The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  The centaur had loved them. He loved all her gifts.

  “I’ve seen the centaur,” she tells them. “He is as tall and proud as ever.”

  They delight in how intractable he is, how stubborn and rude. He is a puzzle that they’ve yet to unlock.

  “Have you met the children yet?” her other niece asks. The quieter one, the one who reminds the doctor of herself. “Are they happy? Are they loved?”

  “I haven’t met the children.” The girls and their mother sigh in disappointment. “Next time, maybe. Perhaps I should bring him a different kind of gift.”

  “Seems to me you bring the centaur everything. And the centaur brings nothing to you,” her sister says.

  The doctor looks down at her mug of tea. “He’s lost a great deal.”

  “So have you.” Her sister’s voice is sharp. “So have we all.”

  “Perhaps. But how is he supposed to know that?”

  “He would know if he asked you about yourself. If he spared one moment to think about you.”

  The doctor shrugs. “He has no obligations to me.”

  Her sister cocks her head at her. She has never been surprised—not when the doctor first told her the story of the centaurs, not later, not now. She is also the child of an almost-witch. She, too, lost her mother in the fire. She has survived all these years by turning her anger into love for her twins, her husband, and the sister she sees only a few times a year. Everything is magical and nothing makes sense. Everything could fall away at any moment.

  “He has an obligation to you like everyone else does,” her sister says. “If the centaur doesn’t see that, then he’s not worth your time.”

  That night, after the girls have gone to bed, the doctor and her sister sit outside. Together, they breathe the night air.

  “You’ve lost weight,” her sister says. “Are you eating enough?”

  “What kind of doctor would I be if I wasn’t taking care of my own body?”

  Her sister snorts. “You. That’s what kind.”

  The doctor chuckles. She always feels very young when she’s with her sister, and tonight is no exception. “Do you miss them?” she says, after a while.

  “Always,” her sister says. “And I still see them everywhere.”

  The doctor nods. They often talk about this: how their dead mother sometimes seems to appear in a crowd; the way their father, who died last year in his sleep, still sometimes seems to come to them in the face of a stranger on the other side of the street.

  “I keep running into the same stories,” the doctor says. “Babies with no faces, extra limbs. Monster children that nobody wants.” She leans forward and rests her elbows on her thighs. “The way that Mama kept running into people who wanted love. What lessons lie in that?”

  “The centaur loves his children,” her sister reminds her. “If what you say is true.”

  “Yes,” she says. “But he doesn’t want to show them to anybody. He keeps them hidden away on that mountain. And maybe that’s my fault.”

  “Mama was not responsible for the choices that other people make, and neither are you,” her sister says, sharply. “If he wanted an uncomplicated life, he should have stayed a horse.”

  The doctor laughs, and then sobers. “But what about his children? What kind of life will they have up there, alone?”

  “Still not your responsibility. Didn’t you say their mother has new twins? Human ones?”

  “Yes,” the doctor says. She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Perfect babies. A boy and a girl.”

  “She’s chosen her life,” the doctor’s sister reminds her. “And so has the centaur. You can’t expect either of them to choose a different one. Perhaps that is the lesson you need to keep on learning.”

  The doctor looks away. “That doesn’t seem a worthwhile lesson,” she says.

  Her sister sighs. “There are different kinds of magic. And there are different kinds of grief. One person can only carry so many kinds. You of all people should know that.”

  “And what if his children want to be in the world? What if they don’t want to be hidden away?”

  Her sister has no answer for this; they sit on the step in silence until a call from the house takes them back inside.

  It’s the second niece, awake. The doctor goes in to see her.

  “Tell me the story again,” she says. “Tell me what happened when the centaurs were born.”

  The doctor sits beside her on the bed and brushes the hair out of her eyes. She’s told this story so many times they know it by heart. It is not, perhaps, the best kind of story for children. But it’s the one they always want.

  “Three doors for three babies,” she says. “Three doors into the world.”

  16

  JJ crawls behind the wheel and turns the key. Moira is beside him in the passenger seat while the others sleep in the back, piled on what blankets and clothing they’ve managed to scrounge. JJ turns the headlights on and there it is in front of them—a huge thing come to a sudden jerking stop, half man, half horse, all muscles and startled blue eyes. It raises its hands against the sudden flare of light.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  JJ is leaning on the horn, and Moira is screaming. She hears a wild shuffling in the back and then the clang of the back door of the U-Haul opening.

  A shot rings out and the creature stumbles. Darby steps up beside Moira’s window, the gun on his shoulder. The creature—the thing—looks toward Darby, its hands still up to block the light. Darby fires again. This time, the beast falls.

  The impact shakes the ground around them. Moira and JJ sit stunned for a moment, and then they’re both tumbling out of the truck. She gasps in the dark morning air, but only partly from the cold.

  The creature lies sprawled in front of them, a dark splash of blood on its lower abdomen, the part of it that looks like a man. Before she knows it, she’s on her knees by the creature, pulling the sweater from around her shoulders and pressing it hard against the wound.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Darby crouches beside her.

  “It’s hurt.”

