by Amanda Leduc
As she moves through later patients, she notices they all say the same thing. A young boy comes in, trailed by his mother. She listens to his heart while his mother mutters something about strange dreams.
“Dreams?” Tasha says. It’s probably the flu, she tells herself. Delirium brought on by fever.
“I just want food,” the woman whispers. “But those damned flowers keep taking it away.”
“What?”
A rush of wind outside the building brings the mingled scent of sweet flowers and dirty little boy to her nose. The mother only shrugs. “The vines eat everything, and give us only berries.”
Tasha puts a hand on the mother’s arm. “What have you eaten?”
Then, all around them, a scream.
The window shatters. The mother cries out and reaches for the boy, covers his ears. She begins to laugh—softly at first and then loudly—and then she screams, and her hands are around the little boy’s neck and she snaps his head, and now he’s sliding toward the floor, his eyes unseeing.
The mother stops screaming and whispers, “I’m not enough. We’re all going to starve. I can’t stop it.” She lunges past Tasha and throws herself at the shattered window—her fingers scrabbling for broken glass. As Tasha watches, horrified, the mother slashes her own neck.
Tasha can’t move. The screaming hasn’t stopped. Vines snake their way over the glass in the window frame, slither toward her, across the floor.
She backs away and comes up against a cupboard, spreads her hands wide, sidles along the counter until she realizes she’s looking for a phone. Futile.
“Tasha.”
She turns at Annie’s call. Her wife’s arms are bare. Something sharp glints in her hand. Glass.
“Annie.” Tasha sidles along the wall. Annie stands between her and the door. Vines slither up her legs.
“I was never enough for you,” Annie says. “I did everything you wanted. It’s never going to be enough, is it? I am never going to be enough.”
“Annie.” Tasha raises a hand “Annie, please.”
Annie lunges. Tasha kicks a chair in her way and scrambles along the wall, her hand reaching for the doorknob of the room that they’ve converted into a supply closet. She swings the door open and jumps inside, heaves it closed, locks the knob. Annie slams into the door and everything shakes.
“I hate you!” Annie screams. “I hate everything you’ve done to me.”
The darkness in the closet is absolute. On the other side of the door, Annie is cackling, mad. The sound goes on and on.
PART TWO
11
When she sleeps, Aura dreams about her mother—the same dream she’s had since she was young: a house, a long window, a woman with blonde hair staring out. There is a man with her, flat-nosed and gentle, and then children, one by one. The woman dotes on her husband and her children with a love that’s almost desperate. Slowly the woman’s sadness lifts from her shoulders, but settles like cobwebs into the corners of her home.
The woman never leaves the village, although it could just be that Aura doesn’t dream about her anywhere else. The children grow and Aura sees them arrive home from trips, from journeys far away. The mother is always at the door to greet them. When they tell her about their time away, there is a flash of something in the mother’s eyes—longing, hunger, maybe guilt.
Sometimes the woman mentions events in the village. Small things, normal human things. Babies and weddings and death. These are the moments when Aura balls her fists in the dream. Sometimes when she unfurls her hands, she sees red crescent moons across her palms.
No one in her mother’s house ever notices her. No one suspects that she’s there.
But why would they? None of her half-siblings know the story of their mother’s first husband. None of them know she exists.
As the village grows into a town, these children become town children, then town adults. They sail ships to the other side of the world and become teachers and, generations later, lawyers and doctors and accountants. And then they die. They all die. The daughters and granddaughters and great-times-many granddaughters are all, without exception, suffragettes. Maybe this is where the mother’s passion and wanderlust has gone—passed down to the girls, who are strong-willed and difficult, mean and beautiful. They have the woman’s eyes—Aura’s eyes, and her brothers’, too.
She tells her father about the dreams once, when she is small.
“She seems sad,” Aura tells him.
Her father straightens. He is building them a treehouse, like the ones the village children play in, or so he says. The treehouse isn’t really a treehouse—more like a platform that juts out from the tree—but Estajfan and Petrolio already know how to climb higher, to twist their legs and grip their ankles around the trunk. Sometimes they swing from one of the higher branches and do chin-ups.
Aura doesn’t care about the treehouse. She cares about her father, though, so she climbs onto this half-built refuge and waits for him to answer.
“What does she look like?” he says.
She regrets telling him about her dream instantly.
“What does she look like?” he asks again.
“Like me,” she says. The words feel like birds with sharp claws. She feels them push out all around them and draw the scene right there, like magic, and suddenly they are both standing inside her dream, inside the house. Her father turns in a circle, nodding. The plaster walls, the rough-hewn door, the scrap of bright cloth by the fireplace. “Yes, this is the house,” he says and turns to her. “Do you want to see where you were born?”
She swallows, shakes her head. She just wants to leave.
“I think you should see it.” He holds out a hand and she takes it. Her hooves touch spongy moss and floorboard all at once. They are still on the mountain, but they’re surrounded by the house. She wants to run into the trees, but her father’s grip is so tight it hurts. She whimpers.
