Midnight Chase by Kim Malinowski

Ichabod urged Gunpowder into the shadowed road.

Clouds captured the moon,

plunged the path into tangled darkness.

Was there a whinny from over the hill?

Some groan from the thicket?

Ichabod Ichabod the wind carried his name.

Faster and faster he rode,

whipped by branches,

scared by creaks and frog groans,

and the whisper

Ichabod Ichabod Ichabod Crane.

A twig cracked too close, and the horse spooked.

The two galloped straight onto the bridge

to the Old Dutch Church and the graveyard beside it.

The moon reappeared and gasped a dark horse,

the rider broad and headless but carrying

his torn head, the eyes open and fierce.

Ichabod urged Gunpowder forward.

Strangers had died in this forest,

had fallen over the bridge,

and who was he to think he wouldn’t share their fate?

His hymns and books wouldn’t protect him.

A mad chase began, straight from the old wives’ stories.

He passed by the brook as the saddle slid off,

reached the gravestones as the Horseman overtook him.

The headless rider did not disappear like in stories.

Instead, he catapulted his head, and then the pumpkin,

the pumpkin, slammed to the ground,

the bits hung to trees and the bridge but the rubbing limbs

only whispered Ichabod, Ichabod, Ichabod Crane.

And no one ever saw him again.

Kim Malinowski is the author of Home, Phantom Reflection, and Buffy’s House of Mirrors. She is an avocational archeologist and editor of the ASM Ink, the newsletter of the Archeological Society of Maryland. She is the poetry editor and managing editor of The Fairy Tale Magazine. She writes because the alternative is unthinkable.