  “Of course it’s hurt. I fucking shot it.”

  “What the fuck is it?” says Brian from Moira’s other side. “Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. Where did it come from?”

  The creature’s breathing catches as Moira presses harder. She sees its eyelids flutter, then close as it passes out. “It’s hurt,” she says again. “We need to get it…somewhere.”

  “Sure,” Darby snaps. “We’ll take it to the next emergency animal hospital along the highway. No problem.”

  “Well, we can’t just leave it here.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Moira’s right.” JJ crouches down beside her. “We should take it with us.”

  “What the fuck for? You want to eat it or something?”

  Moira tries not to shiver.

  JJ doesn’t answer for a moment. He just stares at the creature. “Are we dreaming?” he asks.

  “Everything is a dream now!” Darby yells. “Let’s just leave it and go!”

  “JJ,” Moira says. “It’s hurt.”

  He slides his eyes over to her. He is so quiet, JJ. They know next to nothing about him. “Would you want to save it if it was a deer?” he asks. “Or would you want to eat it?”

  “I can’t,” she says. “It’s at least—at least half human.”

  JJ snorts, then stands up. “I know where we can take it,” he says. “Put it in the back of the van.”

  Darby sighs. “Fine. Brian, JJ—let’s just load the motherfucker in and go.”

  The beast is even heavier than it looks—the three men half drag, half carry it to the rear of the truck, then lift it in. Moira walks beside them, pressing her sweater against the wound all the way. Once it
’s in the back of the truck, she climbs in and sits beside it, then reaches for one of the flashlights they’ve stashed in the back and hands that to Brian, who climbs in beside her. From what she can see, there’s a bullet lodged at the place where human skin gives way to fur.

  Fur, she thinks, and suppresses a shudder. “Darby. Give me your knife.” When he hands it to her, she reaches for the bottle of whiskey that Darby keeps in his pack. She opens it, then splashes it over the wound. As always, she thinks of Eric, who’d survived the scream and the godforsaken plants with Darby only to die from a blood infection, raving and delirious, a cut on his hand gone untended. He’d been halfway to death when Moira had found them. Now, whenever they stop, alcohol of any kind is the first thing Moira looks for.

  “You’re wasting good whiskey on an animal?” Darby grumbles.

  She kneels in front of the creature and slides the knife into the wound, using her sweater to sop up the blood that wells, and gently pries the bullet out. It clatters to the floor.

  As if he’d been waiting for her to be done, JJ starts the truck. Darby rolls the back door closed and Moira blinks in the sudden darkness, the flashlight wobbling in Brian’s shaky hand. They move forward, slowly, into the dark.

  Moira takes off her shirt and tears a strip from it, then douses the strip in more alcohol and presses it against the wound. The strip quickly goes red. “Tape,” she says. Brian reaches into one of the packs and rummages around, then pulls out a roll of duct tape. Moira tears a piece from it with her teeth, the other hand still holding the bandage, and presses the tape across it. It sticks. She doesn’t know how long it will stay put, but at least the beast won’t bleed to death in the truck.

  She hopes it won’t, anyway.

  “Dr. Moira to the rescue,” Darby drawls. He and Brian snicker. Brian hands Moira another T-shirt from a pile in the back, and she pulls it on.

  She says, “Tie its legs with something. What if it wakes up and thrashes around?”

  Darby and Brian comply, using the rope that they keep by the door. Then they settle themselves on the blankets. Moira sits cross-legged in front of the beast and looks for the rifle, which is propped in the corner. Odd, she knows—given that she’s just pulled a bullet out of the creature—but it’s good to know it’s there, just in case.

  “You didn’t even seem that surprised,” she says, after they’ve bumped along for a few minutes. She’s looking at the shadow that is Darby, but he only shrugs.

  “The world went down in fire and then in screaming,” he says. “Nothing seems that strange to me anymore.”

  * * *

  Life had seemed strange to her until the meteors had come and taken her sister away. It was a delightful strangeness—days that sparked in front of her, brimming with both routine and possibility. She could audition one day and find the part that would change her whole life; she could buy a lottery ticket at the convenience store and lift her whole family into another world. Every day was another day wherein something could happen.

  Then the meteors had come. She’d been staying at her sister’s place. Jaime had offered Moira her bed for the night, playing the good host, but Moira had said, “I’m fine on the couch,” and it turned out to be true. She had been fine—the meteor had come through Jaime’s bedroom window, demolishing the south side of the house and leaving the other half standing, practically untouched. There was nothing left of Jaime, not even bones.

  She had expected to fall apart with grief, but instead the world became fuzzy, two-toned, monotonous. The collapse of things around them, the starvation—all of it unremarkable, all of it drudgery. She’d made her way back to her old basement apartment—her landlord was gone, or dead—and got used to living without power. One by one her neighbours left, and her friends disappeared. She grew potatoes in the backyard and was not surprised, come harvest, to find them stunted, almost inedible. She ate them anyway.

  The other plants around her grew lush and green. Hollyhocks had bells as large as her hands and grew taller than her house. Tree roots broke the ground in the backyard. Berry bushes grew along the sides of the old roads, fruit hanging dark and luscious. For some reason, she did not touch those.

