Ten Thousand Horses

The newness of everything around him—and the strangeness of it all—made it seem to Matt that the volume button had been turned up on all his senses. Only one week had passed since he’d hung up the phone with David, one short week and then a few hours of flight. But the life he’d led seemed so distant now, the world he left a gray and shadowy place.

Matt’s flight that morning to Colorado Springs had been smooth, and halfway across the small parking lot from the airport to his rental car, he had stopped, propped his wheeled suitcase against a post, and looked around. The closeness of the sky amazed him, as did its blueness and its size. He took a breath, a big breath, and then another.

He’d driven slowly, a tourist to this new world, a child on ...