“Be quiet,” he hisses, and now she is truly afraid.
He pulls her to the back of the house—she’s never seen the back of the house in her dreams; she’s never wanted to be anywhere except where the woman is, and the woman never comes here—and steps through a doorway. There is so much light that at first it’s hard to see. The windows are bare and the outside door is open. The room is so cold she shivers. She’s never cold.
“The rest of the house doesn’t feel this way,” she says.
“No one comes here,” her father says.
She doesn’t ask him how he knows. “Why not?”
The ashes in the fireplace are cold like everything else in the room. Her father stares into them.
“There was a table here,” he says, gesturing. “Our bedroom wasn’t big enough to hold the doctor and the midwives, so they brought her in here and laid her on the table. She fell asleep, after.”
He doesn’t say after what, but Aura knows.
The floor is bleached white and the walls of the room have been whitewashed. Everything is bare, bare, bare.
“Why don’t they tear this room down?”
He drops her hand and walks to the doorway. Aura wants to tell him to be careful, but she’s not sure he’ll listen. What if he is swallowed? Could her dreams do that—whisk him away to some in-between place?
He shimmers as he steps through the doorway. She calls out to him, and he shimmers back into place, instantly. It was only the light playing tricks. But when he turns back to her, he is sobbing—like someone’s stuck a knife beneath his ribcage, like he can’t breathe. The room shines with sunlight and something else. The bleached white floorboards, the blank walls—they pulse with forgetting.
Aura watches her father sob until she can’t stand it anymore. She steps forward—her hooves clack against the wood and it’s the first time in her life that she’s been ashamed of her body, of how large it is and the noise
it makes.
“Da,” she whispers. “Let’s go.”
He lets her lead him. In the front room, she’s suddenly terrified that the woman will be there, but it stays empty and she reaches for the front doorknob without letting him go. But when she tries to duck through the front door, he tugs against her, fiercely. His eyes are wild and animal in a way she’s never seen. He twists, she loses her grip on him, and she feels the house hold him tight—the cobwebs of sadness that the woman beats back with her broom are angry now, hard and grasping.
You did this to me, Aura hears, and she knows it is the house talking. You did this to her. You did this to us. Her father moans—high and terrified.
The house is gathering him in. It will pull him into the back room and bleach him away. It will make him into nothing. This house and the ground it stands on—everything wants to forget. To pretend they have never been.
She grabs for him and pulls. The house snaps him away.
“No,” she snarls, and pulls harder—she thinks of Petrolio and Estajfan and how they’ve teased her for being so much smaller than they are, but she is not small here, she is not. She digs her hooves in and pulls with everything she can, with her twin hearts and her love and her hot, hot rage. No, she says again. No. No. No. Give him back.
And then he is through the door and hers again. They are back on the mountain, and you wouldn’t think that they’ve been anywhere except for the fact that their hands are locked together. They stare at each other, breathing hard.
“Don’t ever leave the mountain again,” her father says, finally. “I don’t care if it’s only in your dreams. Do you understand?”
“I can’t control my dreams, Da.”
“The house invites you, and you go in. Don’t go in.”
“But,” she says, “you go down.”
“If you get caught, they will kill you.” He pauses. “They may be family, but they don’t know you. They won’t understand.”
“No one even knows I’m there.”
“The house knew I was there,” he says. “The house knows you, too.” She sees the effort he makes to calm himself. “You are not—we are not—meant to be.”
The words hurt her so much she can barely breathe. “You’ll never be safe off the mountain. Please don’t go, Aura. Please.”
“All right,” she whispers.
He hugs her. When he lets her go, he says, “You be a good girl and go find your brothers.”
The rage is back in her throat so quickly it burns. “I’m not a girl!” she shouts. “I’m not a girl, and you aren’t a man!”
He nods, stricken. “I won’t say it again.” But he leaves her, frightened by her anger.
She would cry, except that crying will make her think of the house again, and she can’t bear to be sad and scared anymore. Instead she runs and hides in the trees. Petrolio finds her, eventually.
“What happened to you?” he says, and he pulls her hair in the way that she hates. Like her, he is slim and blond, his four white feet always ready to run. When she chases him, she never wins.
Aura can catch Estajfan sometimes, but she’s pretty sure he lets her do it.
“Nothing. Leave me alone.”
But this is Petrolio, so of course he doesn’t. “What happened? Aura, what happened?” Whathappenedwhathappenedwhathappenedwhathappened. Aura, come onnnnn.
She can’t tell him. In the house, when her father let go of her hand, she understood that he was hoping the house would take him back, make him what he used to be. Or, failing that, make him nothing. We are not meant to be.
Her father still loves her, the blonde woman at the window. Their mother. He would be human again in an instant. He would rather be that than be all that they have.
