Vonnegut wasn’t destined to last very long at the new magazine. His demise came when he was assigned to write a caption for a picture in The Wonderful World of Sports about a horse that had veered off a track, jumped the infield fence at Aqueduct, and trotted across the infield.
‘I was working on this goddamn story with nothing else to do,’ he remembered, ‘working eight-hour days and sitting around. And it ceased to be amusing to me that this horse just took a shortcut across the infield. I was going to go out to Aqueduct to investigate, but they told me it wasn’t necessary. So I could only get so much amusement out of the story, and I figured I was in the wrong job. So I left that in my typewriter and departed.’
What Vonnegut left in his typewriter was a single sheet of paper, with a one-line caption: ‘The horse jumped over the fucking fence.’