“Well?” Bounder said, grinning gleefully. “Is it creepy, or what?”

It was so dark in the barn I had to stand right next to the thing to make it out. The slits in the rafters cut the moonlight in stripes and laid them across it. It looked like a sawhorse wrapped in felt, but I could feel hinges underneath, and thick rubber hoses.

I sneezed in the dusty air. “What is it?”

He hit my shoulder, hard. “What does it look like, idiot?” He pointed at two long, stiff strips of buckram sticking up from a ball on one end. They looked like ears.

I squinted. They were ears. Donkey ears. Suddenly I saw the thing was like one of those dummy ponies in the clothing stores, but strange, all flat lines and sharp angles.

The shoulders were the strangest of all. The front legs were long wooden slats that stuck up way past the shoulders. There was a flat piece across its back, connected to each leg by a hinge. I thought maybe the parts sticking out above the shoulder were wings, but they were too skinny, and anyway I was pretty sure it was supposed to be a donkey. A hose ran up the inside of one leg slat to its end, then across to the other leg and down to the floor.

“Why’d you think he never opens the windows?” Bounder said. “He’d die if anypony saw this. Which is why we’re gonna splash a photo of him with it across the front page of the school paper.”

“I don’t think it’s the kinda thing for a school newspaper,” I said.

Bounder narrowed his eyes at me. I flinched.

“Come on,” he said. “He’ll hafta leave town! Or do you like being yelled at every time you speak louder’n a whisper? Every time a ball bounces on his side of the street?”

Well, I sure didn’t. I didn’t know how bad being caught with a thing like that was, or why, but I guessed it couldn’t be worse than that grumpy old donkey deserved. Nopony would miss him.

“He’s a pain in the ass,” Bounder said.

“Shut up. You said that like three times already.”

“In the ass,” he said again.

“Wait. How’re you gonna get him in the picture?”

Outside, I heard a door slam.

Bounder dashed across the floor and disappeared. I stood staring at where he’d vanished.

“Under here, idiot!” he hissed.

I blinked, and saw Bounder crouched in an even darker spot under a wall cabinet. I stuffed myself under it a moment before I heard a barn door slide open and saw the old donkey’s shadow stretched across the floor. Even there his wig looked ridiculous.

He shut the door, and everything was dark. I heard him clomp towards us. Beside me, I felt Bounder lift the camera.

There was a snap, and a humming started. Something moved in the strips of moonlight. After a minute, the old donkey started moaning, like maybe he was in pain.

Bounder did his ugly gargle-snigger, real quiet, and it gave me a sick feeling. I knew I should call out and warn the old donkey, but I was afraid. Maybe that’s why I sneezed.

Then the flash blinded me, and I heard Bounder scrambling out and running, and me too. I couldn’t find the latch in the dark, but somehow the door was open and we were outside. I ran straight home, stumbling in the dark and startling at shadows.

The next day I passed the barn on my way to school. Its doors were open. I didn’t see anything inside.

I was jumpy all day at school, expecting the teacher’s hooves to grab me every time he walked past. Afterwards I met Bounder in the school’s darkroom.

“This’ll be good,” he said, swishing the film under the developing fluid in the room’s red light.

There were two shapes in the picture, facing each other. Soon I could tell the real donkey from the fake. The fake donkey’s forelegs were lifted up and lying across the real one’s shoulders. The hose between its shoulders that had sagged before was full of air, pushing out on the slats and pushing the forelegs together, squeezing the old donkey like it was giving him a hug.

Bounder looked at it and said some bad words. I still didn’t get what was so bad about it. Anyway, with the real donkey already gone, we never did run that picture.