The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  He does not come for her.

  She is walking by the greenhouse when nausea creeps up and then explodes, a heavy crampish feeling that does not go away. Her breasts hurt. Her whole body feels swollen.

  She is so tired. She stops and lets the girls down on the forest floor and smiles, with effort, as they reach for her.

  She’s known for a while what’s been happening to her—the subtle but unmistakable changes in her body, the unrelenting fatigue. You’re starving, she told herself. That’s all it is. You’re starving, you’re unwell. You should go see Tasha, and see if she can give you something for despair.

  But what kind of medication is there for this level of sadness? So one day passed and then another, and she did not go to Tasha, she did not go to Annie, and now she is here, in front of the greenhouse, the girls laid out on the ground in front of her as another life blooms inside her.

  She sobs aloud, then catches her breath. Colours swim—bright-red flowers that cover the greenhouse, dark, husky berries that sway up from the ground. She leans her forehead against the cool glass of the greenhouse and closes her eyes, reminded of her father. Soon the snow will come in earnest and bury them all.

  She doesn’t want to bring another child into this mess. She doesn’t want to die, frozen and starving.

  She picks some berries and brings them to her mouth. Belladonna. Belladonna, oleander, poison oak in the shade beyond the greenhouse. Her father had loved poisonous plants the best.

  The babies coo; she barely hears them. The berries won’t kill her, just make her sick, and maybe that will do the rest. Her father was right, all those years ago. She isn’t strong enough. She never was. The world smells of amaryllis and lilies and orchids and the jacaranda tree and the sweetness of the berries in her hand and then something else. A sudden dark shadow comes toward her, rippling the leaves. A shape that smells of mountain and snow and crystalline air but also of sunlight and flowers, of animal and darkness.

  “You,” she says, as he comes out from the trees. “It’s you.”

  * * *

  After he brought the knapsack, the centaur returned to her night after night. She snuck out after her mother was asleep. Out the back door and into the trees. If her mother suspected anything, she didn’t ask. Or she didn’t want to know.

  Instead of flowers, Estajfan brought her stories. They walked through the silent fields and the cicadas stopped to listen. The crickets went still, like they knew him.

  He told her about the time that he and his brother—Petrolio, the name like a flower on the tongue—ran down the mountain so fast they almost fell. The rage that their father had been in when they’d returned—how he’d yelled at them, how he’d wept. How he’d been so sure they’d been killed.

  Don’t go down the mountain, his father had said, and they raced each other anyway.

  Estajfan told her about the other centaurs—how they’d grown from his father’s bones, how they’d pulled themselves out of the earth. They had no names, he said, because they didn’t need any. He told her fairy tales she hadn’t heard before—stories about octopuses who guard treasure in the deeps, mountain deer who kidnap and raise a human child. Fairies who lived in the salt mines beneath the mountains, long ago, who coated themselves in salt crystals before mating. That one sounded familiar—an old wives’ tale her father once told her, about elders who threw salt across a doorway to ask good things into a woman’s life.

  “Stories are never just stories,” her father had said. “There’s always a kernel of truth hidden deep within the words.”

  In turn, she told Estajfan about walking late at night. About the twelve dancing princesses, the goose girl, the queen. She talked through the silence that surrounded her, her words like a knife, cutting a web that had grown thick and hard.

  She entered ninth grade with no friends except the one she met late at night. She read fairy tales at lunch and drew dragons in her notebook. Dragons, Estajfan told her, had lived on the mountain long ago. They’d disappeared before the horses were there.

  “Were they dinosaurs?” she asked him.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He knew many things and yet often seemed like a child—fascinated with mundane human objects like combination locks, a cafeteria tray heaped with food, the money humans passed to one another.

  She brought him things for his collection—picture frames, a baseball glove. Her first job was at a bookstore and instead of saving her wages for college she bought paint and pencil crayons and thick sheets of creamy paper and passed them to him in the dark. “So you can draw, if you want to.”

  “Draw?” he said.

  She showed him what she meant—spreading the paper on the ground, the moon just strong enough to show the pencil lines. Four legs, two arms, a tangle of hair in dreads. He smiled when she finished.

  “Is that me?” he said.

  She was suddenly too shy to say yes, so she just shrugged. “I’m guessing you all look the same,” she said, and he laughed.

  “Mostly we do.” He took the pencils, the paper, and the drawing with him up the mountain.

  The years went by. She graduated high school and decided not to go to college after all, telling herself that she didn’t want to leave her mother alone. It was mostly true. She got a full-time job at the bookstore, and started to send out her illustrations. Bears with long teeth. Unicorns and strange birds. Dark forests with shadowed beasts among the trees. Her illustrations began to be published. She illustrated a picture book, and then a volume of fables. She stopped working at the bookstore, and moved into her own apartment. She walked the trails up to the mountain in the dusk to meet Estajfan. Every birthday he brought her flowers, which bloomed in her windows for months. Fifteen years went by like that.

