Wendy shrugged. “See ya.”
When Wendy got there, the carousel had been packed up. The sun shone on Devon as she walked towards her station wagon and Wendy thought her shadow looked centaur-like for the briefest of moments.
“You leaving?”
“I must.” Devon stopped and smiled at Wendy. It was a restrained smile.
“You coming back?”
“If I need to.”
“Brumbies were shot last night.”
“Yes, unfortunately,” Devon said.
Wendy noticed the carousel horses stood on their poles, side by side. There seemed to be more than should have fit on the carousel.
“Can’t you stay?”
“It’s kind of urgent. Why I have to leave.”
“Where did you get them those extra carousel horses?”
“That’s my hobby, I collect ‘em…” She unlocked the trolley that pulled the carousel.
When Wendy looked again, Devon’s silhouette once again looked like a centaur. Her body was elongated like a horse but her torso was human and the long plait’s shadow seemed to flick on it’s own as if shooing away flies. Devon noticed Wendy’s gaze at her shadow and flicked her head back, the shadow transmogrified again to a woman with a long plait.
“Take care of yourself, kiddo. Remember everything goes round and round, what’s gone comes back, what’s old is new and all that.”
“You too, Devon.”
Wendy stepped forward and put her arms around her. She smelled like horse hair and fresh lawn. “I hope I see you again.”
“You will.”
Wendy turned and left. She wanted to ask Devon if she knew which of the horses were shot, if her silver brumby had been but she knew it was best not to ask.
When she walked back home she found her father and Lillian sitting on the verandah together, mugs of coffee in their hands. She pretended she didn’t see them and walked through the lane on the street parallel to theirs so they wouldn’t see her.
Back to Werrily Creek. But the caution ribbons of yellow and black were up and Coorooma’s one police car was there with the hazard lights flashing so Wendy knew best not to go forward.
She walked back home and found her father and Lillian had their arms around each other. Like children doing the wrong thing, they moved apart but Wendy shook her head.
“It’s fine with me.” Her father patted for her to join them and Wendy sat between them. They sat together on the verandah in silence for a long time.
Wendy went back to Werrily Creek two days after that. She’d returned each afternoon after in the hope the silver brumby would return, but he never did. At first she’d cried and asked the people of the town if they knew the colours of the brumbies that were shot but nobody knew and Clive would have never told her the truth.
One day a hand written envelope addressed to “Wendy who doesn’t believe in fairies” was in the letterbox. When she opened it there was a photo of a carousel. The horses were unadorned with no saddles or reins. Nor were they attached to the carousel with poles. They looked like wild horses and in the front, breaking into a canter, was a silver brumby. Her silver brumby.
“Believe. Love, Devon,” was scrawled in messy writing on the back.
Wendy did.
***
Angela Rega is a belly dancing school librarian with a passion for folklore, fairy tales and furry creatures. She was raised in a multi-lingual household where nobody finished a sentence in the same language and still struggles with syntax. Her work has appeared in publications including The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, Crossed Genres, Fablecroft Press, Belladonna Publishing and PS Publications. She keeps a small website here: angierega.webs.com
Eli the Hideous Horse Boy
Michael Leonberger
Taryn escaped from home whenever she could, dashing through crooked neighborhood streets lined with shuddering houses, leaning almost together in a show of support. She’d dart past the woods and the shopping centers, all fetid litter and glittering candy huts and boarded-up windows, before emerging on the sloping hills beyond. There she’d lounge on green grass nearly untouched, cut through with the dull gray arteries of water drainage units, unfit for urban development. She’d lay with a book open, shoes and socks kicked to the side, stretching toes through blades of grass and imagining that she was someone she was not, somewhere she was not. Someone brave and inquisitive and capable of great adventures, in a town that was not this one. This synthetic scoop, where most of her adventures came from television, where most of the local culture was provided by corporate supermarkets, and all the memories she’d developed in their parking lots with her friends weren’t as unique as she thought. Just adolescent discoveries in the glow of artificial street lamps, by the metallic cattle of shopping carts and old cars, surrounded by the trash of old receipts and plastic bags blowing across the blacktop like tumbleweeds.
