9
“You shouldn’t come here anymore,” Estajfan tells Heather one day when the snow has almost overwhelmed her as she trudged to the greenhouse. “Let me bring you food in town.”
He seems extra hard, somehow—all wiry dark-brown arms and body, blackened legs against the snow—but his eyes are the brightest thing in the forest.
He is not the centaur she remembers. When they meet under cover of the trees around the greenhouse, he is all business. Handing her the food he has managed to find. Standing ever so slightly away.
She is probably not the Heather he remembers either. She doesn’t bring him drawings anymore and the only story she has left to tell is this one: they will survive today. Maybe they’ll survive tomorrow.
Please, let them survive tomorrow.
“What happens when the food runs out?”
“There are still things that grow on the mountain,” Estajfan says. He lets Greta pinch his arm, then makes a face. Her laughter flies higher than the trees.
“The mountain won’t feed the whole city,” Heather says.
Estajfan makes another face at Greta. “No,” he says. “It won’t.”
“How many?”
Now he looks at her, only her. “You,” he says. “I will try to save you.”
She closes her eyes, takes a step back, a hand on each of their bright-red heads. “Greta,” she says. “And Jilly.” She swallows. “And B.”
He doesn’t speak for a long time. When she looks up at him, he only nods. “We’ll go as far as we need to go to find you food,” he says again. “I can run for years.” Then he turns from her and goes back to the mountain.
At night, Heather dreams about killing the baby. She dreams about drinking poison tea, she dreams about climbing the mountain, about feeling the wind in her face as Estajfan lifts her into the air and throws her off the mountain’s edge. She imagines surviving the fall, she imagines the pain. Crawling back into the city with broken bones and a belly that’s bled empty.
No more, she tells B in the dream. I won’t have any more children. I won’t. Don’t ever touch me again.
Awake, she says nothing. They are rationing so carefully it is a surprise to see her belly grow, but grow it does; the rest of her is so thin that the curve, though small, seems almost grotesque. Only one, this time. A boy.
(“How do you know it’s a boy?” B asks her, late one night as they lie on the bed.
“I just do.”)
In another dream she’s on the mountain, the baby in her arms. The wind blasts pellets of ice through her hair. Estajfan is there with her, shouting.
What do you want?
I don’t know what I want. She holds out the baby, whose dark eyes watch her, unafraid.
Estajfan raises a hand and for an instant she thinks he’s going to hit her. The ground wobbles beneath her feet and Estajfan is reaching for her. His fingertips brush hers. He pauses. It’s only a fraction of a second, but long enough. She falls, the baby’s scream loud in her ear.
She wakes up slick with sweat, curled over her belly. When she gets up, there is blood on the sheets.
B wants her to go see Tasha, right away. “The girls and I can come with you,” he says. “We’ll go together.”
“No,” Heather says. “I can go on my own. It’s all right.”
He’s hurt. He’s always hurt now, and she is trying not to think about it. She is trying not to think about anything. She cleans herself up as best she can and then sits with the girls while they eat wizened apples for breakfast. When B comes into the kitchen, he smiles at the twins. “You look so pretty,” he says. It’s true. They are beautiful and tiny, like little ruffled sparrows. Then he looks at her. “You’re beautiful too,” he says. “I don’t say that enough.”
Heather swallows the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she says. She crosses to kiss him on the cheek. The baby kicks as she straightens, and she takes B’s hand and presses it hard against her abdomen. Another kick and a smile touches his face.
She blinks and it’s Estajfan standing before her instead. His hand on her belly, his hand against her face. In his eyes she sees the mountain.
“Heather, are you all right?” B is frowning at her now.
She steps back and cups her abdomen, trying to quell the shaking of her hands. She manages to kiss him on the cheek again, and then turns on her heel and leaves without saying goodbye to the girls.
At the clinic, Annie is harried. Tasha, as usual, is unflappable and calm. Heather sits in the makeshift waiting room and listens to Tasha speak gently with a father and his children. Annie, at the front counter, takes inventory. She is always taking inventory now, watching their supplies dwindle day after day
“How are you?” Heather asks, surprising herself.
