The creature looked at Branson and paused, lifting his head. A smile, Branson thought, smiling back. He bent and lay a hand against his booted prosthetic and waited.
The salamander went to the burning oil and sucked the flames from the top of the dish, leaving just enough fire to reignite the entire surface. Then it wheeled on its haunches and raced for Branson, leaping first to the wooden leg, then scampering across Branson’s fingers and up his arm onto Branson’s shoulder.
“You are quite the fine little fellow,” Branson crooned, dusting a fingertip over the lizard’s brow ridge and stroking down his back to his tail. Cat-like, the salamander closed its eyes and lowered its head as Branson continued to stroke the delicate, moist skin. The salamander purred, its tongue rasping slowly in and out of its mouth with each slow pant.
Suddenly, the creature sucked in a convulsive breath. Branson cupped it in his hands, thrusting it away from his body. He knew what was coming.
The salamander burped, expelling a cinnamon-scented fireball the size of a cantaloupe, singeing the hair on the back of Branson’s fingers and very nearly his eyebrows.
“Salamanders?” the witch said, a sound of curious awe in her voice. “Eating the flames?”
Branson nodded, laying the creature on his forearm and stroking it again with his finger. “My guess is this is just one of a brood,” he said. “A scout. We should be able to entice the others out fairly easily.” He frowned. “Mama must have died. I don’t think she would have allowed them to siphon off so much heat if she’d been around. Salamanders are rather crafty, and good at hiding their tracks.”
“But you can remove them?”
He tickled the lizard under its chin and nodded. “It shouldn’t be a problem to relocate them.”
Branson was carrying his things through the great steel doors, ready to depart when the Head Witch came to greet him. She carried his payment in a small purse and she was smiling.
“Would you consider staying on?”
“As mechanic, or doctor?”
“Both, I think,” the witch said. She handed over the purse. “The dragons say you have a pleasant touch.”
Branson smiled—to have the respect of dragons—who could ask for more?
But he wasn’t certain. He enjoyed tinkering around his cottage, helping the neighbors’ animals—and he’d bet after this the villagers would call upon him for help again. To work for the witches would be an honor—and those dragons—beautiful creatures.
“What about the people in the neighborhood?”
“You could help them—as long as your official duties were taken care of.”
He looked down the mountain to his cottage. The path was long and painful. And if he offered to help the villagers, he’d be making the trip often. It was tempting to stay, but...
“We could help with that leg of yours,” the Head Witch said.
And yet, Branson still wasn’t sure.
“Let me think about it.”
He patted his horse and climbed into his cart, and headed for home. The yellow salamander climbed over his shoulder to watch. The red and the orange crawled out of his tool bag and played at his feet. They kept him company all the way down the mountain.
About the Author
Kelly A. Harmon’s short fiction has been published in Flame Tree Press's Swords and Steam; Evil Jester Press's Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace and Misery; Parsec Ink's Triangulation: Dark Glass, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Charm City Darkness series, an urban fantasy that takes place in Baltimore, Maryland. Her website is kellyaharmon.com.
Winter Horses and Other Unknowables
Leslie J. Anderson
The winter I learned the truth about Mary’s deer was also the coldest on record since 1932. It was the kind of cold that made your lungs hurt and your skin prickle, but the horses still needed to eat, so I drove my hand-me-down hatchback through the woods to Black Star Stables, where Mary taught children to ride and rehabilitated horses other people would have sold for dog food. Some of them had already been sold for dog food, and we’d bought them for fifty dollars behind a rusting auction barn when lazy dealers didn’t want to bother to load them onto their trucks.
One of the fifty-dollar horses raced my little car up the driveway that morning. He was young and had already put on enough weight that it didn’t make me sick to look at him. I had no idea if he was trained at all, but we would find out when he was strong enough. With a happy flip of his head he disappeared around the corner of the barn, waiting for me to fetch him inside. We might have to keep them all inside, I thought. Horses can endure more than most mammals, but everything has its limits.
