THIS IS NOT MY FIRST rodeo. It’s not my second, my seventeenth, nor my eight thousand and twenty-third. I’ve been to more rodeos than God has made cowboys. And these rodeos, they never stop. For I’ve become unstuck in time, and wake up to a different rodeo every day. Or maybe it’s all the same rodeo, and all the same day. Some days, the bull is named Mr. Bojangles, Frenzy, or El Señor. Some days the bull is named Earthquake, The Bailiff, Paddycake, or Death, Destroyer of Worlds. Some days the bull is named Timothée Chalamet if He Were a Bull. I do not know if the bulls are also stuck in time, if this temporal revolving door is what’s forcing steam out of their nostrils and making them so volcanically angry. I do not know what bulls dream of, if they dream at all. I imagine, perhaps, they dream of freedom, of the open plains, of romping with cows far from the meddlings of humans and our controlling ways. Perhaps they dream of lightness, of softness, of hot air balloon rides or swimming in the tranquil warm currents of a pristine Caribbean surf. My dreams are populated with rodeo clowns, keeping me safely out of the path of disgruntled bulls, and disquieting thoughts. My skin feels like rawhide. My breath reeks of Skoal. I have a wife and kids, but they didn’t follow me through the time-warp rodeo wormhole, and probably wouldn’t recognize me even if they had. They know nothing about my double life. They have never seen me sport my twenty-gallon Stetson nor my size-and-a-half-too-tight Wranglers; back home, before the Schism opened, rodeo was something I was trying to contain within the bullpen of my brain, a covert bucking and kicking of the heart. They do not know how long I’ve longed for this. They do not see me saunter down from the bleachers to test my skills at calf roping. They do not see me dragged along the dirt infield when I try and fail to wrestle an ornery steer to the ground. They cannot feel the physical pain I endure for the sake of a fantasy I just can’t quit. They wouldn’t understand my lack of fear, because in my civilian life I was cautious as a shivery kitten. At the rodeo, I am a different kind of hombre: wild, feral, willing to throw my body into anything. At the rodeo, I proudly tell people my real name is Cash McCoy. My real name is not Cash McCoy (I have long since forgotten what it is). At the rodeo, I’ve done things I’d scarcely imagined possible. I have successfully, for instance, ridden a bull named Bad Attitude for precisely 4.71 seconds, before being tossed like a ragdoll against the hard edge of the cattle pen. And every time I get unseated, my bones ache like crackling death—then heal overnight via some sort of Rocky Mountain voodoo the lords of time have never quite revealed to me. This is not my first rodeo. I do not know if it will be my last. None of us can know such things, I reckon. I’m perched precariously atop a bull called Commander Smackdown. I can feel the urgency of his breathing, in perfect sync with my own. I can feel our hearts—his big as a basketball—beating in unison. It’s like we’re reading off the same sheet music, he and I. We understand each other’s fears, desires, our deepest bovine dreams. The gate opens, and (for a few milliseconds, at least) I’m confident I could ride forever. •   



Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been previously anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best Microfiction 2025 & 2026.

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