Halloween Short Story: En Fuego

When the flames took Fuego, the barn lost a horse — but gained a guardian made of smoke, fire, and loyalty that refuses to die.

We lost him the night the barn caught fire.

The blaze took everything — hay, tack, feed, and most of all, Fuego, our proud, copper-coated gelding whose name, fittingly, meant fire. The flames painted the night in terrible shades of orange, and by the time they died down, only ashes and silence remained.

We buried what little we found and told ourselves he was gone. But the farm never felt empty. Not really.

It started a few weeks later, when hoofbeats echoed down the path behind the house. Slow. Rhythmic. Familiar. When we ran outside, there was nothing — just the faint smell of smoke and the stir of leaves in the dark.

We told ourselves it was grief. The mind playing tricks. Until the night of the foal.

The mare wasn’t due for another month, but I woke to the sound of hooves pounding around the house — fast, insistent, circling. When I stepped onto the porch, I caught the flash of movement by the tree line: a horse-shaped shadow glowing faintly at the edges, like embers beneath soot.

By the time I reached the barn, the mare was down, struggling. We called the vet, pulled the foal — and saved them both. Out by the paddock, the dirt was torn with fresh hoof prints.

It happened again in winter. The older gelding had cast himself near the woods, and when he didn’t come to the barn for dinner and we began searching for him, night was already closing in. But the sound came first — pounding hooves and a sharp, warning neigh from the forest. We found the gelding cast against a tree. When we got him up, he stood trembling — scraped, but alive. Walking him back to the barn, we saw paw prints in the snow. Wolves had been circling him. We also saw the unmistakable signs of the wolves having scattered — disrupted by large hoof prints, full of force and power. Fuego had charged.

Now, on cold nights, we sometimes see him — a flicker of movement at the edge of the trees, a shimmer that glows like firelight. The dogs don’t bark. The horses don’t spook. It’s as though they know.

We miss having Fuego in the barn — the way he’d paw for grain or nudge our pockets for carrots. But we welcome his presence. We feel safer for it.

We believe he lives still, untouchable and wild, like the flames that drove him from us — our guardian spirit of smoke and ash.

Fuego, the fire that never went out.