by Jeffrey Ford
As soon as the word was out of his mouth, the door opened, someone entered and then it was shut quickly; the only sound, the clicking of the latch.
“Doctor?” he whispered.
“Shhhhh,” came the reply, and he knew immediately that it was Nona. A surge of warmth emanated from his solar plexus and moved out in all directions through his body. A slight buzzing filled his head, and, for the first time since waking, he wondered if he were not really still asleep. It was only when he felt the weight of her body press down on the mattress next to him and smelled the tell-tale hint of lemon from her hair that he was certain it was not a phantom.
His mouth was dry but he finally managed to swallow. “Nona?”
“Shhhh,” she cautioned and at the same time placed her open palm flat against his chest. His heart slammed as if trying to break through the skin and fill her grasp. With a gentle nudge she pushed him down onto his back. She stood up and pulled back the covers and climbed into the bed. Her body shivered next to his and he knew without touching her that she wore nothing. He enveloped her in his huge arms. As they lay silent and still his warmth was transferred to her, and he adopted the rhythm of her breathing. After some time, she turned to face him and kissed him just below his left eye. Because of the awkward nature of his snout, he couldn’t return the kiss, so instead he stuck out his tongue and licked her shoulder. He ran his hoof across her breasts as she scratched the hide of his beastly leg.
When she mounted him, she quietly gasped. He lowed, but with his mouth shut so the sound stayed within his chest. She began to move and then reached up and grabbed his horns for leverage. The bed creaked and the headboard lightly tapped the wall behind it. As their combined motion became more violent, Belius’ mouth would slip open and release a particle of his imprisoned voice. “Shhh,” she said, and then sounded off louder than he had. In the middle of their love making, she stopped suddenly.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I thought I heard footsteps,” she whispered.
They lay locked together, frozen, listening until neither of them could stand it and they had to continue.
After they had finished, and Nona again lay at his side, Belius didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Thank you.”
“I love you, Belius,” she whispered into his pointed ear.
“How can you?” he asked.
“At first, you frightened me, but I’ve come to see how gentle you really are.”
“Is my being gentle enough for you to love me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so ugly, though,” he said.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of ugliness as a matter of looks. I’ve known real ugliness in my life, and many times it’s come from the people with the smoothest faces and most beautiful eyes.”
There was silence for a time. They both listened to the storm outside. It was Belius who finally interrupted the quiet. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“You want to know why I live with my uncle?”
“Yes,” he murmured. “I want to know everything.”
“Well, I know quite a lot about you from talking to your mother, so I suppose it’s only fair. When I tell you, though, you’ve got to promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“You have to promise that you won’t feel badly for me.”
“I hate pity,” said Belius.
“I know,” she said. A few moments passed and then she began, her words coming with the same complacency with which she did everything but make love. “When I was younger, I lived with my parents. My mother is the doctor’s sister. Like you, I had keen interests in many things. Life was very powerful. A few weeks after my sixteenth birthday, while my mother was away visiting friends, my father forced himself on me. I had no warning. I was frightened and confused, but when I tried to get away from him, he slapped my face with the back of his hand and I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was lying on the floor, my dress torn, my blood all over me. He was standing over me, tightening his belt. He warned me, ‘If you say anything to your mother, I’ll kill you both.’
“I never said a word, but a few months later it became obvious that I was pregnant. I tried to hide it as long as I could, but my mother finally noticed. She was hysterical. She asked me who had done it. My father was right there, shaking his head as if he was completely disappointed in me. My mother wanted to throw me out of the house, but my father told her, ‘We all make mistakes, dear. Maybe we can send her to your brother for a cure.’ She agreed and I came to stay with the doctor.
“On the second day I was here, he performed the operation. He gave me a shot and made me breathe gas to knock me out. I really had no idea what was happening. When I realized what the operation meant, I was furious at first, but he had always been so kind to me that, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t hate him for it. It was almost an act of love. The thing I truly despise him for, though, is having kept my child in that jar on the desk in his office. When he drinks too much, he stares at it and uses it to focus all of his sadness on and it makes it easy for him to cry. He wants the world to be perfect. He doesn’t want anyone to suffer except himself. It’s hard to imagine such selfishness.”
Belius wanted to say something to her, but his animal nature told him to be quiet. He concentrated on trying not to cry and was almost successful, but for two large tears that formed, one in each eye. If he moved his arm to brush them away, she would surely know that he was crying. She lay perfectly still as if exhausted from the telling of her tale. Just as he was about to apologize for having broken his promise, he realized that she had fallen asleep.
As she slept next to him, he remained awake, thinking about the story she had told him. Now that he knew her, he felt as if he also knew himself for the first time. He was no longer half man and half bull, he was a minotaur—a separate entity unto himself. These thoughts circled like a whirlpool in his head until their dizzying action, along with the warmth of Nona’s body and the hushed violence of the storm, made him tired. He began to doze off to sleep, his head nodding down beneath the weight of his horns. Just before passing into the realm of dreams, where his father was waiting with the knot, he thought he heard footsteps moving down the hall away from his door.
