The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  No one knows at first, the rock said to her. But everyone can learn.

  The fox, understanding, was ashamed. She sat back on her haunches and looked at the rock for a while.

  I am ready to bring you into the world now, she said again.

  The worms crawled out of the dirt to her, and she was very happy.

  2

  When the meteors come for them, Tasha is at work in the sickly green of the ER, dealing with the normal crises of an ordinary shift. Then there are bangs and screaming, and fire everywhere. She is standing by the charge desk one moment, and the next she’s crawling out from beneath a pile of chairs and pieces of ceiling and scattered patient charts, the fire alarm screaming through the space between her ears.

  Where is Annie? She looks around and sees only bodies, some of them sprawled motionless, others struggling to stand. Blood like a slow red wave. The fire alarms go on and on.

  Have they been bombed?

  Tasha pushes herself up, shaky on her legs. She touches the side of her head and her hand comes away sticky—blood, something else. There are other fluids on the floor. Bags of saline, bottles of hand sanitizer cracked and leaking onto the tiles.

  Someone appears in front of her, grabs her by both arms. Mouth open, no sound. Brown eyes. Blonde hair. Annie.

  “Speak up,” Tasha says. “I can’t hear you.”

  A frown, and Annie’s mouth moves again. “Tasha,” she hears, faintly. “Tasha, look at me.”

  Tasha’s hands start to tremble. She balls her fists and closes her eyes, takes one deep breath. “I hit my head,” she says, looking at Annie again. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Annie says. “A bomb?”

  Who would want to bomb them? That makes no sense. Then the ground shakes beneath them and Tasha feels the idea of a bomb move out of both their minds and become something else. It was like that with Annie, sometimes. They felt things at the same time, understood crossword puzzle clues at the same moment, even when they were on opposite sides of the house. They’d made a silly Sunday game out of it over morning coffee—finishing their respective puzzles in unison, the two of them flushed and triumphant.

  “Earthquake,” Tasha says.

  “Tsunami,” Annie says. The seashore is so close; the water would rise up to cover them all. “We need to get away from here.”

  Annie grabs Tasha’s hand and they run to the nearest exit, and from there to the ambulance on the ER ramp. Two fire trucks come screaming up the street as more people stagger out of the hospital, patients in rumpled gowns, nurses and doctors and orderlies in scrubs, their arms filled with blankets and bandages and boxes.

  “We don’t have time!” Annie screams. “We need to go.”

  Tasha turns back to the hospital. She does not want to die—not after what she’s survived. But they can’t leave yet. They need supplies. They need to figure out where to go.

  She looks back toward Annie and sees people climbing into and onto the fire trucks, drivers in yellow jackets pushing people up.

  Then a ball of fire arcs over their heads, so bright everything turns iridescent. It smashes into the hospital. Tasha falls to the ground, all

  sound

  gone.

  The world explodes.

  * * *

  A hand on her arm. She lets Annie pull her up, stumbles with her to the ambulance, gets in the passenger side. The heat is almost unbearable. The two red fire trucks pull away in the smoke. Annie throws the ambulance into gear and they peel down the ramp and onto the road.

  They’ve left people standing, but she can’t hear the screams.

  * * *

  As a child, she’d had night terrors—long twisted minutes with half of her in one world and the other half in the next. Endless dusty hallways with no corners and snarling demons who lunged at her through the wall. She’d bolt upright in her bed and scream, still asleep, strike the demons across the face only to have them multiply and pin her to the bed.

  The demons came from the ground, like all wild things. They slithered up through the floorboards of the house and through the windows, pretending to be birds. They wrapped their talons in her hair and choked her with their feathered wings, then slid scaly down her arms and held her fast to the bed. Sometimes the terror in her chest would become its own thing, unfurling from her ribcage like a bat. It would smile with pointed teeth and press down into the bleeding skin of her stomach before launching itself into the air. The darkness from her ribcage would overwhelm the sky.

  In the morning her mother might have a black eye, her father a puffed lip from where Tasha had hit them in the night. Her mother would hold Tasha close and murmur stories in her ear—dancing octopuses, starfish that gathered treasure and hid it beneath the sand, mountains, far away, that were so tall they reached the moon. Her father made them oatmeal and toast, weak tea with lots of warm milk and extra sugar for Tasha. Sometimes after a troubled night this would be enough to restore her and she was able to go to school. Other times she’d be too tired and they’d keep her home.

  The doctors told her parents that the terrors would go away. They said this when she was seven, and again when she was nine, and after the night of her twelfth birthday, when she screamed about birds that burned holes in the ground, they shook their heads and said she was still a child and it would pass. Her mother turned the fire-birds into a story, but the terrors did not go away. In high school she found comfort in science and stayed up late into the night reading biology textbooks—blood and kidneys, heartbeats, brain. Night terrors, she read, were thought to be linked to epilepsy in some cases but not in others. There were questions around whether night terrors were congenital. Her grandmother had sleepwalked as a child. As the doctors said, most children outgrew night terrors before they hit their teens—and if they didn’t, nine times out of ten, the terrors became easier to manage. Medication to help you sleep without dreaming. Strict diets that helped to facilitate an easier transition into delta sleep.

