My Winnipeg (2007) 74% 5★

– The bridge, manufactured some 100 years ago…by the Vulcan Iron Works of London…was originally destined for Egypt, where it was to span the Nile. But a mistake in specs made the fit with that river impossible…and the bridge was sold at a bargain price… to bargain-crazy Winnipeg. The bridge has not adjusted well to its always strapped foster home…and it often turns in its sleep…when it is possibly dreaming of its lush and joyous originally intended home…and pops a girder out of place.

– A fire in the paddocks, started when a squirrel…scorched itself on a power cable. The horses panicked, frightened…wildly fleeing from the flames. One last race for their lives…out into that cruel snap of cold. No other way to escape the flames but to cross the Red River. Swimming in the current. Swimming. Fighting the current…that current clogging with jagged chunks of freeze-up. The ice takes on heft. Deadliness. Horribly, everything clogs. Both horse and ice clog together. An ice-and-horse jam piles and paralyzes…locks, locks each animal in place…by its panicked, bulging neck, by its frenzied head. The heads stay this way for the whole winter five months at the Forks…like I I knights on a vast white chessboard. A great public spectacle. We grow used to the sadness…simply incorporate it into our days. Soon the Holly Snowshoe Club embarks on weekly jaunts out to the horse heads…and holds little jamborees there. Winter strollers visit the heads frequently…often on romantic rambles. Lovers gather to sit among or even on the frozen heads for picnics…
or to spoon beneath the moonlit dome of our city. The horse heads are always frozen…in those same transports of animal panic…an abandonment reading unambiguously to the young lovers of Winnipeg. The city enjoys a tremendous baby boom the following autumn. Humans born of horses.