It was then the airbag popped out, pressing firmly against her face. She struggled to break it, to get out of the way of it, because it was making it impossible to breathe. She reached for the buckle of her seat belt, but the impact must have broken it; she couldn’t get it off.
Her arms flailing, Carrie struggled to get out of the car. Blaine, meanwhile, had vomited, and now felt much better. He was curled up out in the corn, falling asleep.
Nobody was there to notice when Carrie’s arms finally stopped flailing, and became still. The soft sound of snowflakes on their spiraling descent was the only sound to be heard.
“Are you awake, my child?”
When Carrie’s eyes opened again, she was quite disoriented. The world was no longer spinning, but she didn’t recognize any of the stuff around her. Beakers and test tubes. Electrical things making zapping noises every few seconds. It looked very much like a scientist’s laboratory.
“Where, where . . . where am I?” is what she tried to say. The only sound that came out was a soft neigh.
She saw a tall man with a very wrinkly face looking down at her, his white hair receding. Lights from the laboratory reflected on the vast bald dome of his head which was so reflective it made her wonder whether he polished it. Quickly after this, she wondered who he was. Unfortunately, the only sound she was able to make was the same neighing.
She felt his hand stroking her face. “You must have a lot of questions right now, mustn’t you?” the man said kindly. “First of all, you should know that I am your new father. And, I suppose, your mother as well. You see, you are the first person to ever literally be born again.” The man stepped away from her, unclamping some straps that were holding her four legs down upon the table.
“You died. I’m not sure how or when, so any questions you have about that may go unanswered forever. But I can tell you where I found you. You were buried at the Chaifer Bush Cemetery on Bluff Road two weeks ago. I dug you up the following day, taking. . . certain parts of your anatomy, and leaving others. Suffice it to say that you have the most important parts of who you were.”
Carrie tried to rise, but it was too difficult. These narrow, hoofed legs were impossible to control. It was all so different from the two legs with feet she’d walked upon in her previous body.
“For the last two weeks, I’ve been incorporating you into the template I was working with previously, to create one integrated creature. The ultimate assistant, in fact. You’re stronger than when you were a human, and just as intelligent as ever. You’re as kind and loving because you still have your human heart. I’m afraid you will never be able to speak or write in this new body, but neither of these will be necessary. You see, since I am the one who gave you this chance at a new life . . . you owe me.”
Carrie tilted her head, confused about where the strange scientist was going with this.
“You are going to help me run my business,” he said, smiling proudly. “In addition to my experiments, I run a winery. It’s how I make the money to fund all of this,” he said with a sweeping gesture toward the tremendous, shadowy lab.
The scientist walked over and poured a glass of a dark, red wine. The smell of alcohol was enough to make Carrie’s new stomach recoil as she remembered the feelings of nausea in the last hours in the truck with Blaine.
Blaine. Was that asshole alive? She hoped not. She could remember seeing him catapulted from the truck. She saw his body flipping through the sky and into the corn. With any luck, he landed on his neck and was now burning in hell.
Hell, just like her life had been before this rebirth. What would this new life be? And who was this new man who she was going to be assisting with his business? Although he was clearly batshit nuts, he also seemed kind enough. Much kinder than Blaine.
With a gentle smile, the man walked over with his glass of red wine. “By the way, I’m Doctor Cunningham.” He held out the glass of wine, and she gingerly lapped up a bit of it. It was quite dry.
“Napa Valley’s finest,” the doctor said with a chuckle. “You probably already realized this, but you’re not in Kansas anymore.”
Chapter 2
Carrie grunted with satisfaction. Her downy hair was covered in sweat and her muscles ached. But when she looked over her shoulder and saw all of the grape fields she’d just plowed, her fully-human heart couldn’t help but swell with pride.
“You did good,” Dr. Cunningham said. “That would have taken a regular horse twice as long. You act with such determination and tenacity, Carrie.” The doctor handed her a carrot, which she eagerly took from his long, nimble fingers.
A girl could get used to this, she mused between crunches. Back when she was in her human body, life wasn’t anywhere near this simple or satisfying. She’d spent tons of time drinking alcohol, studying for final exams, and working double shifts at the ice cream parlor only to fall asleep every night with the same monotonous thing to repeat the next day. Blaine was supposed to be a break from all the drudgery, but he only made things worse. He was good looking, sure, but being with him was like trying to keep track of a mongrel dog.
Carrie swallowed and pushed herself forward.
“Whoa, girl,” the doctor ordered. “That’s enough for today. If we keep going, we’ll plow the neighbor’s field for him. And that would be bad for business!”
The doctor hopped down from the plow and detached it from Carrie’s harness. Next, he removed the harness entirely. Carrie’s entire body shuddered, as if she was trying to shake off the flies that had landed on it.
“Come on,” said Dr. Cunningham. Carrie followed. She was the very best type of horse. There was no need for a bridle or a saddle. She was completely docile, her demeanor more like a human female than a horse female. He smiled to himself. He was a very good doctor. Though his training was originally in sports medicine, he found the work unfulfilling. One could only grasp the testicles of high school students so many times before it gets redundant. That was why he’d joined the United States Army.
