An Excerpt from “Casting Grand Titans” In Shoot the Horses First by Leah Angstman
Leah Angstman’s debut collection of short histories Shoot the Horses First, releases February 23rd with Kernpunkt Press. Author Ryan Ridge says “She is the literary heir to Shelby Foote, Willa Cather, and E. L. Doctorow. Get off the internet and read this book!” She serves as the executive editor for Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine and is a founding Quartermaster member of the American Battlefield Trust.
Were any horses harmed in the making of these histories? You’ll have to read them to find out!!
Winner of the Shorts Award for Americana Fiction
A debut collection of genre-bending short histories and novellas spanning 16th- through early 20th-century.
Through a historian’s lens and folkloric storytelling, the pieces in SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST revel in the nuances, brutality, mythology, and tiny victories of our historical past. A launderer takes us inside the linens of the richest families in early Baltimore. A child on the Orphan Train has his teeth inspected like a horse. Civil War soldiers experience PTSD. While one woman lands on an island of the Wampanoag tribe, a woman 200 years later finds Apache in a harsh frontier. Children survive yellow fever, the desert heat, and mistaken identities; men survive severed fingers, untested medicines, and wives with obsessive compulsive disorders. Frederick Douglass’ grandson plays violin at the World’s Fair on Colored American Day, a woman with disabilities is kept hidden away like she doesn’t exist, and a botanist is denied her place in a science journal because she is female. Themes of place, war, mental illness, identity, disability, feminism, and unyielding optimism throughout harrowing desperation resurface in this collection of stories that takes us back to time immemorial, yet feels so close, and all too familiar.
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EXCERPT
By the time she made it as far as her arms would carry the heavy wooden crate, she could see the Athenian lantern of the Capitol. She set down the crate and wished she could dispense with enough coin for a carriage, but she’d have to make do. She could catch her breath for a few minutes, and still make it back in time to listen in on the natural philosophy class. She flexed her arms and hands and was about to sit on the crate for a rest, when a swash of coattails went by her, and a cane thunked on the stone walk, and the glint of light reflecting off its surface saturated her eyes. She blinked hard, and when she opened them, he had stopped and turned around to her.
Yves Jolliet clucked his tongue. “If someone doesn’t sport that box for you, you’ll miss eavesdropping on Philosophy 1.”
Agatha drew herself upright. How did he know she eavesdropped on Philosophy 1? He taught Physiological Chemistry 1 at the same hour. She opened her mouth to retort, but he laughed and threw his cane into the air, snapping it at a midsection, then collapsing it in on itself, once and again. Her brows lifted. He stuck the folded cane into his pocket and swooped to her side to lift the crate.
“Light as a paramecium. Are you to subsist on a single pea?”
“There are three individual peas, I believe,” she said. “I prefer to call them Pisum sativum, of course.”
“Three!” he laughed, carrying the box toward the university. “That shall last you a whole month.”
“Shall I report back how they fare in this drought?”
He stole a glance at her, and she made sure to be self-satisfied. His eyes remained on her too long. It wasn’t something she was accustomed to, but she felt the look morph into judgment, assessment. That was more her custom.
“You know a thing or two, don’t you,” he said, not quite a question, and not quite as if he believed it.
“Not much, really,” she said to appease him. “Not much in accordance with how much there is to know. I notice you don’t stand outside the door of Philosophy 1.”
He chuckled, “How socratic. I took philosophy at Harvard.”
“I took it at Oberlin.”
“I took it again at Heidelberg.”
“I’d take it again if they’d let me.” She eyed his tophat, its perfect ten-degree tilt. He looked so like a dandy, but distinguished. Not a fop, but not born into it, either. He had earned what he knew; she could tell it even if she didn’t already know it. “Besides, Mr. Brown is a marvelous instructor. Such a commanding voice, and he tells it so simply for those dull-witted boys.”
“Brown is a cad.”
Agatha looked off toward the trees that surrounded the shack laboratory at the back of the university. “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” she mumbled, and then came to a halt. “Dr. Jolliet—”
“Yves,” he said, turning around to her and walking backward like she’d seen him do often. “Please.”
“That’s too personal for me, Dr. Jolliet.” She walked toward him slowly. “I would like to offer you a proposal, if you are willing.”
He smirked. “I’m not in the market for a wife.”
Just then, a professor of mathematics, whose name Agatha had not yet learned, came up and smacked Yves on the shoulder. “Checkmate!” he said as if a punchline to some inside joke, and the men laughed, and Agatha stopped and watched them walk away with her crate.
She hadn’t thought she’d dislike Yves Jolliet. When she first learned they’d be sharing university space, she’d been thrilled at the knowledge. But the man thought he was clever. Fields of prairie wildflowers surrounded her, and she studied them, remarking absently on each petal, the differences in stems. She could come out here and illustrate between Ladies’ Gardening and sewing. And he was, she thought. Clever. He was. She watched him set the crate down in front of the door to her little shack, and sink with the mathematics professor into the Capitol, gregarious all the while.
PREORDER SHOOT THE HORSES FIRST HERE
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Leah Angstman is also the author of the historical novel of seventeenth-century New England, Out Front the Following Sea, available now from Regal House, and the novel of the French Revolution, Falcon in the Dive, forthcoming from Regal House in spring 2024. She serves as the executive editor for Alternating Current Press and The Coil magazine and is a founding Quartermaster member of the American Battlefield Trust.
Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Publishers Weekly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nashville Review. She’s recently been a finalist for the Laramie Book Award, Chaucer Book Award, Eric Hoffer Book Award, National Indie Excellence Award, Da Vinci Eye Award, Clue Book Award, Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, Cowles Book Prize, and Able Muse Book Award; a semifinalist for the Goethe Book Award; and longlisted for the Hillary Gravendyk Prize. This is her first collection of short stories. You can find her online at leahangstman.com and on social media as @leahangstman.
Category: On Writing
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