“I’m all right,” Annie says, as though she’s never asked herself the question. “Tired. Hungry. But aren’t we all.”
“And Tasha?”
“Tasha is Tasha.” Annie shrugs. “One day she’ll drop dead from a heart attack and all of this will be over, but until then, who knows.”
After the family leaves, Heather follows Annie to where Tasha sits waiting on her chair. Annie pulls the curtain across and sits down beside her.
“Heather,” she says. “What can we do for you?”
She tells them about the bleeding. Tasha frowns and gets up to check her belly.
“The placenta seems lower than it should be,” she says, “though it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on without equipment. Did you bleed with the girls?”
“A little,” Heather tells her.
Worry settles into the lines around Tasha’s eyes. “We’ll just have to wait and see. But let me know if the bleeding continues,” she says.
Heather looks at them both, then clears her throat. “What if…what if I don’t want it to stop?”
Tasha blinks. “What?”
“What if I don’t have this baby?” Heather whispers. “What if I can’t have this baby? Can you help me with that?”
The women glance at each other. For a moment Heather sees strong emotion pass between them. Envy flickers in her heart. She’s never looked at B like that. She’s never even wanted to. She’s only ever looked like that at someone else—and that, an impossibility.
“It’s too dangerous,” Tasha says, finally. “Heather—you’re malnourished. I can’t take a chance that something might happen.”
She swallows, closes her eyes. “Isn’t it dangerous to keep going?”
“Your body knows what to do,” Tasha says, softly. “Trust your own body before anything else.”
Her body. Heather lets out a laugh, and wipes a tear from her eye. “My body has always betrayed me,” she says. Not strong enough, not normal enough. And yet still strong enough, somehow, to give her children, again and again.
“I would do it,” Tasha says. “If this was any other time and we were in any other place. I would do it.”
The sharp pull of the curtain. Heather turns.
B stands there, backlit by the light from the windows. She can hear the girls laughing in the waiting room.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” he says. Something like terror in his face, something like hatred.
“Brendan—” Tasha begins, but he raises a hand.
“Don’t talk,” he says. “Please.” He looks back at Heather. “Would you have told me? Or would you have just gone and done it?”
She stares at the floor. The criss-cross of cracks over the tile. “I didn’t do it.”
“But you want to.”
“We’re starving,” she says. “You really want another child?”
B comes to her and grips her arm. She feels the other women shift, stand up. “I need you to have faith,” he says. Angry, desperate. “We’ll get through this. We will. The winter will end and we’ll plant the gardens again—”
“And if that doesn’t work? What happens then?”
“You’re always so negative!” he cries, dropping her arm. “I’ve tried so hard and nothing is ever enough for you. Even before all of this.” She looks up at him and then can’t look away.
“No one wanted to touch you,” he whispers. “No one wanted anything to do with you. I used to watch the way that people mimicked you at school. They called you crazy, you know that? No one wanted to be near you. But I did. I do.”
She thinks, hazily, of the smirks his friends had shot his way after B came over to her table at the pub. The whistles that had followed them out onto the street.
“So what?” she hisses. “Am I supposed to be grateful you’re paying attention to me now? Is that it?”
“Heather.” Annie comes to stand between them. “Brendan. Look—this is all terrible—everything is terrible.” She holds her arms out as if to push them away from one another. “But fighting helps nothing. Think about the girls.”
At the thought of them, Heather feels her heart crack open. “I’m sorry,” she says, and covers her face with her hands. “I just—I can’t do this. It’s too hard.”
“You’re not doing it alone,” B says. “That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”
Heather lets her hands fall, then nods. “Yes,” she whispers. “I know.”
They walk back to the house together, each of them carrying a twin, the gulf that yawns between them growing deeper as they go.
As the winter ends, the sky is blue—but never for very long, and not the blue that anyone remembers. The grass and trees are deep green, as though they’ve all kept on growing under the snow. The city is a daylight clock. The city is a shell. The mountains stand over them in shades of grey and green and blue.