  She drew centaurs, over and over. She drew her father falling, his face rigid with terror. Estajfan’s fingers just missing his. Her father’s broken, mangled body somewhere down far below. No one saw those.

  She drew herself, a wide-eyed twelve-year-old, one leg shorter than the other, her feet twisted and bent. Her mouth open in a silent scream.

  She drew herself now. Her father’s eyes, her father’s smile. The uneven legs and lopsided shoulders that were entirely her own.

  Once upon a time there was a father and daughter who went up a mountain together, and only one person came down.

  One night she showed Estjafan these pictures. He was gentle with them. When he looked at her afterwards, there was something in his face that made her ribcage tighten.

  “Could I keep these, too?” he asked. She wanted to say no, but she nodded.

  “Did you ever find him?” she asked.

  “I didn’t look,” he said. “Heather, I’m sorry.”

  Everything went hot and blurry. “You didn’t try to find him? You just left him to rot?”

  “I didn’t want to see it,” he admitted. “I didn’t want to remember what I’d done to you.”

  “It was an accident.”

  In the dark, she saw him swallow. “When I reached for him, I—I hesitated.”

  The world skittered in and out of focus. “For how long?” she said, finally.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “He was already falling.”

  She closed her eyes. “Why did you hesitate?”

  “You weren’t supposed to be there,” he said. “Neither of you. He touched Aura like he had a right to do it. Like we were…property.” A long pause. “And what he said—I saw your face. I saw what that did to you.”

  She swallowed. “He deserved to die for that?”

  His eyes were dark, bottomless pools. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry.”

  She tried not to imagine it, but the thoughts came anyway. The animals that had nibbled on his flesh. The maggots that ate his eyes. Had he died right away? Or had death come later, in the dark?

 
“He deserved somewhere to rest,” she said. “He deserved at least that much.”

  Estajfan took her wrist and she jumped. It was the first time he had touched her since he carried her down the mountain. “I don’t think I should come to see you anymore.”

  “Why did you come in the first place?”

  A long pause. “I didn’t know why,” he admitted. “And then I did.”

  What was it that he’d said years before? Humans are like the brightness of comets in the sky. She was thirty-seven years old—older than her father had been when he died. Time was going so quickly. Time was not going at all.

  She held fast to his hand. “Don’t go,” she said.

  “Heather,” he said.

  He so rarely said her name.

  * * *

  It’s the first time she’s seen him in the daylight in years. She’s forgotten how big he is, how magical. A story made flesh.

  “Heather,” Estajfan says. They stand together in the forest, near the greenhouse. The weak sunlight glints on the golden cuff on his arm. The girls lie gurgling on the forest floor between them. It is warmer than any November she remembers. “I won’t let you starve.”

  He’s brought her a small sack of things—cherries, nuts, and apples.

  She closes her eyes and lets the nightshade berries drop onto the ground. “And what about another baby?” she asks. “You’re going to feed us all? See us through the winter, when snow buries everyone in the city?”

  “I’ll find a way,” he says. “I promise.”

  I promise. He had promised to stay on the mountain. He had promised to leave her alone.

  “I don’t think we should do this anymore,” she had said just over a year ago. Two pink lines on a pregnancy test, dinner with B in the immediate future. “I need to live my real life.”

  He had nodded, had accepted it all without question.

  Now he is here again, in front of her.

  Everything has changed.

  “What am I supposed to do?” she says. Half to him, half to somebody—anybody—else. The girls start to fuss. “How am I supposed to have a baby? I’m barely eating enough as it is to feed myself and the girls.”

  “I’ll bring you more food. Things are still growing on the mountain.”

  She stares at him. “Why are things still growing on the mountain if they aren’t growing in the gardens? Or the greenhouses?”

  He looks at her, but doesn’t speak.

  “Estajfan.”

  “I don’t know,” he says, carefully. “I can guess, but I’m not sure.”

  “Well—guess, please.”

  “Haven’t you already guessed for yourself?”

  You are not meant for the mountain. Perhaps humans are not meant for the world now either. She takes a deep breath. “So—what—the world is starving us now? There’s nothing we can do?”

  “There are always things we can do,” he says. “I will not let you starve.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  He is taken aback, hurt. “What else do you want me to say?”

  “I asked you to go and you went. I walked these forests for months after the meteors came, waiting for you to come back, and you never did. Not once.”

  “I came.” His voice is almost a whisper. “I came every day. I watched you through the trees. But you had your husband. Your girls. Your real life.”

  “Well. The world got in the way of that, too, I guess.” She bends and picks up Greta, puts her in her sling, and then does the same for Jilly. “You won’t be able to feed us forever. Even I know that.”

  “Maybe not forever,” he says. “But maybe for now is enough.”

  She would laugh, but she’s too tired. “Humans don’t live in the now, Estajfan.”

  He bends and snips a lily from the greenhouse, then reaches forward and tucks it behind her ear. “Then maybe,” he says carefully, “I’m glad I’m not human.”