I didn’t get out of the car right away. I let the heater run and hoped I could soak up some of its heat before I had to work, and I read the letter again.
Thank you for using GeneMatch Michigan™! Our goal is to map families across Michigan and eventually the Midwest! Your genetics matched 12 of our other participants! 3 of these matched as sibling! 1 matched as parent! 8 matched as cousin or other family relation. For full details on your genetic matches, see your Personal Genetic Relation Tree below. So far our results have been 99.8% reliable. If you believe we have made a mistake, please contact us. Thank you again for volunteering for our program. This information will contribute to genetic research for decades to come!
Below that was a detailed family tree, with participant numbers where the names should be. Over father was the number 087593 and below that were three sibling numbers, three more siblings than I’d had before I’d opened the envelope. Before I opened the envelope, there was only me.
There was a sharp tap on the window and I jumped, shoving the letter away as if it was something I should be ashamed of, though I’d done nothing wrong. I’d only been curious. I’d only let a sliver of a suspicion dig into my mind.
I don’t trust your mother, Maria.
Mary stood beside the car, her hand raised in case she had to tap the glass again. Her sharp features were frozen in irritation, which could have easily looked like fury if you didn’t know her. Mary was an old-school horse woman. She had a gun in her truck and dirt in her skin. I wasn’t sure how old she was, maybe 65 or 92 or 300. She’d lost an eye in a riding accident before I could remember, and her white iris looked oddly opalescent, reflecting light almost like a cat’s eye sometimes. A lot of people thought she was a mean woman. But even at 16, I could tell that wasn’t true. She’d seen a lot of hurt in the world, and healed what she could of it. Mostly she was furious that the world rewarded her by sending her more hurt.
“There are more bones by the west gate,” she said as we walked to the barn.
I hurried after her. The sunset threw strange light through the trees, reflected off the ice, lanced blue light through the forest. Somewhere ice cracked a branch, which crashed to the ground. I almost rolled my ankle on the way into the barn. The stones around the stable were oddly round, like ugly grey marbles, and I was always sliding over them and picking them out of the horses’ hooves. It was just another strange thing, like all the other strange things about the place. Like the old dog who’d been hit by a car six months ago (the neighbor who hit him stopped to apologize, hat in hands, unable to look at Mary’s white eye). The dog came hobbling home that evening and fell asleep in the tack room, like nothing happened. I told Mary we should take him to the vet, but she said he was fine, and he was.
We worked in silence for hours. Mary didn’t talk much usually, and she almost never talked while she worked. It gave me a lot of time to think, and I had a lot to think about. I thought about my dad’s head rolling across the pillow, his eyes focused on nothing. I tripped over the bottles beside the bed trying to catch him before he rolled to the floor. I don’t trust your mother, Maria. I know some things she did, and that’s just the things I know! Merde, Maria, assiste-moi. Je suis glissais. I realized I was falling behind when Mary came up behind me and punched me on the shoulder. I tried not to rub it, but it did hurt. I don’t think
Mary knew how strong she was, or maybe she did.
“You’re dragging today,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry. Do better.”
I nodded. It was one of her sayings, something I’d heard again and again since I was six, like heels down, eyes up and breathe at the halts and turn the water pump off when you’re done with it. I tried to put my head down and push through the haze in my brain. I checked the fifty-dollar gelding and found heat in one of his ankles. When horses are injured, their body produces heat, and the heat can kill infection, but heat can cause its own damage. It can cause the connective tissue to break down. I’d keep an eye on it. That’s the best you can do sometimes. Keep an eye on it and wait. The cold was probably good for it today.
“What’s wrong?” May asked, appearing over me like a phantom.
“I think he twisted his ankle.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I found out my mom’s cheating on my dad, or she did once.”
Silence. I looked up at her and the gelding stepped away from me. He was one of those easily irritated souls. He had no time for whatever it was I was trying to do.
