Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

Heather lunges after Elyse, all her careful resolve disintegrating in panic. B’s hand on her arm is the only thing that stops her. He has Greta on his hip; Jilly, still in the sling, looks up at her, confused.

“You need to tell me everything,” he says.

“You’re hurting me,” she says. She watches Elyse hurry away from them, then glances at his hand on her arm. He doesn’t let go.

The ground rumbles beneath her feet.

“We can’t go up the mountain,” she whispers to B. “It isn’t safe.”

“Why isn’t it safe, Heather?”

“It just isn’t.”

She finally wrenches her arm away, and he laughs—a short, sharp bark at the sky. “You can’t really be serious. Half man, half horse? What kind of joke is this?”

“It isn’t a joke,” she says, dully. “But it doesn’t matter. We can’t go up there.”

“Tell me,” he says, and she knows what he means. “Tell me all of it.”

And so she does—standing there in front of their house as the sky begins to darken and the breeze rustles through the trees. The day her father took her up the mountain. The songs he sang. The beasts in the trees and her father’s explosive joy. The way he touched the palomino. His sudden stumble and fall.

“How could he do that?” B interrupts.

“How could he fall?”

“No—how could he take you up the mountain ? On a path he didn’t know was safe? A child like you who couldn’t even walk straight on normal ground?”

“He helped me.”

“What if you’d fallen? What if you’d gotten hurt? Would he have left you there with God knows what while he went down for help? Didn’t he think about that?”

“He believed in me,” she retorts. A reflex, her loyalty so deep it splits her in two. “I wanted to believe in myself too. To know that I could do it.”

Help us, she remembers him saying. Help my daughter.

B shakes his head. “So—what—your father fell and this—creature—carried you back down the mountain? And then what?”

She thinks of it—night after night of hushed escape from the house. Estajfan, smiling as she drew him on the paper. Estajfan, telling her a thousand stories.

“I had no one else to talk to,” she says, eventually.

“You had people to talk to!” he cries. “You didn’t want to talk to anybody else.”

“People wouldn’t have understood,” she says. “You don’t know because you weren’t there.”

“I’m here now,” he says. “I’ve been here for almost two years. And you’ve never told me any of this.” B looks away, for a moment. He doesn’t believe her entirely, she can tell. But who can blame him? They are all malnourished, weakened, beaten down by this disaster. What’s easier to believe in—magic or despair?

“I’ve tried so hard to be good to you,” B says. “But you never let me in. You’d rather believe in the stories you tell yourself instead.”

“This isn’t a story,” she says, softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“Not just this,” he says, surprising her. “Everything you believe about yourself is a story.”

She blinks. “What?”

He sighs. “Everything. The mountain. These—centaurs. The way that everyone treated you at school.” She opens her mouth to protest; he just shakes his head. “I know we weren’t perfect. I know I haven’t been perfect. But—people change, Heather. I’ve tried. Tasha has tried, and tried, and tried. And all you show us is a wall.”

She swallows. She’d expected anger, not this.

“You might as well be up on that mountain already,” he says. “You’d rather be in a fantasy world than here.”

“Can you blame me?”

His face hardens. “I can, a little. It’s like you believe that the only person who can change is you. You went into the forest while everyone else tried to keep the city alive.”

“I had the girls,” she protests. “I kept the girls alive.”

“You did,” he admits. “That’s true.” They stare at each other, and then he sighs again, and says, “So. These—centaurs—on the mountain. Is there food? Like Elyse said? Can we go up there and get it?”

“We can’t go up,” she says. “B—it isn’t safe. People will die.”

“People are already dying,” he says, echoing Elyse. “If there is food up there, we have to try.”

“B,” she whispers, “no one can go.”

“So that’s it, then? They’re going to let all of us starve?”

She doesn’t say anything—her face says it for her. She watches the realization slide over his face with something like horror.

“Not all of us,” he says, eventually. “Not you.”

Heather swallows, puts a hand against his arm. “He said he could take me up. I said—”

He leans over and plucks Jilly out of the sling. “Go, then,” he says. “Get the fuck up the mountain and leave us alone.”

She is too shocked to protest. She watches him turn away from her as if in a dream. He walks up the steps to their house, carrying the girls, then stands for a moment, his hand on the doorknob.

It’s a dream, she thinks. It’s only another dream.

“Go,” he says, and he doesn’t turn to her. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”

“I have to warn him,” she whispers. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

Beneath her feet, a steady rumble, rumble, in the ground.

Estajfan is not at the greenhouse. She heads past it, toward the forest, pushing her way through the underbrush. Sweat pools in her collarbone and trickles down between her breasts. When she reaches out to push the vines out of the way, her hands sting where they touch the green. She stops to examine them—small welts rise and fade as she watches. A trick of the light , she thinks, and pushes ahead, ignoring the pain. She’s good at that.

Another rumble hits—so hard and so loud she almost falls. When she rights herself, she’s barely past the greenhouse. She retreats back against it, looks up into the trees.

“Estajfan,” she calls. “ Estajfan. ”

“ Heather. ” Suddenly he’s beside her, before her, everywhere. Mountain air and light and sky.

She wants to collapse, to cry, but she gets a hold of herself. “Estajfan, listen to me. They’re coming up the mountain. You have to go—you, Aura, Petrolio. Please. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re—everyone is so hungry, and so desperate.”

Estajfan shakes his head. “They can’t come up the mountain.”

“I know that—”

“No.” He grips her shoulders again. “Heather—something deeper is wrong. I’ve been trying to figure out what the ground magic is saying—”

“Ground magic?” She stares at him.

An unleashed banshee wail shoots at them from all directions. Heather covers her ears and bends low. Low enough to see the lilies around the greenhouse open their petals like mouths and scream. The glass shatters. Vines crawl through the shards and loop around her arms. She yanks free but the vines wind tighter, pull her down to the forest floor. Tiny green tendrils burrow into her arms. A thousand tiny pinpricks, a thousand pictures in her head.

A father tucks his son into bed, lifts up the pillow, and smothers the child. Then he jumps headfirst from a third-storey window and his neck snaps like a twig.

A mother bursts into tears at a dinner table and stabs her daughter through the eye with a fork, then takes her own life.

Children face down in a filthy tub. The mother and father slumped against the sink, a gun on the floor, blood and brain matter splashed over the wall.