  * * *

  It isn’t easy, carrying the girls and the sack of fruit back from the forest, but she manages. The fox follows her and she pays it no attention. No one sees her slip into the house and put the food away. But B discovers it all later that evening, as she plays with the girls in the dark living room.

  “What’s this?” When she looks up at him, she sees that he’s holding an apple in each hand. “Where the fuck did this come from?”

  “I found it in the forest,” she says.

  She doesn’t expect him to believe her. She is not wrong. “Oh sure. Apples and cherries. Just lying on the ground?”

  “I found the sack,” she says. “Maybe someone left it there?”

  He looks at her, scoffs. “Do you think I’m a moron? A fucking idiot?”

  She flinches, thinking of the children who mocked her at school. Moron. Idiot. Fucking spaz.

  B stops and looks at her—really looks at her. He is gone with Tasha and Annie every day now, preparing for the winter. He is so thin. “If I find out that you’ve been fucking someone else off in the forest—”

  She throws the first thing she grabs—a paperweight they keep on the living room table. It catches him on the side of the head with an audible thump, then shatters on the floor. He stares at her with horrified surprise, a hand to his head.

  The silence around them is thick for a moment, and then the girls burst into tears.

  “I am doing the best that I can,” she says over their cries. “Would you rather I went and threw myself off the mountain?”

  Something flickers over his face—shame, maybe, but warring with anger and pain. Blood trickles from his temple. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he says. “I feel like I don’t know you at all.”

  “I don’t know myself anymore,” she admits. They stand like this—frozen, not reaching out—until B looks down and notices the broken glass.

  “I’ll clean that up,” he mumbles, and turns toward the kitchen.

  “I’m pregnant,” she says. As he slowly pivots to face her, she thinks back to when she told him about the girls—that awkward dinner, the fear and joy that leapt into his face. Another universe long, long ago.

  There is no joy this time. B closes his eyes, then nods.

  She says, “I don’t know where that sack came from. But I don’t care—I’ll take it. We don’t have enough food.”

  He opens his eyes and looks, for the smallest of instants, like the man that she married. “We’ll find a way,” he says. Then he turns for the kitchen.

  She soothes the girls while he sweeps up the glass. By the time he comes back from dumping the shards outside, they are already tucked in their crib. He climbs onto the bed behind Heather and puts an arm around her.

  “If none of this had happened,” he says, “where do you think we’d be now?” A peace offering.

  Where, indeed. Their old apartment, their old jobs, taking the girls to daycare, maybe the park. He’d worked with computers; his office had been a twenty-minute walk from their apartment. Before the girls were born, they had walked to his office in the mornings and stopped by a coffee shop on the way—latte for B, iced raspberry tea for her. In the latter stages of her pregnancy she’d been obsessed with the iced teas from that store.

  “Please don’t go up the mountain, or away,” he whispers. “We can’t survive without you.”

  She squeezes his arm, and says nothing.

  * * *

  The next morning, someone finds a sack of apples on the other side of the city, and two bags of flour and rice appear as if by magic on the doorsteps of the strip mall.

  B does not ask her any more questions.

  THE RIVER SPRITE

  Once upon a time there were twin babies born to a woodcutter and his wife. Their mother planted herbs and kept a garden, and sometimes the neighbours from their village would come to her for medicines—tinctures to help
them sleep, a salve to soothe the itchy red spots that came from mistakenly touching one of a hundred different plants in the forest.

  The birth of the children also brought the mother a great sadness, and she had no balms to treat it. She had heard about this sadness and had hoped to avoid it by being prepared; she and her husband covered their lintel in birch sap, buried stones from the river at every corner of their house. Before the twins came—two girls, their hair bright like fire and their smiles just as holy—the mother made sure to go for daily walks along the river.

  “The water will carry you,” the river said. “Come back to the water every day and let your sadness float away on the waves.”

  After the girls were born, the mother went to the river, ready to give her sadness away, and instead fought the urge to throw her daughters into the water. She knew the girls belonged to her but somehow did not feel it. They were demanding and greedy, all primal emotions. Try as she might, she couldn’t see herself in their tiny faces. Everything about them seemed alien, strange.

  The river, to her surprise, told her that this was normal. She had given birth to changelings. When the mother consulted the old river sprite who lived beneath the waterfall, the sprite said much the same.

  “You have been given children by the fairies,” the sprite said. “See how pale they are? See how they scream when you yourself have always been so gentle? These children might look like you, but they are not of you. This is why you don’t feel like yourself. These children belong with the fairies, and the fairies will come to take them soon enough.”

  “But if I have changeling children, where are the baby girls who belong to me?”

  “The mountain fairies stole them,” the river sprite told her. “You must ask the mountain fairies to bring your children back. Take these changelings into the forest and leave them on the forest floor. Turn in three circles and say Give me my children. If the fairies do not appear, take the children home and try it again the next morning.”