At first it was only the Old English faculty so no one paid much notice but soon enough it was the Compositionists and then the Modernists and finally Contemporary Fiction, with their LGBTQIA Comics Studies and African American Disability Poetics. The horse heads were speckled and maned and dark and spotted.

No one knew the names for types of horses or even if they did, they stopped speaking in faculty meetings except for the department head whose head was still the department head’s head in his square: thick rimmed glasses, close beard. The rest of the faculty wrote only in the chat: neigh. Except for the rhetorician who thought himself clever: nay.

Brown and speckled horses galloped into lecture halls to talk about on Dickens to 300 students who hadn’t done the reading. A white horse struggled for a protracted amount of time with the PowerPoint and gave up. A horse with a thick braid down his mane led a discussion section on Chaucer while students dozed off in the back. A miniature horse stood on its back legs to convey its excitement about Sula and students got briefly excited. A fraternity tried to wrangle a cranky medievalist and slap a saddle onto her broad, spotted back. There was outrage and protest.

Janitorial staff got angry about all the manure. The environmental studies faculty made the case for fertilizer. The janitorial staff reminded the environmental studies faculty that the janitorial staff already began every day on campus at 8am. If the environmental studies faculty wanted to make fertilizer, perhaps they could saunter in sometime before their 11am seminar on Tuesdays.

Soon, students began reading David Copperfield, understanding for the first time it wasn’t about the magician. The environmental studies faculty started waking with the backyard chickens to gather poop, occasionally catching sight of the medievalist galloping across the broad fraternity lawn, a t-shirt with Greek letter slung over one ear, a shirtless, drunk boy on her back, ashamed to be happy but happy.