He Was Planning To Clean Up

[G. S. Carnivals]

"There once was a race horse named Ascrobius. He was a gelding (ouch) who ran with a good class of other horses but had never won a race. There was also a young bettor, let’s call him Timmy, who watched Ascrobius week in and week out as he lost race after race. Timmy liked the name Ascrobius. It sounded creepy to him. He wanted to bet on Ascrobius, but didn’t want to lose his money. It seemed to Timmy that the horse wasn’t running up to his potential and that the evil rat bastard trainer was telling the jockey to hold him back. One day Timmy was at the race track, having told his boss that he was afflicted with a terrible intestinal disease. He had seen in the newspaper that morning that Ascrobius was listed to run. He also noticed that the horse had been raised in class. That’s funny, Timmy thought to himself. Why would they run Ascrobius against tougher company when he had never won against lesser horses? Before the race in which Ascrobius was scheduled to run, Timmy scrutinized the tote board as if he were looking for a sign from the gods of horse racing. Then he saw it. While the odds on Ascrobius were naturally quite high, for just a moment they suddenly dipped before rising again. Somebody had just placed a large wager on Ascrobius, and Timmy knew exactly who it was—that evil rat bastard trainer who had held back Ascrobius for so many races. He was planning to clean up. With only a minute to post time, Timmy ran to the nearest teller’s window and bet Ascrobius to win. (He also keyed him in the trifecta, wheeled him in the exacta, and played him in the early pick-three.) Sure enough, Ascrobius wired the field and won by ten lengths, making the other horses in the race look like pigs scuttling behind him. Timmy had won so much money he hardly knew what to do with it. So he tried to parlay what he cashed on Ascrobius by betting it all on a horse named Dr. Locrian. Timmy liked that name. It sounded creepy to him. But Dr. Locrian was not a very fast horse."

Thomas Ligotti - "The Story of Ascrobius"

[Ascrobius]

And cleaned up he did...

[Spotbowserfido2]

Thank you for placing this piece in the Quotation Forum, G. S. Any day that we receive a new metafictional fable from Mr. Ligotti is a special day indeed!

[Ascrobius]

I agree. Sometimes you have to take whatever you get.

[Corman]

Anything new from Ligotti's pen is cause for celebration, even a brief paragraph of prose.