Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

“What does she look like?” he asks again.

“Like me,” she says. The words feel like birds with sharp claws. She feels them push out all around them and draw the scene right there, like magic, and suddenly they are both standing inside her dream, inside the house. Her father turns in a circle, nodding. The plaster walls, the rough-hewn door, the scrap of bright cloth by the fireplace. “Yes, this is the house,” he says and turns to her. “Do you want to see where you were born?”

She swallows, shakes her head. She just wants to leave.

“I think you should see it.” He holds out a hand and she takes it. Her hooves touch spongy moss and floorboard all at once. They are still on the mountain, but they’re surrounded by the house. She wants to run into the trees, but her father’s grip is so tight it hurts. She whimpers.

“Be quiet,” he hisses, and now she is truly afraid.

He pulls her to the back of the house—she’s never seen the back of the house in her dreams; she’s never wanted to be anywhere except where the woman is, and the woman never comes here—and steps through a doorway. There is so much light that at first it’s hard to see. The windows are bare and the outside door is open. The room is so cold she shivers. She’s never cold.

“The rest of the house doesn’t feel this way,” she says.

“No one comes here,” her father says.

She doesn’t ask him how he knows. “Why not?”

The ashes in the fireplace are cold like everything else in the room. Her father stares into them.

“There was a table here,” he says, gesturing. “Our bedroom wasn’t big enough to hold the doctor and the midwives, so they brought her in here and laid her on the table. She fell asleep, after.”

He doesn’t say after what, but Aura knows.

The floor is bleached white and the walls of the room have been whitewashed. Everything is bare, bare, bare.

“Why don’t they tear this room down?”

He drops her hand and walks to the doorway. Aura wants to tell him to be careful, but she’s not sure he’ll listen. What if he is swallowed? Could her dreams do that—whisk him away to some in-between place?

He shimmers as he steps through the doorway. She calls out to him, and he shimmers back into place, instantly. It was only the light playing tricks. But when he turns back to her, he is sobbing—like someone’s stuck a knife beneath his ribcage, like he can’t breathe. The room shines with sunlight and something else. The bleached white floorboards, the blank walls—they pulse with forgetting.

Aura watches her father sob until she can’t stand it anymore. She steps forward—her hooves clack against the wood and it’s the first time in her life that she’s been ashamed of her body, of how large it is and the noise it makes.

“Da,” she whispers. “Let’s go.”

He lets her lead him. In the front room, she’s suddenly terrified that the woman will be there, but it stays empty and she reaches for the front doorknob without letting him go. But when she tries to duck through the front door, he tugs against her, fiercely. His eyes are wild and animal in a way she’s never seen. He twists, she loses her grip on him, and she feels the house hold him tight—the cobwebs of sadness that the woman beats back with her broom are angry now, hard and grasping.

You did this to me, Aura hears, and she knows it is the house talking. You did this to her. You did this to us. Her father moans—high and terrified.

The house is gathering him in. It will pull him into the back room and bleach him away. It will make him into nothing. This house and the ground it stands on—everything wants to forget. To pretend they have never been.

She grabs for him and pulls. The house snaps him away.

“No,” she snarls, and pulls harder—she thinks of Petrolio and Estajfan and how they’ve teased her for being so much smaller than they are, but she is not small here, she is not. She digs her hooves in and pulls with everything she can, with her twin hearts and her love and her hot, hot rage. No, she says again. No. No. No. Give him back.

And then he is through the door and hers again. They are back on the mountain, and you wouldn’t think that they’ve been anywhere except for the fact that their hands are locked together. They stare at each other, breathing hard.

“Don’t ever leave the mountain again,” her father says, finally. “I don’t care if it’s only in your dreams. Do you understand?”

“I can’t control my dreams, Da.”

“The house invites you, and you go in. Don’t go in.”

“But,” she says, “ you go down.”

“If you get caught, they will kill you.” He pauses. “They may be family, but they don’t know you. They won’t understand.”

“No one even knows I’m there.”

“The house knew I was there,” he says. “The house knows you, too.” She sees the effort he makes to calm himself. “You are not— we are not—meant to be.”

The words hurt her so much she can barely breathe. “You’ll never be safe off the mountain. Please don’t go, Aura. Please.”

“All right,” she whispers.

He hugs her. When he lets her go, he says, “You be a good girl and go find your brothers.”

The rage is back in her throat so quickly it burns. “I’m not a girl!” she shouts. “I’m not a girl, and you aren’t a man!”

He nods, stricken. “I won’t say it again.” But he leaves her, frightened by her anger.

She would cry, except that crying will make her think of the house again, and she can’t bear to be sad and scared anymore. Instead she runs and hides in the trees. Petrolio finds her, eventually.

“What happened to you?” he says, and he pulls her hair in the way that she hates. Like her, he is slim and blond, his four white feet always ready to run. When she chases him, she never wins.

Aura can catch Estajfan sometimes, but she’s pretty sure he lets her do it.

“Nothing. Leave me alone.”

But this is Petrolio, so of course he doesn’t. “What happened? Aura, what happened?” Whathappenedwhathappenedwhathappenedwhathappened. Aura, come onnnnn.

She can’t tell him. In the house, when her father let go of her hand, she understood that he was hoping the house would take him back, make him what he used to be. Or, failing that, make him nothing. We are not meant to be.

Her father still loves her, the blonde woman at the window. Their mother. He would be human again in an instant. He would rather be that than be all that they have.

Eventually, with no response from her, Petrolio gets bored and leaves her. She waits under the trees for some time, then heads for the treehouse and destroys it, tossing the pieces off the side of the mountain. When she’s done, the tree is bare and trembling, the ground littered with broken wood, the air menacing and silent. The tree will be angry at her for a long time.

She turns to see her brothers standing silent in the clearing. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there. There is no fear in their faces, just curiosity and a mirroring grief. They feel her heartache without knowing what it is.

The next night, Aura dreams of the house and her mother again. She doesn’t tell her father. She walks right into the house. The flat-nosed man is with her mother and the sadness in her face is gone. Aura watches them, invisible in the corner. She screams, but no one hears a thing.

Many years later, when the meteors come, she is standing where the treehouse used to be. Petrolio and the other centaurs, the ones who were born from the mountain, have gathered in the clearing to watch. Her brother reaches for her hand. Estajfan is nowhere she can see.