There are no eggs from Joseph anymore. Heather no longer speaks to Joseph, apart from saying hello when they pass on the vine-ridden street. She doesn’t really speak to anyone apart from B and the girls, who are babbling now—mostly nonsense, sometimes a few words of something only they can understand. They are tiny but fierce. They pull themselves up by the legs of tables and wobble around the house from one piece of furniture to the next. Greta is always first in line. Jilly, more timid when it comes to new adventures, laughs the loudest. Neither of them goes anywhere without looking to see where the other twin is first. Their eyes follow her everywhere.
Their backyard is soon a lush jungle of green. There is no in-between time, no in-between place. In the morning she cuts the vines back from the stairs and in the evening they have grown to overtake the porch again.
Look at the wildflowers grow, she hears people whisper. Look at the lilies, look at the bushes that have come up almost out of nowhere. Look at all of it, so bright and alive.
A week or so into spring, brightly coloured boxes arrive on their doorstep, holding new clothes for the babies and an invitation. Please join us in the city square for a spring celebration. We would like to come together to celebrate the lives of those we’ve lost, and express gratitude for all that we’ve accomplished together. It’s signed Tasha and the Council.
“I don’t know why it bothers you so much,” B says, as they dress the girls in their new outfits. “The Council is trying to stay positive. Why is that so hard for you to get?”
“This is more complicated than just trying to stay positive. People died during the winter,” she says, the words short and clipped. “Even though the Council did so much. It’s eating away at Tasha, too, even if she’s not talking about it. If it hadn’t been for the Food Angel, we all might have starved.”
“Fuck the Food Angel!” B hisses. “We survived because we prepared. Because we worked together. Because Tasha and Annie didn’t give up. That’s why. Not because some mysterious hoarder decided to be generous.”
“But what do we do now—plant gardens again and wait to see if we’ll have food for next winter? What happens if things don’t grow a second time? Do you think Tasha—”
“What have you got against Tasha?” B yells. The girls watch them, transfixed and terrified. “She gave you vitamins, for God’s sake.” His face darkens. “She would have helped you get rid of the baby if she’d thought it was safe. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”
How could she think that? The memory is in every shadow on his face, in every strained hello he gives her in the morning. “She’s a doctor,” she says. “That’s her job.”
“She didn’t have to stay here, though,” he argues. “They didn’t have to help us gather supplies or build the greenhouses or get wood for the winter. They could have kept on going when they found out the hospital was destroyed. But they stayed. We’re here—you’re here—because of them. Jesus, Heather. What’s your problem? Where’s your faith?”
She laughs at this—high, almost hysterical. Faith in what? In centaurs? In other magical beasts that prowled the mountains around them long years before any of them were born? Faith in the ground that teems beneath them, in a world that chokes the food they plant and offers them poison berries instead? In the vegetation that creeps relentlessly in to drown the city?
Or does he mean faith in regular people, in the miracles they work with their own hands? They have survived one winter, yes. That is a kind of miracle.
But that was because of Estajfan. If they continue to survive, it will only be because of Estajfan. Tasha has nothing to do with it.
“I don’t hate her,” she says, finally. “But I don’t trust her either.”
It’s B’s turn to laugh now. “Are you serious?”
“Fine. I knew you would say that. Never mi—”
“You think she’s got some kind of nefarious plan? That she’s going to—what, hoard all of the food so everyone else starves?”
“Why is she here? Why here, B? Why spend the whole winter here and ration the goddamned food and practically take over a small mountain city no one cares about? Why not somewhere else?”
“Here is as good a place as any.” He pushes the stroller past her, out through the front door. “And maybe she saw too many of us falling apart and figured she could help.”
“Right,” she says, pretending not to get the dig. “Because Tasha has no problems of her own and is taking perfect care of her own family.”
“What?” He’s genuinely surprised for a moment, then rolls his eyes and continues down the walk. “Oh, for Chrissake. You don’t even know her family.”