When they were especially adventurous they’d take their indiscretions to the woods, and there was a sort of untouched magic there, if you stepped over the crushed fast food bags and French fry containers that sprouted like garish, greasy mushrooms. She’d had her first sexual experience there with a boy whose clammy hands had made it beneath her shirt and down her pants, and it was so genuinely exciting and made her feel so much a complete person that she had to imagine his beautiful face hadn’t been lit up by a gas station sign. That she hadn’t peeled away a straw wrapper from the sweat of her naked back when they’d finished. That she hadn’t pulled her underwear back over her feet with the smell of gasoline as thick and sweet in her nose as his sweat and the subtle humming green smells of the woods underneath.
He’d joined the army afterwards because he hadn’t known what else to do. Having sex with her hadn’t made him feel as much like a man as he’d needed, she thought. She resented herself, maybe. Thought those things bitterly at his funeral, after he’d taken a bullet to the head. Thought him heroic and beautiful and remembered his silly smile and blamed herself, yes, for not being reason enough for him to stay.
Not that she’d been in love. In love with the soft sinew of his body, maybe. The muscles that rippled beneath, the way the sweat coated him, made him bestial, even. The glorious scribble on his face when he’d buck and finish, and he was too embarrassed for her to look. But even the darkness wasn’t safe from the electric glow of the florescence and she could see the sweat glean up in the woods in neon that clung to every inch of him like plastic wrap.
She’d think of him and feel the flutter in her stomach, lightheaded and out of breath and then remember he was dead and the colors in her memory would fade and her lust would dry.
He had been stardust and now burned far away in a skyline where the stars couldn’t make it past the electric pollution anyway.
His sensitivity and thoughtfulness had been unique to the boys she knew in town, blunted by the men in his life who hadn’t any use for that. Who’d snipped off those bits, and sent him perforated to a pinewood box.
She missed him and hated them and found herself on the top of the green hills, feeling widowed but young and finding mirror versions of herself in the stories she’d read. Even the stories she’d write, that she didn’t show anyone, naked and panting as they were. She worked at a diner on the weekends and shelved books at the library weekdays, and figured if she saved enough she’d make it to college, and maybe then, if she kept her wings relatively muscular, she could learn to fly.
Derrel Johnson had fallen in love with Taryn’s quiet eyes, the plump purse of her lips, her flowing, thick coils of charcoal hair and the idea that she’d never had sex in the woods, that she didn’t know what that was at all.
He saw her and wanted her and thought she’d be a good thing to fill in the negative space of photographs in his life. She dressed politely at the diner and he’d try and pinch her backside and act like he hadn’t, while his friends laughed and snickered and he figured she liked it.
He pretended to browse for books
at the library, where she wore skirts and sometimes kicked off her shoes, and he’d ogle her transparently from above books that he’d sometimes read upside down, which was a little joke to him. Her face alive with discomfort, and he liked that, too. Figured she couldn’t look bad. Figured her discomfort was like a growing pain, the last part before she learned to lust for him, before she entered the world of adults and sex, and what was there not to lust for?
He had a perfect sculpt. A scar on his right temple from when his younger brother had swung a shovel at him, but the hair had grown back okay over it. It hid the damaged part where the seed for violence had grown in his brain. He had a strong nose and a powerful neck and shoulders. A little too much beer had created a community center in his gut, but he looked in the mirror and saw power there, too, especially when he sucked it up, and what did women care, anyway? Men weren’t attractive besides, and women weren’t visually engaged. That’s how his mom had ended up with his ogre of a father. She’d left, of course, eventually, because she’d been a monster, too, underneath a charming exterior.
