Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“They don’t stay in the house,” Joseph says. “They have the run of the backyard. I bring them in for company. Also—it’s cold, Annie.”

Elyse looks skeptical. She opens her mouth and is about to speak but Tasha rushes in, nods to where the chicken has disappeared.

“You have eggs?” she says.

Joseph’s face goes dark. “They aren’t laying anymore,” he says. “And they certainly couldn’t lay enough to feed the whole city.”

“Well,” Tasha says. “Keep an eye out. Let me know if you see anything… unusual.”

He snorts. “Like a wicked stepmother? Okay.” Then he looks at her. “If you find out who it is, what are you going to do to them?”

“I’m not going to do anything. No one’s getting in trouble. I just want to know where it’s coming from. And if we can get more. Don’t you? Aren’t we all in this together?”

Joseph rolls his eyes. “If someone is dropping food in front of the clinic, they’ve been hoarding all this time. So no—I wouldn’t say that this person, whoever they are, is in with us at all.” He looks at her, at Annie. “But then, you know all about hoarding.” He shuts the door in their faces.

They drop in on Brendan next.

“Someone left food at the clinic,” Annie tells him.

“Food?” he says. “From where?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Tasha says. “Do you have any idea where it might have come from?”

He blinks at her. “Sounds like someone’s been hoarding food and feels guilty about it.”

“That’s what Joseph said,” Annie says, slightly suspicious.

Tasha sighs. “All right. Well—if more comes, we’ll add the extra food to the rest of the stores. If you see anything, Brendan, or hear of anything, let us know?”

He nods. “Why do you think more food is going to come? Isn’t it better to assume it’s a one-off?”

Tasha looks at him, surprised. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I guess I just thought—I don’t know what I thought, actually.”

Annie snorts. “You thought it was magic. You were ready to believe, like you always are.”

“I was n—”

“Tasha.” There is a long-suffering note in Annie’s voice that shuts her up. “Don’t even get me started.”

Tasha smarts from this the entire walk back to the clinic. Magic. Don’t be ridiculous.

But the next morning, there are more bags outside the door—cans of vegetables, rice and dried beans. Someone else comes running to tell them about a food drop at the edge of the city—this one out where Heather and Tasha both take their walks.

They gather the food and store it, put it all under lock and key.

The next day, there is still more food left outside—a random assortment of scuffed and dented cans that they store with everything else.

Not a lot, Tasha tells herself. It’s not a lot. Hardly magical. But she cannot help it; she wakes every morning like a child, eager to see if more gifts have come.

In December, the first snow. They have prepared as best they can—indoor propane heaters looted from the hardware stores, propane doled out as carefully as gold. People congregate in the houses that have wood-burning stoves, the wood that they’ve all split for the winter stacked in the abandoned space next to Tasha’s clinic, piled six feet deep.

They advise people to move closer to the strip mall, so that no one needs to travel very far through the snow. Once again, people bunk down in strange beds, on couches, on the floor. No one is a stranger to anyone else anymore. They shovel when they can, but the snow is heavy and wet; the paths around the strip mall are all that stay cleared.

As the days go by, the temperature drops. Some people stop coming by the strip mall for wood. Tasha leads a scouting party to Randall’s house. He’s an older man who lives on the outskirts of the city with his wife, and had refused to move. “We’ll be okay,” he had told her. “We’ve lived in this house our whole life. Don’t want to say goodbye to it just yet.”

When they get there, the place is dark and silent, freezing cold. They find Randall and Stella in their bed by the living room fireplace. The window is open and snow has dusted onto the floor. Tasha steps close to them, checks their pulses, and then looks away.

“Dead,” she says.

Annie is too tired to be horrified; she looks around the room, then nods. “We should take the wood,” she says.

When they return to the clinic, staggering under the weight of firewood, Tasha tells the townspeople. “Please everyone, stay close. We’ll get through this together.”

They are hesitant to believe her, she can tell. But no one disagrees with her, either.

One night when Tasha is asleep on the clinic mattress, someone bangs loudly on the door.

“Tasha!” a voice yells, muffled by snow. “Tasha, please!”

The voice pulls her from sleep and dreams of fire. The man on her doorstep is Robin, one of the original residents who had helped her with the gardens. He’s staying with a group of people a few houses down from Tasha’s townhouse. Candice, one of the women in the group, is six months pregnant.

“The baby’s coming,” Robin says. Tasha’s already pulling on her boots.

Snow is thick and deep on the sidewalks; it takes forever to get there.

“Go get Annie,” she tells Robin, and he sets back off into the snow.

Candice lies labouring on the couch in the living room. The wood stove blazes fierce and orange, the room almost unbearably hot.

The baby is already crowning; when she guides it out, the child is blue, the cord around its neck a whitish-purple noose. She untangles the cord and stimulates the chest. Tiny hands and feet, tiny purple lips. A boy. The mother and the father—his name is Seth, she remembers—are both sobbing. The room stinks of blood and fear.

Noises at the front door, a gust of cold wind. She doesn’t look up. She clears the baby’s mouth with her finger, then gently turns him over and rubs his back, his arms and legs hanging limp. One, two, three rubs. A little movement. Not enough. When the child finally gasps in air, his arms and legs do not move. She turns the child over—he is so tiny, a crumpled fairy frog—then lays him down across her thigh, flicks a finger against his feet. Nothing.

Annie is beside her now, her hands ready. She passes the child to Annie and gets up to check the mother over. Candice tore, but only a little; she’ll be okay.

She can hear people trying to be quiet in the kitchen. When she turns back to Annie, it’s been five minutes since the birth; they tap the baby’s tiny feet again and still he doesn’t react, though his chest heaves up and down. They don’t need to say anything to one another—instead Annie swaddles the baby and hands him to his parents.

They stay the rest of the night, keeping the wood stove alive, catching bits of sleep in turns in the armchairs. They try to feed the baby—first at his mother’s breast, and then with some formula from the clinic. In the morning the baby is still breathing but is otherwise unresponsive. The parents are vibrating with terror.

“What can we do?” Seth whispers.

“He lost oxygen to the brain,” Tasha says. “Because of the cord.”

“He’ll be able to move eventually—won’t he?” Candice asks.

Tasha doesn’t answer. She sees the mother swallow.

“He won’t latch,” Candice says. “I’m holding his head right up to my breast and he won’t latch.”