  As the months stretched into fall and then to winter, she began to see small mounds on the roads when she went out in the morning—small green mounds with maybe a flash of red hair in one, a small curled hand in another. She didn’t look too closely. Then the winter came and the snow kept her mostly inside, except when she had to salvage for food.

  When the scream came, she was outside again, scavenging for supplies. She first felt a tremor of rage and grief shiver through her. When the big orange flowers around her opened their mouths and let loose, she backed into the first building she could see, an abandoned restaurant, and shut herself in the bathroom at the back. The scream became human, became a hundred different screams, became footsteps that ran around in terror. She thought dully about how the Moira of a year ago would have been alive in her terror, electric in her madness, desperate to hang on. There was nothing to hang on to now, so why be terrified? Survival was an instinct. Survival was boring. That was the secret, that’s all it was. There was no hope, yes—but there hadn’t been any since Jaime had died.

  She sat on the toilet and counted the tiles at her feet. They were chipped and filthy. One, two, three, and four. Five. Six. One hundred and twelve.

  See? She almost wanted to open the door and scream at them all. See? You have it all wrong. Grief isn’t painful—it’s just boring. Boring as fuck. You can get used to it too.

  She sat on the toilet until the world went quiet and then sat until the darkness outside was absolute. Then she stepped out of the bathroom and around the bodies on the floor and went outside. She walked back to her apartment. Just like she’d done in the days after Jaime, she let herself in and crawled into bed, and slept until she couldn’t anymore.

  When she woke, it was late afternoon and the world outside had changed again, gone lush and thick, an even deeper green. For the first time Moira could remember since the meteors fell, it felt wrong to be inside. She changed into cleaner clothes and went out.

  There were so many bodies. On the ground, slumped in doorways, everywhere. As she walked, vines stretched over the ground like twisted green snakes—slithering over the bodies, winding around the bodies, covering their hands and faces and hair in emerald green.

  She avoided the vines as she walked. Eventually, even this felt ordinary, like she’d seen it all before.

  17

  Darkness, and then light. A force breaks her from the dirt. Air rushes at her face and she gasps in great lungfuls of it.

  Blue-green eyes drink her in.

  Aura.

  Aura drops her on the ground, hard enough for stars to sparkle across her eyes. When her vision clears, Aura is all she can see.

  “I should have let you suffocate,” Aura says, her voice low and terrible. She yanks Heather up by the shoulder and stares her in the face. “I almost,” and she squeezes Heather’s shoulder so hard she gasps, “didn’t get here in time. I almost didn’t come here at all! If Estajfan hadn’t told me to check on you—Heather. A few more seconds and you would have been gone. The ground was already smoothing over. There was almost no sign of you at all.”

  “I just—” Heather stares, her teeth chattering. “I just—wanted—to be different. I wanted my life to be—different.”

  “You are different,” Aura says, and she lets Heather’s arm drop. Heather backs up until she’s leaning against the willow again. She feels the ground rumble and then go silent.

  But she’s not different—she’s the same, Heather realizes. Covered in dirt—dirt in her clothes, stuffed in her ears, gritty in her mouth—but every bit the same. Her own two legs. Her own fragile human body. The baby kicks, fierce and alive. She bends over her belly and sobs.

  “You can’t trust the mountain
,” Aura says. “If the mountain can birth a centaur, it can birth all other kinds of lies.”

  “But it made your father different,” she whispers.

  “My father was already halfway into another world. You don’t want that—you just want the world to know who you are.”

  Heather shuts her eyes and leans back against the tree. “There’s no one left to know who I am,” she says. “Everyone is gone.”

  “Not everyone,” Aura says. When Heather looks at her, the moonlight shines behind her head like a halo. “You and Estajfan—” Aura makes a gesture with her arms, a half-circle—“I see you in his face. In the way he moves. I don’t think even he understands it. The way our father kept seeing our mother long after he’d left the village and come back to the mountain. Your bond marks you both in ways that even the mountain does not understand.”

  There’s another rumble beneath Heather’s hands. She thinks it’s the mountain, disagreeing, but then the rumble resolves into hooves striking the ground. Petrolio bursts from the trees, his face full of terror.

  “Estajfan!” he cries.

  “What?” Heather pushes herself up and stumbles to Aura.

  “He’s in trouble,” Aura says, knowing instantly what Petrolio means. “The mountain”—her voice drops low—“the mountain won’t let me see anything else.”

  Heather goes to the three willows and places her hand against a trunk, looks out across the land that stretches on and on into the dark. Foothills and flatlands and the ruins of so many cities. Far beyond that, the sea.

  She couldn’t see him on the mountain, but she can see him now. Below them, back down in the world that she knows.

  “He’s by the water,” she says. “Or close to it.”

  “Is he hurt?” Aura and Petrolio cry together.

  She closes her eyes and feels a darkened space, shadows skittering over the windows. The floor cold against her cheek. Against his cheek. The glint of metal. A rifle in the corner.