He pitied his old man but thought he was a little bit of a sap for allowing her to go in the first place. The old man had taken those frustrations out on him, with his fists, when he’d been too small to fight back. Only now he was bigger, and he’d have a lovely girl in his life soon enough, and then the old man would have to admit, somewhere in the crumbling mania of his aging mind, that his son was superior.
He saw Taryn lastly at church, in a powder blue skirt that he figured was too short, that showed her pretty knee caps too plainly, that he wouldn’t let her wear when she was his, but that was somewhere in the future, and so he soaked her up now. She volunteered to give out food to sick older women, with oxygen tubes coiling out of their noses like awful snakes, and he figured time was not on her side. Someday she’d look like that, too.
He hoped they’d made a pile of children before then.
Boys stared. Even those adequate at conversation, polite enough to maintain eye contact and crack a joke until Taryn walked away. But if she looked back at the right moment, she’d catch them looking.
With Derrel, it was worse. There was a meanness there, a possessiveness, and he didn’t ever talk to her in real life. Just looked. Tried to touch her. Spoke about her loudly and showered her with vulgarities if he was drunk. How good she looked, how much he wanted her, always with the smug air of someone waiting. She’d catch him waiting in places she didn’t expect, outside of her house at night, or in the library when she was working, with that piercing, childish meanness in his small eyes, and she did her best to avoid him.
He’d taken to sitting at the diner for hours, just so he could pinch her.
She’d told him off but he figured she was joking. Most people did, actually. He was attractive. Athletic. Going nowhere, but in this town that didn’t count against you, so people didn’t understand maybe why she wouldn’t just take what was given to her.
Well, she wouldn’t. Not from him or anyone else. She had her own designs on life, and he wasn’t anywhere near being a part of her plan.
The only thing they had in common would have repulsed him, and she let it warm her heart on cold nights when she’d look out her window and catch his brake lights peeling away, down the road, curving with drunk imprecision.
She’d wonder how long he’d been outside her home, drinking in his car, thinking about her, and to prevent herself from screaming she’d think about her secret.
The sideshow girl.
The one in the traveling carnival that had set up their tents outside town, by the old mine. If you were standing at the top of those green, sloping hills, you could see their lights, dotting the horizon like Christmas colored cigarette butts twinkling in the dark. The sounds of crashing metal and hushed screams carried along the breeze at night.
At the carnival the world didn’t seem so small, so mean, and failed dreams didn’t seem so gutting.
Kids climbed in their cars and headed towards those pied piper lights, to ride the bone-rattling machines, pile-driving along rickety tracks through clouds of grease and hot butter. The show tents surrounded the rides in candy-cane stripes faded the color of nicotine, and inside one of those tents was Carlotta.
Her hair waxy red, the soft muscles of her tan and sturdy body accentuated by the burlesque corset and hole-punched fishnets she’d wear. Her eyeliner was perfect, peeling her wide eyes with carefully paralleled streaks, underscoring her sly wisdom—like she would teach you things, but only if you began by getting comfortable with the idea that she was superior to you, that you were only an amusement to her.
The sideshow girl’s eyes spoke of power.
And Taryn wanted to be seen in those eyes.
She wanted, she supposed, to break a little in those eyes, wanted Carlotta to instruct her in things she couldn’t learn from anyone else in this town.
She’d heard the boys talking about it. Derrel in particular. How, if you paid her a pile of cash, she’d teach you things, in the smoky darkness of her tent.
Things Taryn certainly hadn’t learned in the woods with her previous lover, as good as he’d been.
And he was dead now, and she was stuck here, so she figured it didn’t much matter how she learned anything, besides.
So she waited around after the show, after Carlotta had attached ribbed metal cones over her breasts and caressed them with a buzz saw until yellow sparks leapt off the stage. Taryn tingled all over watching her. The command she had over her audience. The sly mystery in her eyes, and the efficient sensuality of her body.
Once the show was over and everyone had piled out Taryn approached her, trembling all over, sweat pooling on her scalp beneath her hair.