  Her terrors did become less, but also more—fewer instances, longer dreams. Once or twice she woke up and found herself on the lawn. The second time this happened it was snowing; with Tasha’s permission, her parents installed a lock outside of the door to her room and locked her in. The demons did not hold her down against the bed anymore—they just taunted her alone in a locked room.

  Her years of studying late into the night prepared her well for medical school, then residency. She was alert when other students struggled to get by; as a resident she was eager to plunge into a trauma case at two-thirty in the morning when everyone around her was bleary-eyed and cautious. She did not need stories to help her through the night now, not when there were bodies to disappear into and heartbeats to measure. Mountains that reached the moon were not real, nor were starfish that hid treasure, nor were fire-birds that fell screaming from the sky and bone-bat things that crawled out from your ribcage.

  On the first day of her residency she’d seen Annie in the hospital cafeteria, clad in her scrubs and sitting with three other nurses. Tall and blonde, like the princesses in some of the stories that her mother had told. (There were never any dark-haired, dark-skinned princesses, but she’d been too busy trying to sleep to wonder about that.) Annie looked up with something like recognition as Tasha approached, and Tasha felt her chest expand into a world bright and soft. The winged thing that unfurled from her ribcage this time was only made of light.

  They were married in a year. Their parents surprised them with the down payment on a house. When she was finished her residency, offers came from other hospitals far away but Tasha turned them down so they could stay in the house by the ocean.They thought about having a child. She had terrors so rarely now they felt like the stuff of legend.

  But demons are demons and don’t forget how to find you. When they came for her again, their hands were filled with fire. That time, they took her parent
s.

  This time, they took everything else.

  * * *

  Billowing smoke, shaking ground, and groaning road. Great gaping holes around them as they drive past bodies tumbled over one another, past the wreckage of houses and tall apartment towers. The sky continues to fall around them in great flaming chunks. The ragged breathing of children and their parents fills the ambulance, too many people on board, but still they screech to a halt when they see someone standing in the mess. It doesn’t happen often enough.

  “Where is everyone?” Annie asks at one point. Tasha has no answer. Sound has come back to her, slowly, along with a heightened sense of colour. Everything outside feels like it belongs to a different universe.

  “What are we going to do?” Annie whispers.

  “Keep driving,” Tasha says. The world still shakes off and on, but not as often. Water from the ocean has not followed them.

  Not a tsunami after all. Something else entirely. Everything feels like a dream.

  “Tasha,” Annie says, sharply. “Don’t fall asleep.”

  “I’m not,” Tasha says instantly—but she is drowsy, drifting alongside Annie, closing her eyes against a world so sharp it almost hurts.

  “You hit your head,” Annie reminds her. “It could be a concussion. Don’t fall asleep until I can check.”

  “Annie, I’m okay.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  It’s all right, she wants to say. Annie, it will be all right.

  But the words don’t come. They drive on, and the world continues to burn.

  * * *

  Meteors, catastrophe, impact event. The radio bursts in the ambulance are infrequent, and always catch them off guard. The entire world, it seems, has been caught by surprise. They stop for gas at one abandoned station and leave a pile of bills on the counter. The next time they fill up, Tasha slides money across the counter to a weeping sixteen-year-old boy.

  “Come with us,” she says, but he only shakes his head.

  “My parents,” he says. “No one’s picking the phone up at home. I don’t know where they are. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Sometimes the road is blocked and they have to turn around to find another route inland. They keep driving north, away from the sea, just in case. Eventually they have no room for more people and when they see someone they don’t stop. As they drive through miniature dust storms, they hope there are no people lost in the murk.

  Once, as they prepare for yet one more blind push through the dust, Tasha grabs the edge of the seat beneath her and holds her breath. They hit a bump that could be a body; she crosses herself, even though she hasn’t done that in years. When they’re through the dust, Annie, almost hysterical, pulls the ambulance over to the side of the road.

  “What was that?” Annie asks.

  “I don’t know,” Tasha whispers. “A body? Do you want me to check?”

  Annie shakes her head. “Not that,” she says. “You. Are you praying?”

  Laughter catches her off guard; Tasha hiccups, almost chokes. “Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to hang on.” She reaches over and opens the door, then steps down onto the ground and looks back toward the dust storm, which is already clearing.

  There is no human body on the road. Instead there is a bear—a small brown bear, likely a cub. Tasha takes a breath and walks over to it. As she gets closer she can see that half of the cub’s snout is smeared with blood, the other half burned away in strips of red and blackened flesh. There is skin and fur under the bear’s claws from scratching itself bloody in a frenzy to soothe the burning.

  They might have hit it, she thinks. It might have died before.

  “Tasha.” Annie is leaning out the driver’s window, calling. “Tasha, leave it alone. It might be diseased.”