“So what are you going to do now that you know?”
“I don’t know. It changes everything.”
Her gaze didn’t shift from me. If there was any movement in her face, it was the slightest deepening of her almost permanent frown.
“Doesn’t it?”
“Maria, I want to show you something. But I’m trying to decide if you can handle it.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. For one, it was the longest string of consecutive words she’d said to me. Secondly, if Mary didn’t think I could handle something, I almost certainly couldn’t. I felt her goals for me were almost always just above my abilities. I was always failing by the skin of my teeth, and she endured me because I was the only one who didn’t have a family emergency every time the thermometer dipped below 25.
I ran my hand along the gelding’s neck until she finally nodded and shrugged one shoulder. When a horse follows you, they usually follow the motion of your shoulder because they can clearly see it. The best horsemen can control a horse just with that movement. Mary could, and she could move me with it too. We headed toward the Far Field, a pasture I’d never been to. There was a long, fenced path to it, through the woods. I assumed there was a paddock at the other end, but only Mary led horses out there. She said it was too far away and she wanted to keep an eye on us. Sometimes she wandered out there with a bucket and a loaf of old bread “to feed the deer.”
That’s what we did now. She went into her house, a tiny, battered white shotgun shack on the property. It had once been surrounded by flowerbeds, but she’d let the foals loose in her yard every once in awhile and they’d trampled or eaten all of it. There was a lawn jockey, half sunken into one of the beds. For some reason someone glued little mirrored tesserae over its eyes. They reflected the white snow and gray sky.
The ancient dog came out first, pushing the screen door open with his nose and leaning against my legs, heavier and heavier until I bent and scratched his eyes. Mary reappeared with a metal bucket and a loaf of bread. She handed me the bucket and I looked down at red—blood red, and meat—chunks of fatty meat. The bucket was heavy with it.
“Mary!”
“Keep your voice down and let’s go.”
“What are we doing?”
“Feeding the deer.”
The ice was thick on the trail and cracked under our boots. The strange round stones rolled into the ditches and I could hear the ice breaking trees in the forest. There was no paddock at the end of the fence; it simply stopped at a metal gate that Mary unchained and kicked open. The old dog snuffled at my bucket, and I shooed him away without looking too closely at it. It made my stomach turn.
The path went on and on. I saw deer trails converge with it, the animals wandering from the forest to walk along the wide road. There were also tracks I didn’t recognize, tiny bird tracks and little mammal hands, maybe a possum or a raccoon. There were larger tacks, four toed with little points of claws. My blood went cold as I thought of bears. Could there be bears in the woods? The ice beneath the tracks seemed almost blue, like antifreeze. I kept walking.
The path ended in a field with a lake in the center, or maybe a very deep puddle, as the tall, tan grass grew right through the ice. Standing on the ice, sniffing at the surface, were six or seven deer. As we walked closer I realized they were larger than deer. My mind corrected to elk, but elk didn’t live around here. My mind corrected again, and again, as we walked toward them, flicking through mammals that made sense—that could possibly be standing in front of me, even if they had to escape from a zoo to be there.
But it was impossible. They were too huge, too lean. Their necks were too long. They were the wrong color, a tannish-green that reminded me of moss on the side of rocks. I kept walking, but my joints tightened. Blood roared in my head. My body reacted like an animal, afraid and unsure and afraid because I was unsure. Mary shrugged me forward.
The first one raised its head to look at us, and it wasn’t a deer. Its eyes were centered in its face, huge and silvery, and its long face had no nose. It did have a mouth, and it opened to make a kind of rasping cry that the rest of the herd reacted to. Seven silver-eyed faces. Seven raspy cries. They came toward us, walking with a sliding step that stuttered at the end in a way that struck me as unearthly.
“Dump it there,” Mary said, and I did.
The blood splashed across the snow and the things calmly bent their heads to eat. I wanted to look away from the tearing, slurping creatures, but something in my mind was certain they would attack if I did, chew and shred me to pieces and leave me in the snow with the rest of the meat. My breath came quickly, making tiny clouds in front of my nose.