Carlotta had thrown a cream silk robe on and was lighting a cigarette beside a ladder made of blades she’d climbed up moments earlier. Her eyes flicked up and she smiled.
“Hi,” Taryn said, curling her fingers in the air in an embarrassed school girl wave. Then: “You’re amazing.”
“Thank you,” Carlotta said. Her eyes belonged to a cat goddess, her grin too. She was tall, even without heels, taller than Taryn had been prepared for. She could see the thick smear of her foundation up close. The beads of sweat that couldn’t break through it.
“Um…I was just wondering…” Taryn started. She had the cash in her right hand and was fidgeting with it. Carlotta’s eyes dropped to it and her grin grew a little wider.
“What are you thinking about, honey?”
“There are things I’d like to learn,” Taryn stammered.
“There are things I’d like to teach,” she said, stepping forward, looping one finger beneath the strap of the white tank top Taryn was wearing and pulling it down her shoulder. “This’ll be fun. Usually it’s only boys. Slobbering hard-ons. This should be more sophisticated. But…” And she stopped for a moment, stepping backwards, finishing her cigarette and crushing the butt beneath her toes. “I’m going to need to see your ID.”
Taryn swallowed and fished it out of her drawstring bag, hands trembling, almost dropping it as she passed it along to Carlotta.
“Nineteen. You’re Eli’s age. Down to the month.”
“Eli?” Taryn asked.
“Oh,” Carlotta said, clearing her throat. “The Horse Boy.” Behind her, a fan rotated lazily, murmuring electric. Taryn caught onto its rhythm and it calmed her. So did this small talk, and she allowed it go on so she didn’t collapse into a jittery heap of desperate nerves.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Sure you do. That’s why you kids come, at least when you’re younger. I am more popular with a slightly older crowd,” she said, smiling. “I only bring him up because of your birthdate, but also that.” She nodded towards the dog-eared paperbacks climbing out of her bag. Steamy southern gothic pulps. “Strange kind of girl brings books to a carnival. Then wants to pay the sideshow performer for sex.”
Taryn blushed somewhat defiantly. The truth was complex, but s
he didn’t feel too strongly the need to defend herself. Part of this whole thing was about being broken down, she figured. At least that’s what the boys had said.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Carlotta said. “You’re looking for a thrill, then I can provide. Just don’t let him see you with those, if you go to his tent. He’ll talk your ear off.”
“Eli the Horse Boy?”
She nodded. “We all thought he was dumb as a stack of bricks, until one of your local boys hit him hard enough. Unlocked his jaw a little, we figure. One way to fix up that mass of cartilage he calls a face. Cheaper than surgery besides, and now you can’t get him to shut up. It was a little easier, to be honest, when we thought he was stupid.”
Taryn stopped shaking, and something cold ran through her, putting out the flames at the tips of her nerves. “You call him the Horse Boy?”
Then Carlotta rolled backwards on her heel, a confused look on her face. “Yes. The Hideous Horse Boy. It doesn’t matter, just when people come around here with extra cash, it’s for one of two things.”
“People spend the night with the Horse Boy?” Taryn asked.
“You could call it that,” Carlotta said, but her face was a frown now, and whatever chemistry had connected the two of them was starting to evaporate. “Hey, I’m just making chit chat. It doesn’t matter. There’s a bed in the back, and that cold money isn’t getting any warmer in your hand…”
Taryn looked at her, but folded the money back up. “I think I have to go,” she heard herself say.
“Oh, come now,” Carlotta said. “Don’t be shy. You’re young. You’ve still got the baby fat in your cheeks. There are things I can do to your soft little body that you can’t imagine…”
But it had passed, and she couldn’t get the idea out of her head: someone being hit hard enough that their bones finally slid together correctly. That they could finally speak. And this was somehow amusing to Carlotta.
“Another time,” Taryn said, walking backwards towards the tent’s entrance.
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