The next morning, at the kitchen table, Belius searched the old man’s face for signs that he might actually have been outside the room during the night. The doctor gave no indication, but was full of jokes and word games and closets full of laughter. It was a beautiful day out; the warm sun already at work on the snow. Belius decided to leave the wagon, doubting it could make it back through the high drifts. He promised to return for the horse and rig in a few days.
After they had all finished eating, the doctor got up to adjourn to his office where soon his patients would be showing up. He wished Belius a safe trip home and promised to look after the plough horse for the next few days. Nona walked the minotaur to the front door. When they were certain that Grey was nowhere nearby, they put their arms around each other. She kissed him on the throat and then pushed him toward the door. He stepped out into the beautiful day, shading his eyes against the reflection of the sun off the snow. As he made his way down the road, his wingtip offering little protection against the icy slush, wearing nothing over his shoulders save the double breasted suit jacket, he was warm inside. For the entire journey, he threw himself into the task of learning how to whistle.
It was during the first of the spring thaw that Nona came to his farm with the news. In their meetings between their night together and now, they had slowly been working up the courage to announce that they would marry. They had decided to wait until the first day of spring. The message that Nona brought with her this day, though, immediately displaced the importance of their decision.
She told Belius, in breathless bursts, that the doctor had said he was long aware of their love for each other and that, when he first discovered it, he had written to a famous medical specialist across the o
cean, whom, he had read, was doing some marvelous experiments with anomalies of birth. This famous doctor had created a chemical mixture that, when taken only once, would react upon the physical makeup of the patient, causing the distorted body to achieve the human look it might have had had nothing gone wrong while the fetus was forming. For a nominal fee, the specialist had sent Grey a bottle of the potion. It sat in the cabinet of his office, back at the enormous house, awaiting Belius’ decision.
Upon his hearing the news, the pitch fork that Belius was holding slipped out of his hooves and fell to the ground. He cocked his head to the side and stared into Nona’s eyes to search for a hint that she might be playing some odd joke on him. She knew what he was about and adamantly shook her head to show that she was in earnest.
“I can hardly believe it,” said Belius, forcing a laugh.
“Neither can I,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm.
“Is it guaranteed to work?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“This is impossible,” he finally said and turned his back on her to stare out into the fields.
“What is it, Belius? I thought you’d be happy.”
He didn’t answer for quite a while but lifted his right hoof up and ran it along the horn on that side of his head. Finally, he asked, “Are you sure this was your uncle’s message?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“I would have hands,” he murmured.
“I could kiss your mouth,” she said.
He turned around to face her. “Do you think I would be … handsome?”
“Belius, I don’t care. I’m willing to marry you as you are. I just thought it would be something for you. It’s your decision. It might make your life easier, but then you might change in some ways. I don’t know.”
“It sounds like a fairy tale,” he said. “I can’t help it, it sounds too easy.”
“Well, my uncle said that this specialist is world renowned and that he has helped thousands of people to be …”
“To be what?”
“I suppose I was going to say ‘normal.’”
“I need time to think,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“Tomorrow, I’ll come to your house. I’ll make a decision tonight. I know I should be ecstatic, but I’m scared.”
She moved toward him to put her arms around his wide chest, but he warded her off with his hooves. “Please,” he said, “please go. I’m thinking already. I promise I’ll come tomorrow.” Then he turned his back on her again. He could hear her moving toward the barn where her carriage and horse stood waiting.
Some yards away, she stopped and called back, “Remember, think of yourself.”
That afternoon, he did a week’s worth of work around the farm. He fixed things that he had already decided to throw out, and, once they were fixed, threw them on the junk heap anyway. He ploughed a good portion of a field that was still too frozen to plough and only stopped because the horse finally reprimanded him for his stupidity. He kept himself desperately busy until the sun went down, the whole time making only one minor decision, and that, to not mention the doctor’s message to his mother, whom he knew might go crazy at the very thought of the possibility.
He ate little and spoke less at dinner. His mother inquired if he was sick. “No,” he told her, “I’m thinking.”
“I saw Nona here today. Did you have a quarrel?”
“No.”
“Well, don’t worry too much about it. Just drive out there tomorrow and see her. It’ll all be fine,” said the old woman as she piled more potatoes on his plate.
After moving the potatoes around with his fork for a few minutes, he excused himself and went to his room. A book on Norse mythology lay open on his desk. He sat down and tried to read from it. The words refused to register. For two hours, he sat scanning the lines, saying each phrase quietly to himself, but, when the book was finished, he could remember nothing. “Think of yourself,” he repeated as he sat there, his huge head supported by his hooves. It came to him that he had done nothing else for his entire life. Only in the past few months had he grown to like the idea of being a minotaur. It had been such hard work getting to that point, and now, with the doctor’s offer, all of his struggle was made insignificant.