  Beyond the bear, on the other side of the road, is another body. That one is human—a woman, the bottom half of her burned beyond recognition, her top half serene—as though she’s only sleeping. Tasha takes one step and then another, and then she’s standing over the body, trying not to cry. The yellow ribbon in the woman’s brown hair is bright and cheerful against the tumbled grass. She is a halfway creature, a mermaid of the ash and fire.

  “Tasha!” Annie shouts. “Tasha, we have to go.”

  Go where? She turns back to Annie and the ambulance, to the fire trucks that have pulled up behind them and are waiting for her too. Should they go back to the coast and see what’s left to salvage? Or do they see what lies ahead?

  “Tasha.” Annie’s voice is softer now. “Tasha, just come back in the ambulance, please.” There’s a sliver of panic in her voice that Tasha recognizes. It’s the same panic Annie tried so hard to hide two years ago, after Tasha’s parents were killed in the fire and Tasha could not function. Where are you? Don’t leave me alone.

  She takes a breath, then walks back to Annie.

  “Here,” she says. “I can drive.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  Annie is too tired to argue. She slides out of her seat reluctantly and yet also with relief; she’s asleep almost as soon as her seatbelt is buckled. Tasha starts the ambulance and pulls back onto the road. The bear cub and the woman by the side of the road disappear.

  From the driver’s seat, things look even sharper, brighter, more intense. She spots more dead animals by the side of the road, others that flash quickly across the road in front of them—a deer, a fox, a skittering raccoon—and disappear into the trees. As they crawl farther north, the sloping greenlands on either side of the road give way to trees and clouded sky. Green trees, burning woods.

  North. They keep on going north. She’s not sure why, but the road takes her there. Turn here, turn there, keep driving. Far ahead of them are the mountains her mother told stories about. Maybe they’ll reach the mountains and climb up to the moon.

  She isn’t surprised when a blurred grey line appears on the horizon that thickens and darkens and sharpens into peaks. Soon foothills roll around them like an earthquake that won’t stop, the houses dotted among them all collapsed or on fire. As they drive on, the houses coalesce into a city.

  Or what’s left of it. She reaches up as the winding road becomes a city street and flicks on the siren. The fire trucks behind them follow suit. The sound wakes Annie, who sits up and leans forward.

  Tasha feels sad in a way that she hasn’t before—even with the bear cub, even with the burned woman. She drives the ambulance down streets that are too empty, streets where some houses remain untouched while others are caved in and smoking. No one comes out to watch them pass, to beg for help. It is early evening. The sun, or what they can see of it, has begun to climb behind the mountain, and the houses cast thick, smoky shadows over the road.

  “Where is everyone?” Annie asks, again. No one answers.

  They reach the end of the road—stopped short by a giant crater that spans the block. Tasha grunts in frustration and backs the ambulance up, then turns down a side street. The houses are silent and still.

  She heads, though she can’t say how she knows to do so, toward the wreckage of a building that looks like a hospital. The side street leads her to a wider boulevard where the high rises are, or used to be. Here, finally, people come into view. They stand scattered on the street—clustered in groups by the side of the road, gathered around a few open cars.

  For a moment she badly wants to cry. No one here will be able to help her.

  She turns the key and feels the engine shudder to a halt as the siren quits. Annie reaches over, takes her hand. For a moment Tasha stares down at their interlocked fingers as though they belong to a stranger.

  “We’ll be okay,” Annie says. Her Annie.

  Tasha gives the smallest hint of a squeeze and pulls her hand away, then climbs out.

  These people look hau
nted, like everyone else they’ve encountered on the road. A tall man with red hair, a blonde girl in a black leather jacket and scuffed lace-up boots. Other men, women, and children staggering about.

  A dark-haired woman in a hospital gown sits on the curb, two bright-haired bundles in her lap.

  The woman raises her head and looks straight at Tasha. She looks lost too—but there is also something else, something unpredictable and bottomless in her expression that makes Tasha shiver.

  She takes a breath. The air is thick with ash and smoke here too, but it feels sharper than the air that she knew by the sea.

  All right, she thinks. I’ll be sharper too.

  “Who’s in charge here?” she asks, and they tell her.

  THE GIRL MADE OF STARS

  Once upon a time there was a star that tripped and fell while dancing in the night sky, and tumbled to earth as a girl. When she woke up, the girl did not know who or where she was, only that the darkness above her, speckled with bright spots of light, looked familiar. She had no clothes or name, and when she came to the nearest village, the men and women thought that she was a witch. Since she did not know what a witch was, she couldn’t correct them. They threw stones at her until she ran from them, bruised and afraid.

  She found comfort in the darkness, in being alone under the stars. The animals of the forest were kind to her, and brought her things to eat—nuts and berries, roots from the ground that she washed in the river. She did not know how to speak to the animals, but they listened anyway. At night, she washed her hair in the river and sang wordless songs to keep herself company. In time her hair shone as bright as the moon.

  The girl slept during the day, under the cover of trees. At night she walked bareheaded beneath the sky; eventually she made her way to the mountains and up among them. She grew to know the trees around her by name—their real names, not the names humans give them—and for a time she was happy, or as happy as she could be while knowing that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.