section.
Arin’s Desert
Arin fared no better.
His father let the internet teach him about women.
Porn became his school.
No one ever inspired pride in him.
No one taught him honor.
No one showed him how to be brave.
Instead, he consumed the ersatz of the Tate brothers, believing falsely that being a man means being a jerk, especially to women.
That was the forest where the children were abandoned.
Their parents were “too occupied.”
Occupied with Netflix.
Occupied chatting with their “friends” whom they never met in reality.
Occupied hurrying up in traffic to go nowhere and do nothing.
Occupied drinking in front of La Liga or the NHL.
That was their true occupation.
Selling their lives cheap with the trade they made:
time with a screen instead of time raising their children.
Echo Riders
And so Arin and Sol wandered deeper into the convenient dopamine trap of the internet.
Like horses abandoned in a burning stable, they kicked at the walls, but no one came to open the doors.
Amid the glowing chaos, Sol stumbled upon an old app, Echo Riders. They liked to play it to simulate horse riding through the green countryside they never saw in their forest of cars and concrete.
At first, it seemed a hollow escape.
But Arin, a self-taught coder, found a glitch, turning its echo feature into a recorder to spy on others for a change.
They could now access sounds from users, like putting an ear to the neighbor’s wall to hear the motive of a dispute.
That was their unique window into authenticity.
Perfect Products of Society
They became the perfect products of society.
Perfect products of consumerism.
Ideal consumers.
Obese, dependent on brands, swallowing any lie from the media, nourished by cultural products designed to lower their IQ and any sense of critical thinking.
Actors without merit.
Singers without depth.
Nobodies raised as idols.
They were taught to pass indifferently by suffering.
Numbed in front of a crying child, which is just unwanted noise.
Heartless in front of a person looking for help, someone else’s problem, they learned to think.
Brainless, without any genuine interest in deep diving into anything, too complex; I prefer Love Island instead.
Why think when you can watch other people’s drama?
They were the perfect products of our age.
Over-indulging in shiny, poisonous illusions.
Living a life of delusion.
Sol was indoctrinated with the video-chat fallacy that it is fine to make money out of selling your intimacy, and with the “be like a Kardashian” superficial culture from her teenage years.
She was made to think that her value was just in her body, ready for male consumption. Resembling Vanessa, her stepmother, merely a physical form with a dark heart.
Educated by the motto: “Be beautiful, and stay quiet!”
Arin was indoctrinated to believe he must be “like Elon,” cold, efficient, alien, a money machine.
Because in this world, only bling counts.
Shiny objects.
Bragging about success.
That is what life is.
Or so they were told.
And so the horses inside them, their innocence, their nobility, their strength, were slaughtered quietly.
Life’s Cruel School
The children became adults.
Life taught them what the home never did.
Suffering.
Twenty-five years of it.
Abusive relationships.
Divorce.
Obesity and diabetes.
Insomnia.
Despair.
Antidepressants.
Drugs.
Grayness every single day, they were crushed under the neons, steel, and concrete of their inhuman towns.
This was their school.
The Soul Awakens
And yet, the soul does not die so easily.
In misery they picked up books, Paulo Coelho, perhaps a prayer book.
They stopped swallowing MSNBC and CNN, and searched for truth elsewhere.
Slowly, their vision returned.
For the heart is always alive.
Only the connection to it is lost.
But never forever.
You can always find your way back to your inner light, if only you make silence and look within.
The Witch Unmasked
Trying to repair their trauma, the children unmasked Vanessa using their app.
They captured her disdainful rants about her followers, her voice echoing through the app’s stables like a crazy witch.
They revealed her disdain for her followers.
They trapped her with her own words.
A thirty-second recording showed her “true” face, and the backlash destroyed her.
Now Vanessa can still be seen, wandering among the gloomy addicts of the town, digging through garbage for leftover fries, sleeping on cardboard in the cold.
Father and Son
And then…
Slowly, steadily, Arin resolved to see his father again.
To show him he had become a man, without his help.
Perhaps the most vengeful stance of all:
To show your father you succeeded by yourself.
You did not need him.
Not now.
Not anymore.
Yes, you needed him back then.
But not now.
Now it is too late.
And so Arin stood before him, living proof that the father had failed as a parent, and as a man.
Proof that he had chosen cowardice.
Chosen the witch, Vanessa, instead of the children who truly needed him.
That choice was not mere weakness.
It was blood treason.
The Last Horse
Now, 125 years after 1900, we have around 2 percent of the horses we once had.
They were replaced by cars.
Will humans be replaced by AI and digital products?
Then I showed my Daddy my horse and said:
“Look Daddy! This is the horse I wanted to show you 40 years ago!
Look closely!
It might be like me, the last horse in town.”
Arin turned to leave the room.
“Arin, wait!”
“I succeeded, Dad. Despite you. Not because of you.”
The door closed behind him.
The wooden horse stood alone on the desk, its carved eyes staring at the empty doorway, as if it too were the last horse in town.