The Army wasn’t used to receiving medical doctors as new recruits. It was entirely unprecedented. They were so excited, in fact, to have someone other than a teenager or a criminal, that they pushed him through basic training without his having to lift a finger. He was immediately assigned to an experimental medical facility in the bowels of Montana and put to work on Operation Lazarus.
At first, Dr. Cunningham didn’t know what he’d gotten himself into. He was used to healing patients with sprained ankles from vigorous running and stretched vulvas from vigorous volleyball participation, but here he was given a bunch of severed body parts and assigned to discover a way to allow them to be reattached by soldiers in the field. After a few weeks of this work in a secure laboratory deep underground, the doctor made an alarming discovery.
See, he hadn’t had any luck. He was able to stop the bleeding and stop the limb’s decomposition process. In essence, he made it unnecessary for Army units to truck around “limb coolers” for storing the side effects of casualties. Instead, they could carry his formula- cleverly disguised to look like a tube of lip balm- and apply it liberally to any maiming that happened. The wounded soldier could be transported back to base and have the limb reattached, with a 97% effectiveness rate.
The trouble he stumbled into came with the second part of his task. He was able to make the limb reattachable, but was not yet able to chemically reattach it. He spent days peering into dingy microscopes and generally neglecting his health until he had a breakthrough. One day, while he was eating lunch, a fly lighted upon one of the limbs he was working with. Miraculously, the limb instantly attached itself to the insect. Not knowing what to do with its new appendage, the fly tried to fly away from it with such force that it detached the limb, injuring itself fatally. But the doctor had seen enough.
He spent several feverish hours after that confirming what he now knew to be true: his formula worked, but there was one notable flaw: in order to properly bind together, the DNA of two separate
animals must be used. As Cunningham tried to explain to the Army Board of Directors before he received his dishonorable discharge, DNA was like a couple of magnets. If you put two like-strands of DNA together, they will repel one another. However, if you put two different strands of DNA together, they will attract like clockwork. He demonstrated by slapping a human eye onto the underbelly of a lab rat.
The Board of Directors let him go at that point, citing the Kyoto Protocol and the fact that he’d been wasting government funds on grafting human body parts to animals. Dr. Cunningham tried to protest, but the Board wouldn’t hear it. They all had liberal arts backgrounds and couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying. Not even when he showed them their very signatures on the paper that assigned him the duty would they listen. To the United States Army, it was as if Dr. Joel Cunningham no longer existed.
When he returned home, he opened up a winery and, soon after, started producing some of the finest Merlots California had ever seen. The work provided him with the personal satisfaction necessary to leave his ugly memories of the Army behind, and in his evenings off, he continued his work. Initially, he’d tried attaching pieces of himself to insects and rodents with good results. The doctor was only willing to give up small patches of skin and hair most of the time, though, which didn’t make for very impressive specimens. Near the end of his experiments, he’d parted with the top quarter of his smallest finger in the name of science and attached it to a particularly squirmy possum that had been hit by a car. The unfortunate placing of that particular limb made it appear that the half-squished possum was sporting a permanent, if stubby, erection. When the beast tried to drag itself away into the temperate Californian night, it carved a little groove into the dirt with the doctor’s fingernail. That was where he got the idea of building a horse-human hybrid.
It seemed mad to manufacture these creatures without a purpose. How many possums had he released into the wild with a funny beard or seriously smooth knuckles? If the Army wouldn’t respect his discoveries, there was no reason to think the world would, either. He could be just as happy keeping his findings to himself and using them to make the finest wines in the world.
He’d watched the Kansas newspapers for weeks before he found Carrie. He wanted a young woman for his greatest work, someone who would have a strong heart and, just perhaps, a childhood fondness for ponies. And Kansas was the place, as their funeral laws were lax and the required depths of graves was the lowest in the country. When he’d heard of her untimely death, he paid the local mortician an exuberant sum to slather the poor girl’s corpse in what appeared to be chapstick. The mortician, being a man of few scruples and a fondness for large bills, obliged; he, like others of his profession, was used to the bizarre fetish requests that often came with corpses. It was not his place to judge or prevent such happenings; if God didn’t like it, He could do something about it.
Two weeks after Carrie’s burial, the doctor drove his boat of a Cadillac to Kansas. When he returned to California, Carrie delicately folded into his trunk, he was giddy with excitement. He carried her into his home and set to work removing her heart and brain from her body. The Miracle Stick had done its work and both organs were perfectly preserved- the heart even giving off a beat or two every now and again. With a deft swing of a ball peen hammer, he turned out the lights of his old horse Bessie and switched out those most vital of organs, leaving the strength of a horse with the agility and thoughtfulness of mind of a teenage girl.
Carrie came around to the whole thing fairly quickly, considering. There was that initial confusion, but that was to be expected (who wakes up in the body of a horse and doesn’t buck around for a minute or two?).
After the doctor told her his story, she no longer thought he was crazy. Instead, she recognized him for the brilliant mind he clearly was and felt thankful to him for saving her life. While being a horse seemed less than ideal, she reasoned, it was a hell of a lot better than that cold, dark nothing that was death. Her human brain urged her to have sex with him out of thanks, but her animal instincts warned her to back off. She chose to nuzzle him gently instead. He seemed to like that. So did she.
