Bacon

A horse finds some bacon.

There's a single slice of bacon stuck on the lowest branch of a redwood in the middle of the forest. A white horse stands by with grease dripping down its front-left hoof. Men who've witnessed this lay dumbstruck and bewildered, not at the notion of a meat-eating horse but at the audacity to waste good bacon. The horse is an innocent; he believed it to be a maple. In the case of flavor-enhancement, ignorance of the law excuses not.
He runs to flee from the offended, reaching a bus terminal in time to take a backseat to Anchorage. Tourist stops along the way include a giant ball of yarn and the world's first glue factory. He did not leave the bus for either; horse are notoriously afraid of processed fibers.
The horse meets the mouse in a ranch East of Juneau, but their friendship is short-lived, due to a ferocious and precocious Falcon. The horse is helpless as a hawk in a hallway, and the mouse dies defending him. The Falcon hides away, living out the rest of his days in fear of reprisals from the mouse court. Lest we forget, he has no regret. He is Falcon, and he is an a*****e.
The horse rides on further North towards Wester Island. There he meets four statues with the smallest heads you've ever seen. The four heads congregate, collaborate, capitulate and congratulate. The horse has been honored, they say, with a rider worthy of his travels and reputation. "Nay" says the horse, because he is a horse. "Bring hither," says the horse because he is agreeable. The rider steps forward, covered in sweat and grime. He is Beast for he exists as one. "What say you?" say the heads off-sync and echoed. "Nay" says the horse, because he disapproves. On another world, in a different time, they go on together and save the lives of the children of Thornpatch, 900 to be precise. But in this world, Beast lay dismayed. The horse gains his first grays, 900 to be precise.
The horse continues its travels; finding hidden spiders in the pyramids of Baldur, launching the first arrow to Castle Victorian Cape, and leading a March against the next month in a Julian calendar of fluffy kittens and babies in watering cans. There are more grays covering his body now, earned from regrettable decisions or just plain dick moves.
The horse comes upon a gypsy peddling wares dipped in smelted and melted Fool's Gold; a process he completes once every decade, and only ever one piece at that. The gypsy listens to his story with quiet fascination, then admits he is deaf and was humoring the horse so he wouldn't feel ignored.
Angry, the horse rides through the center of a compass and comes to a waterfall reflecting his youthful white back to him. The horse asks "What Is?" but learns “What Was,” and leaves in disgust. A gray horse lunges through the water to console and condole, but when reaching the horse realizes it is just an idea of “What Will Be” and evaporates into gray dust. The horse bears witness in such an indifferent manner that it infuriates the dust. It flies at the horse, bonding to another patch of white. The horse panics, realizing there is only one hair of white left and decides to save it for the truly depraved.
Several years pass. The horse is lauded and applauded for his good deeds and gentile composure. He is traversing middle-America in a quiet search of amorality when he comes upon an Orwelian Pig holding court to some goats by a pond. The horse takes the pig and strips it. He leaves it by a butchers block with instructions for an algorithm with startling implications, the most crucial being how to traverse time and space.
The butcher arrives and does what any butcher does. After the pig has been decimated, the butcher takes the meat and the instructions to a wishing well because time-travel is a goddamn pipe-dream and he has no time for nonsense. So instead he halves the amount of pig yield and burns one side in sacrifice to Cronos, who gladly accepts his tithings. The other half he gives to the well and watches as it drifts down. The bacon sinks to the bottom of the well, becoming a proverbial constant which has always been and always will be. It is here that the white horse finds the package. The bacon is promptly cooked and all but one piece is eaten in haste. The horse shudders and says "this meat is so bland."

Author's Note

I wrote this very late one night while my wife was recovering from surgery. She was absolutely fine, but the stress from the day brought on minor insomnia and a need for levity, and this came out.