She did: as the tune crescendoed, a single green balloon drifted down over the dancers. The single green balloon had fallen from a breach in the rigging above the TV box, one of those many secret places. Both green and white balloons were stored separately above the stage in separate cages to be loosed over the victors. The single green balloon had broken free. The commentators said nothing. The single green balloon drifted down to rising music.

“But death is more important,” Maul said.

The sorrel’s shoe was almost done.

Ella had left the kitchen as the balloon fell to the shiny dance floor, lilted benign in the dancers’ breeze. She’d knelt down on Grannie’s old braided rug. She’d shoved the dog away as the green balloon slipped under the green girl’s skirt and the green man kicked it, thereby scuttling the team’s rhythm entirely, thereby losing balance, falling, losing.

Steel succumbed. The sorrel trotted around Saul’s lead, testing the new shoe.

“It’s too small,” Maul said. “I’m sorry to tell you.”

“Think,” Ella said.

“Think?” He shrugged. “Open your goddamned eyes.”

Mule Thought #5 (the red jenny tells a story and is interrupted thrice): The Foal and Coyotes. Once, at night before her escape, they stood together in the dark listening to the red jenny when that woman-thief came in and rummaged the baggage, and then the filthy boy-thief came in and did identical rummaging, and though thirty equine eyes (counting horses) were watching both thieves, each intruding-thief believed no one saw them. A terrible insult, yes, the red jenny mulled, to count us all as “zero,” not incensed, but still interrupting herself to say so, to make this point. Then the boy skulked away in his silly uniform and rags and the red jenny tried to recover the story, attempted to bring the story to its most grievous climax: the arrival of the coyotes. A cruel drooling, yipping pack bunching in close then closer around a poor foal forgotten by the herd, but she was interrupted a second time:

We have sixty hooves between us, nickered the buckskin jenny, countervailing the red jenny’s story with her own version of the same complaint about their recent insult in the dark, the three narratives running together, as they do, mules being no strangers to hybridization. We could’ve pulverized them each in turn.

They scrummed and kicked, then came speeches, the third interruption.

The horses too! coughed the tall mule with one gorgeous unearthly eye on the horses. But horses never miss a chance to humiliate themselves. The tall mule was tired and sick and lame but still pressed on daily and would die doing so, just like that “Queen” in the billowy getup.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, nickered the buckskin jenny. Go for the knees, the face, the longest slenderest bones.

They never did hear what happened to the foal.

Dusk.