Chapter 3: The Horn
Over the next few weeks, Carrie got used to the anomalies of her new body: the four legs, the hooves, the fact that she was now a male. All of this quickly began to seem normal, sort of like when you move to a new place, and all of a sudden the scenery is much different. Very quickly, it all seems to feel like home. Just like this, Carrie’s new horse body began to feel like home.
But gradually, Carrie began to notice how much of his time the kind scientist spent in an alcoholic rage. Almost every evening he would spend hours nursing a bottle of Green Apple Pucker, singing old army songs at the top of his lungs. He often would begin talking to himself, cursing those who led to his current state: the U.S. Army, the public education system, an array of uptight girlfriends. The old man had never been very good with the ladies, partially because he was often distracted not by their beauty or their personalities, but by thinking about what they would look like with new body parts attached to them.
Occasionally, Dr. Cunningham would go wandering out into the fields, swaying around and cursing God for his lot. Eventually, he’d fall asleep out among the soy. Carrie would pick him up by the collar of his jacket and carrying him inside, doing her best to tuck him in with her tremendous new face.
This marked a period of confusion for Carrie; it was unclear whether this doctor was truly as nice as he first seemed, or whether he was brilliant but too mixed up to do any good other than saving her.
Carrie also had some sexuality related problems, considering now she was a male horse. She still found herself attracted to human males. Since her brain came from a female body, did this make her a lesbian, or was she straight? Was her lack of interest in any of the other horses a sign that there was something wrong with her? In other words, was the real Carrie her brain and heart, or was it every part of her, even the barnyard animal parts?
One day, while Dr. Cunningham was brushing her mane, she felt a large hypodermic needle slide into the side of her neck. By the time the pressure registered, she was already falling to the ground, drifting into an unconsciousness almost as deep as the death she’d experienced less than a month ago. When she came to, she once again was strapped down to a table. Neighing, she looked over at Cunningham, who had clearly been drinking. He wiped his mouth on the white sleeve of his jacket and stumbled towards her.
“Now, my plan is complete,” he said, impassively.
Carrie blinked.
“Be careful, my pet. You may be a little dizzy.” With that, he unstrapped her and stumbled back into a chair. He raised a bottle of Apple Pucker to his lips.
She walked over to the mirror, looking on in confusion. She appeared to have become a unicorn while unconscious. A long, curling rod of metal protruded from her forehead, giving the appearance of a tremendous wine corker. Why on earth had the doctor made her into this freak? What was the purpose?
As if reading her thoughts, the doctor launched into speaking. “I didn’t tell you about this particular part of our experiment because I wanted it to be a pleasant surprise! You see, I’ve done the math about this wine business, and we could be making much greater profits if we store wines in a more cost-effective manner. Once each batch is prepared, I’m normally forced to put it in individual bottles as it properly ages. This takes up a tremendous amount of cellar space. Now, with your help, my child, we can store the entire Cabernet for this season in one tremendous bottle as it ages properly! Your screw will be able to cork the bottle when it’s time to divide up the quantity into marketable bottles! I--I mean, we--will make a fortune. This will be a marvelous innovation in California winemaking!”
Carrie tilted her head in confusion. The good doctor’s idea, while certainly novel, seemed to have one inherent flaw. After all, she couldn’t spin her head in a complete circle repeatedly to actually screw her new horn into the cork. It
was just impossible. She couldn’t say anything, though, and only made horse sounds in response.
Carrie watched as a series of pipes conveyed an entire year’s worth of Cabernet from their separate tanks into a single bottle that was easily twenty feet high and with a radius of four feet. The bottle, once full, leaned to the proper angle and came to a rest on what was probably the world’s largest wine rack. Then, the doctor used a complex piece of machinery to force the cork into place. The machine was clearly not designed to remove the cork, but only to force it into the bottle’s neck.
No: that would be her job. Or was supposed to be her job, at any rate. When would the doctor realize she wasn’t capable of performing the task before her? How could she possible inform him with neither the ability to speak English or fingers to write with? Her situation, in addition to being unlikely, was also increasingly grim.
In her dreams at night, she was once again at Axtell Public School back home in her town of Axtell, a small town in the northwest corner of Kansas. She was again sitting at the lunch table, eating pizza as she laughed with her best friend, Mitch. He had just said something very funny, and it caused her to laugh. He looked back at her with his big brown eyes, his bright smile. Why had she always been so settled on getting with Blaine? Mitch was a great guy.
Mitch had shoulder-length brown hair that came down to his shoulders, and wasn’t yet getting any facial hair. He smiled at her, kindness flowing from his eyes into the space between them. Blaine, meanwhile, was arm wrestling with the other football players, loudly disrupting an otherwise peaceful lunch room.
What had she been thinking, all of these years? Sure, Mitch started off looking kind of dorky, with big wide-rimmed glasses, and button-up shirts made out of polyester. His family couldn’t afford new clothes, so he mostly wore what his father had worn in high school, which consisted of platform shoes and bell bottoms. He was always getting picked on.
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