He left his desk and went to the mirror that hung on the wall near his bed. Looking at it, he tried to imagine his snout disintegrating into a human mouth. “Where will all of it go?” he wondered. Then his pointed ears shrank to two pink half-circles. His eyes lost their roundness and moved closer to each other in the middle of a face that was forming a chin and cheeks of flesh. The bushy crop of fur between his horns stretched into a slick wave of long stranded hair, and, as an afterthought, he dreamed a mustache and sideburns. The only feature of his anatomy that he could not bring the illusion of change to was his horns. They remained two curved and pointed bones, jutting out from just beside the temples.
“No horns,” he thought. The pleasant sensation of goring a tree would be gone forever. Plension and Austina would speak to him and he wouldn’t understand. The crops and garden vegetables would no longer tell him what they needed. He’d lose half his enormous strength and probably be a foot shorter. There would be no need for the Cosmology. There would be no race of minotaurs. He pulled himself away from the mirror.
It was well past midnight. Belius stood still as a tree stump in the stand of pines out past the corn field and pasture. It was still cool, so he wore the overcoat, but the fresh, green smell of spring was on the breeze. He stared up past the points of the trees, into the night sky. The moon was a sharp crescent and the stars were brilliant. When he breathed out, steam would obscure his view of the heavens. He had been there for an hour, watching the same small patch of sky. Each dot of white fire had burned its image into his memory. There were as many stars as there were reasons for him not to take the doctor’s potion. Then, while he was staring, one of the dots of light in the cluster he had been watching, suddenly went out. There was no fiery explosion, not even so much as a hushed pop, no tremor in the earth. It was there and then it wasn’t. He cleared his eyes, only to find that what he thought he had seen had really happened. For the first time that day, he stopped thinking of himself and thought, instead, of Nona. He thought of the future—of marriage and children. He thought of the sacrifice his family would have to make for him.
His decision was finalized before he reached the sleeping cornfield. Before going in to bed though, he stopped at the barn, thinking the cows might still be awake. He hoped they would ridicule him in their usual way, and he promised himself that if they did, he would laugh along with them and scratch them behind the ears.
A little after noon, Belius’ wagon pulled up in the yard outside the doctor’s house. He unhitched the plough horse and decided to let him roam around the property instead of putting him in the barn. “Don’t eat anything you shouldn’t,” Belius warned the horse with a few low grunts. “Same to you,” said the horse. Belius had told him and the cows everything during the night. Plension and Austina advised him to make the change. They told him it was the only ‘human’ thing to do. He said good-bye to them and thanked them, promising always to be kind to them in the future, when he could no longer understand what they were saying. The horse was in total disagreement, saying he had never heard of anything so unnatural in his life. He had been overruled, though, and finally gave in and wished the minotaur a happy, hornless life.
Before he could even knock, Nona was pulling back the door at the front of the old house. “Belius,” she said, full of excitement. This time, he let her put her arms around him and he returned the hug. When they separated, she asked, “What have you decided?”
Belius looked past her to where he saw the shadowy figure of Grey, standing just out of the light let in through the open door. The girl didn’t know her uncle was there, but when the minotaur spoke, he knew he was answering both of them. “I’ve decided to try it,” he said.
/> “Are you sure?” she asked, as if she had truly believed the answer would be different.
He nodded and, as she hugged him again, he saw Grey also nodding. He rested his snout on the top of her head for a moment. When he looked up, the doctor was gone. Nona moved away and closed the door.
“I have to tell you, Belius, I spent all night thinking about this. I was almost hoping that your answer would be different,” she said.
“I didn’t sleep much, myself,” he said. “But I thought about us, not just me, and that finally made me decide.”
“You’re positive?” she asked.
“Don’t ask again,” he said, forcing a laugh.
The three of them sat around the kitchen table, staring at the brown, cork-stoppered bottle that rested exactly in the middle of the triangle they formed. The doctor wore his stethoscope and his black bag was nearby at his feet in case of, as he said, “Any emergencies.”
“What do you mean, emergencies?” asked Nona. “Isn’t this safe?”
“It’s as safe as any operation or treatment,” said the doctor. “Belius,” he said, turning to face the minotaur, “you know that nothing is totally foolproof when dealing with the reaction of a living organism to exotic chemicals. You do understand this, don’t you?”
“It’s too late for me to worry,” said Belius. “I’ve made my decision.”
“Well, what could happen?” asked Nona.
“An allergic reaction … too great an excitement of the heart … a few things. But the chances are slim. I’m not trying to scare you, son,” the doctor said and patted Belius on the arm.