“Calm down,” Mary said.
She spoke coolly, as if we were discussing the gelding again. Her dog walked under the creatures, sniffing their green fur. One of them lazily pushed him aside with its foot—something that was both a paw and a hoof.
“Those are monsters, Mary! They were just out here the whole time?!”
“The whole time,” Mary said, “long before you were here, I found one with a broken leg and helped it heal. I hid it in the shed for weeks. It was an interesting time.”
I didn’t know what to say. I watched the creatures finish their meal, lick each others’ faces.
“They like bread too,” She said, and started tossing bits of the loaf to them. They gobbled it up, long tongues as thin as shoelaces plucking the bread from the snow. In a way I felt betrayed, no matter that it made no sense.
“Why did you show me this?”
Mary looked disappointed, like I’d missed something obvious.
“Sometimes you learn something about how the world works, and it don’t make anything clearer. It’s just another thing.”
The next morning was just as cold, but the wind died down. I pulled a hat on at the door and stood with my hand on my keys. Was everything the same, or was everything different? Did I know more about my world, or did the unknown simply recede slightly, giving nothing but a small sense of what I could never know?
“Maria, Maria, where are you going?”
“Work, dad.”
“Do you know where your mother is?”
He was leaning on the kitchen wall with a bottle in his hand, but it was unopened. I walked over and put a hand around it. It was still cold. He must have just taken it out of the fridge.
“Come on, dad. Let me have it.”
He looked at my hand around the bottle. I thought I saw his fingers tighten, but then he released it. I took it into the kitchen.
“I’m so sorry, Maria. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, Dad. It’s really okay.”
When I arrived at the barn, the gelding was waiting for me and trotted along the fence beside my car. Mary was waiting for me inside, already leading a horse wit
h nothing but a rope around her neck and a shoulder shrug.
“Go feed the deer, would you? The stuff’s in the freezer, in the garage.”
Her door was unlocked. The old dog perked up as soon as the door opened and woofed with something like confusion when she saw me. He heaved himself up onto his paws, and I could almost hear his old bones creak. I’d never been in Mary’s house before. It was surprisingly feminine. Everything was pastel, including the pink carpet. There were doilies under the lamps and a cross-stitch on the wall that said Bless This Home.
I passed a photo on the kitchen counter in a white and silver frame that said “Family.” The woman might have been Mary, a million years younger. There was a little girl in her arms, smiling and holding out her hands toward the camera. Sometimes you learn something about how the world works, and it doesn’t make anything clearer. It’s just another thing.
I found the freezer and the bucket and filled it. The dog followed me out to the field. The ice broke under my feet. There were the deer, standing on the pond, exactly where they were before, their strange long faces turned toward the ground. When they saw me they made their raspy calls and came over to eat. One of them kept coming, that slow shaky gait so unlike any other creature I’d seen. Was this the one Mary saved? Was it frightened by me?
I stood completely still, though it let the cold seep into me more deeply and I wanted nothing more than to thrust my hands into my pockets and hunch over—to try to shield myself. The creature leaned forward, its long neck stretching longer, until the tip of its nose brushed the top of my hand, the one I’d peeled a glove off, to better open the bread. Warmth spread across it, as if I’d brushed the top of a flame. Then it turned and went back to the herd.
I came back from college and decided to stay with Mary until I figured things out. I worry sometimes that I’m feeding off of her certainty, unable to make my own. My parents don’t like it, but we don’t talk much anyway. Mary sold the gelding to a little girl who uses him for 4H, his ankles clear as ice. There are still seven deer. There are always exactly seven deer, with metallic eyes and thin tongues and mouths full of teeth. The lawn jockey has sunk up to his neck and I think I’ll let the ground take him. The old dog is still here. He sleeps at the foot of my bed. His eyes have gone silver.
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