When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

3. My Palomino Stallion

My horse was a palomino stallion. A palomino had a golden coat and a creamy mane and tail, just like Roy Rogers’ horse, Trigger. A stallion was . . . I didn’t have a clue what a stallion was, but I’d heard the word said with such reverence that it must have been a horse of the very best kind. And that’s exactly what the broom was that I was dragging down the sidewalk between my legs, a palomino stallion.

I galloped along the sidewalk in front of our little house. Our house sat in a row of other similar houses, some as small as ours, others larger with a second story. The two-story houses had two eye-like windows in the upper story and frowning porches below with banisters for teeth. From across the street the houses watched me ride.