Eventually, with no response from her, Petrolio gets bored and leaves her. She waits under the trees for some time, then heads for the treehouse and destroys it, tossing the pieces off the side of the mountain. When she’s done, the tree is bare and trembling, the ground littered with broken wood, the air menacing and silent. The tree will be angry at her for a long time.
She turns to see her brothers standing silent in the clearing. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there. There is no fear in their faces, just curiosity and a mirroring grief. They feel her heartache without knowing what it is.
The next night, Aura dreams of the house and her mother again. She doesn’t tell her father. She walks right into the house. The flat-nosed man is with her mother and the sadness in her face is gone. Aura watches them, invisible in the corner. She screams, but no one hears a thing.
* * *
Many years later, when the meteors come, she is standing where the treehouse used to be. Petrolio and the other centaurs, the ones who were born from the mountain, have gathered in the clearing to watch. Her brother reaches for her hand. Estajfan is nowhere she can see.
The meteors fall on the city without mercy, without rhyme. They smash into the lowland trees. She watches fire hit the far-off river, imagines steam rising into the air, the riverbed dried up in an instant, all things lush and green burning away.
The mountain centaurs raise their arms and cry out with joy. Beneath her hooves, she realizes, the ground is rejoicing. Green things will grow again, tendril their way over human death. New seedlings will love the richer soil. They will love how much more space they have, the freedom to grow unchecked.
Petrolio squeezes her hand.
She doesn’t want to think about the people in the city, but she does. Estajfan has told her stories. That other daughter, the one that they met on the mountain. She is down there now, buried somewhere in the mess.
It’s been years since she dreamed of the house (she was a good daughter, in the end), but Aura thinks of it now as the world burns below them. Time passes differently here on the mountain; years since the last dream, longer than that since their mother grew old and died. Centuries? She isn’t sure.
The mountain centaurs begin to sing. They are many but when they sing they sound as one—eerie and sad, angry and beautiful and triumphant as the city far below them catches fire. Aura and Petrolio stay quiet. The other centaurs don’t care about what happens off the mountain. The mountain speaks to them in ways that it doesn’t speak to Aura and her brothers. They aren’t lonely, the original three—not exactly—but they’re alone.
She casts her mind toward her mother’s house, but doesn’t see it. She imagines a fiery piece of the sky coming down to claim it—a gaping crater where their birthplace used to be, the bleached room gone forever.
It’s a small, hard thing to be glad about.
THE DOCTOR AND THE MOUNTAIN
The doctor walks for days and weeks and months, stopping in a hundred little villages along the way, and gradually the mountains come into view on the horizon. She grew up by the sea—she’s never been to the mountains before. They seem higher than it is possible for anything to be, shimmering in layers of fog. Most of them are capped in white, but one mountain is green all the way into the clouds. The sea air tastes of salt. Here, the air tastes like the sky.
There is a city near the green mountain, nestled in its shadow. The doctor makes her way to one of its clinics and asks if they need help. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. They give her a room in the physicians’ lodge. The city folk bring her flowers as a welcome—great red bursts of amaryllis and shining white lilies. She puts them in her window.
The people are happy and fit and superstitious. There are a few houses built closer to the mountain but not many. Almost everyone lives clustered together. The elders sprinkle salt across her doorstep early in the morning on the first day of spring. For wealth, they tell her. Wealth and prosperity and protection from death. For a family, a man.
The doctor has no money except what the world gives her. She has a twin sister whom she sees several times a year, and twin nieces. They a
re all the family she needs.
And protection from death? She herself is protection enough.
When she isn’t working, the doctor walks the streets and wanders out into the fields at the city’s edge. Sometimes she walks in the evening, even late at night, when there are no other souls around. No one else in the city goes where she goes.
“There’s something strange about that mountain,” another one of the doctors at the clinic confesses to her, late one night over drinks at the pub. He too has come from away. “The people here tell all kinds of strange stories. Monsters and ghosts. Animals that talk, that kind of thing.”
The doctor laughs. When her mother was thirty-seven years old, a man came to their house and called her a witch. His wife had run away with another man, and the husband was convinced the doctor’s mother had helped her do it.
“She wouldn’t have fallen in love if it hadn’t been for you,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that on her own.”
The doctor’s mother was also a doctor, of sorts. She grew herbs in their backyard that she made into medicine, and she delivered babies when she needed to and got rid of pregnancies when that needed doing. Sometimes a heartbroken girl or boy would come to her and demand a love potion. The doctor’s mother would brew tea and sit down and tell them that you cannot make anyone fall in love with you. And sometimes people fall out of love, and there is nothing you can do about that, either. It will hurt. But while you can’t see it now, that hurt is building a mountain inside of you. One day you’ll climb that mountain. One day, your hurt will allow you to be and do great things.
When the husband came to her, the doctor’s mother told him this same thing. But he refused to listen.
“I don’t want a mountain,” he said. “I just want my wife back. I deserve my wife back!” He was shouting like a madman, and the neighbours came to wrestle him away. When they were gone, the doctor’s mother closed her front door and let out a long sigh of relief.
