I remember sitting in the living room with my father, exercising his mind with the kind of questions you would present to a small child. He resembled one then. Alzheimer’s had wasted him away.
“What’s your favorite animal?” I asked.
“Caballo,” he said.
“Did you have one as a boy?”
“Sí.”
“What was its name?”
“Caballo.”
I laughed harder than I had in a while. His mouth wrinkled into a gentle smile, beneath the glassy eyes of a waking dreamer. He would be dead a few hours later.
Reading through Aaron Gwyn’s “The Cannibal Owl” made me think of my dad again. Clocking in at just 66 pages, it is a beautiful novella inspired by the true story of Levi English, who ran away from home as a boy to Texas, where he lived among the Comanche for a time.
Gwyn’s writing is cinematic and elegiac, a panegyric for a different time, a different way of life. The tale he tells is one of loss, love, and revenge. It’s also deeply informed by knowledge of the ways of the Lords of the Southern Plains, whose prowess on horseback is nearly peerless in history.
If you hate plot spoilers, I recommend reading it before listening. Though just talking about it doesn’t do the quality of Gwyn’s work justice.
We also discussed his new short story in Panoptica, “Last of the Cowboys.”
You can grab a copy of “The Cannibal Owl” from Belle Point Press or Amazon.
