Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

Aura is Heather’s shadow—guarding the door, leading her out now and then to walk among the mountain trees to relieve herself. Estajfan and Petrolio resume their runs down the mountain, this time looking for life instead of food. Carrion birds circle slowly overhead and the streets are empty. Estajfan and Petrolio bend through the doorways of house after house and find only bodies. Children on the floor and parents sprawled near them, dead of madness and grief. Plants have already wound through the windows and into the rooms, taking back the houses.

It is so strange to find the world of humans as silent as his mountaintop home. Maybe more so. There is, at least, no screaming, for which he’s very grateful.

How had he not known this destruction was coming? How had he not seen it? The ground had been starving the humans out, yes, and he’d thought that was the thing making him so uneasy—the casual cruelty of it, the willingness of the mountain centaurs and the animals and the plants around them to let the humans starve.

You have a choice to make, the fox had said, and so he’d made it. He couldn’t stand by and watch them disappear. And so he had done what he had done, had gone down and found food where he could and ensured that Heather and her family survived. Even that had not been enough, in the end.

Tonight he’s in the mountain city, alone in the gathering dark. There is movement at the end of the street; he slinks into the overgrown space between two houses and freezes. Ahead of him, a deer, young and cautious, steps into the twilight. It is eating the vines that grow up the sides of the buildings. It stops to look around, then lowers its head to the vines again.

The blade is out of his hand and plunging into the deer’s jugular before he has time to think about it. The deer drops, instantly. It makes no sound.

He tries to ignore the shiver of rage that rustles through the plants around him. How long has it been since deer ventured into the city? Years, most likely. He withdraws the knife, wipes it clean on the grass.

When he leans forward to lift the body, the vines have already begun to gather it in, green tendrils winding around the deer’s legs and chest and heart.

No, he thinks, and pulls. The vines do not release it, and the body begins to decompose before his eyes. He slices into the deer again and rescues a haunch as tendrils and roots pull the rest of it into the earth.

You made your choice, he hears the ground whisper. The green things curl around his feet and pull at his hooves. He steps out of their clutches, then heads back up the mountain. The haunch stays fresh in his hands and does not rot.

In the mountain clearing, under the moon, he gathers dead branches from the forest and lights a fire. The mountain centaurs mill about, suspicious as always.

“You killed it,” one says to him.

Estajfan shrugs. “She needs to eat.”

“The human has been eating,” says another. A female. Green eyes and brown skin, silver hair. “Aura feeds her every day.”

“She needs protein,” he says. The mountain centaurs do not eat meat—they barely eat at all, from what he can see, subsisting on sunlight and anger.

He and his siblings haven’t eaten meat since their father died.

The centaur glowers at him. “The animals will fear you now,” she says. “The mountain is changing.”

“The mountain was already changing!” Estajfan shouts. “I want to survive,” he says. “And I want the humans— her— to survive. Is that so wrong?”

“Look what the humans did to the rest of the world,” she hisses.

Estajfan sighs and does not answer. He roasts the leg until the smell changes to what he remembers from the days when their father cooked for them. Yes, he knows the stories. The way the dragons vanished, the way the sprites in the salt mines dwindled as humans dug deeper and deeper into the mountains, as they mined for salt, as they hoped for diamonds and gold. The ships that spread death in the water, the airplanes that belched death in the sky.

“They weren’t all bad,” he insists, to himself and to them.

The mountain centaur is unmoved. “Enough of them were.”

Estajfan pulls the roasted meat from the fire and carries it to the cave where Heather waits, just beyond a copse of trees. Aura, keeping watch, takes the meat from him.

“Where’s Petrolio?” he says, following Aura to where Heather lies on the bed.

Aura breaks off little chunks and feeds them to Heather, piece by piece. “Up in your spot at the top of the mountain,” she says. “Hoping Da will give him wisdom.”

He snorts. “How much wisdom has Da given us lately?”

“Not much,” Aura admits. “But Petrolio is ever hopeful.”

“What are the desks for?” Heather asks, as if she’s just noticed them. She points to a corner of the cave, where three children’s school desks sit covered in a layer of dust.

“Our father brought them to us when we were young,” Aura says. “He liked us to stand in front of them when he was teaching lessons.”

“I thought maybe they were for young centaurs,” Heather says. “Though that doesn’t really make sense, does it?”

“There are no children here. The centaurs have no young.” Aura stands up and brushes the dirt from her legs. “Do you think you have the strength to come outside for a little while?”

Heather blinks at both of them, then glances at the desks. “None of this makes sense,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” Aura whispers. “I wish everything was different.”

He watches Heather sit up, slowly, and brace herself against the bed.

“So they’re really gone,” she says. “It wasn’t just a dream.”

He’s gone past her house, down in the city. He hasn’t looked inside.

“Yes,” he says. “But you’re here.”

She only looks at him, and her eyes are very far away. “Was it worth it? The mountain has the world now?”

To this, he has no answer.

She turns away from both of them and looks back to the wall.

Heather sees, and yet she cannot see. Long stretches of sleep peppered with even longer periods of lying awake, unable to get off the bed, unable to move at all.

Where are they, her girls? Far below her, hanging in the kitchen. When she closes her eyes, the image is imprinted on the back of her eyelids. Their tiny faces going black and green.

Come back.

Come back.

Come back to me.

They do not answer. They are gone.

She sleeps.

She eats what Aura feeds her, but cannot taste.

Estajfan brings her a plump avocado that Aura opens with a small knife she keeps tucked in her shoulder bag, her hands at once alien and also so human. The desks in the cave, the picture frames that gather dust. Everything is familiar and strange.

Sometimes Aura hums wordlessly and sometimes Estajfan hums along with her. Sometimes he sings the words. Heather hadn’t known he could sing.

The walls of the cave are dotted with shelves and lined with cupboards and cabinets filled with surprises. Dishes and cutlery. A child’s wagon, a butter churn. Lanterns, empty and dry.

A laptop computer sits on one of the desks, a small handheld video game atop it. On another are the paints and pencil crayons she gave to Estajfan those years ago.

The drawings she made for him are tacked up on the wall. There are more pencils and pens and sheets of blank paper and pictures torn from magazines, stock photos still in frames. Smiling children, smiling families. All dead now. All gone.