There will never be another Seabiscuit, not because he was built by God, as the papers said, as the trainers claimed, but because the universe allows only so much improbability. Or, better: The horsemen in their leisure speak of things that cannot happen, that simply won’t. Or the story about the potbellied paint named Gingersnap who made such fast friends with an Angus bull that the two could not be separated and had to travel cheek by jowl in a special trailer widened for them. Another, in which a redhaired boy from Montreal rode with his broken leg taped to the saddle girth. At the lounge one afternoon she hears of a claiming race some years before, when a six‑year‑old broke a Del Mar track record and promptly dropped dead. Muriel loves best those days when there are no races and the horsemen tell stories of fiasco and anomaly. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife and their dog. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow in fiction. The following is excerpted from Shannon Pufahl's novel.
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