“I know you think she’s strong and unflappable, but I see how she neglects Annie in favour of saving everyone else. And when she can’t save everyone else—I’ve seen her in the greenhouse, B. I know what she does when she’s alone. She’s telling herself—and us—stories too. That we’ll survive if we stick together, that everything will be okay if we just hold on. But what if she’s wrong? What if things aren’t going to be okay?”
“Won’t they?” he says, exasperated. He doesn’t stop pushing the buggy. The girls laugh loudly at the bumpy ride over the overgrown road. “How long do you think we’d survive all on our own? How long did Randall and Stella make it? Candice and Seth and the baby? We’re only here because we stuck together. And we only stuck together because Tasha and Annie saved us.”
“How is holding on to the idea of pulling through going to help us when there’s no one left?” she says. And then, “Have you talked to Annie? Have you asked her how she feels about Tasha? Because I guarantee you Annie’s not feeling the same saviour vibes that you are.”
This time he does stop, and turns to her. “What is wrong with telling people that we’ll survive if we stick together? What’s the alternative—that we’re all doomed? Is that it? Is that what you want us all to say? Because if it is—why bother eating at all? Why bother taking the girls out on those goddamned walks? Why bother anything?”
“Tasha’s not looking after her own family—that’s my point,” she says. “I know she wants to help. But she’s a fanatic. She’s neglecting the person closest to her because she’s hell-bent on saving the city.”
He’s beyond exasperated now. “And that’s a bad thing? I want to survive. Don’t you?”
“She wants to save the city because she thinks that’s going to save her,” she says, the words clicking into place like solving a puzzle. “And if—when—it doesn’t, everything she’s built will fall apart.”
He starts walking again. “She almost died during the winter along with the rest of us,” he says. “How is that saving her, exactly?”
“She’s telling herself a story,” Heather says. “One where she’s the only one making the right decisions.” He’s pulled ahead of her—she speeds up to try and catch him. “You know about her parents, right?”
“Yes,” he says. “They died in a fire. What does that matter?”
“I don’t think she’s over that,” she says. “I think she’s still trying to save them. I think she thinks that if she saves us, it will redeem her. Somehow.”
B looks back at her, his eyes filled with loss. “We’re all trying to save our parents,” he says. “Even if we can’t.”
She reaches out to him, finally, wrapping her fingers around his wrist. “But that’s just it,” she says, softly. “We can’t. We survive by moving on, and moving forward. She hasn’t. She refuses to let go of things she can’t control, even when they’re already lost to her. And everything about that makes me nervous.”
B shrugs her away. “Yes,” he says. “Like how you moved on and forward by not talking to anybody for a year after your father threw himself off that mountain. Like how you move forward now by telling the children silly stories about magical mountains and queens who murder geese.” He registers her shock. “You think I don’t hear you telling those stories to the girls? My God, Heather—if that’s your idea of moving on, I think I’ll stick with Tasha.” He pushes the stroller ahead again, and this time she lets him go.
As they draw closer to the square, they join a crowd. Little girls in faded dresses, little boys who run around, red scabs on their knees. Parents who look as tired and grey as Heather feels. At the square, people mill about, antsy and unsure. Someone has pulled an old wagon into the middle of the square and heaped it high with coloured boxes. Tasha is out front, greeting everyone, and as children shyly approach, Tasha’s people—Annie and Kevin—climb on board and start tossing boxes out into the crowd. The children cry out with delight as they rip the boxes open on the grass. More clothes, some toys, more colouring books and crayons. Things salvaged and stored for months, it would seem.
“Where’s Elyse?” Heather asks B when she reaches him.
He looks around. “Maybe she’s resting. She’s not well. Which you would know, if you’d been paying attention to anything else.”
Of course I know, she wants to say. Instead she turns back to the boxes, to the scraps of wrapping paper that now litter the ground.
B sees the scraps too. “I don’t remember storing wrapping paper.”
She can tell by the look on his face that he doesn’t remember storing clothing, or the other gifts that the children are unwrapping on the grass. Dolls and building blocks. Clay modelling kits. There is even chocolate—small bars that Annie pulls out of one of the boxes and tosses into the crowd.
Tasha approaches them just as B catches a chocolate bar. He can’t keep the surprise from his face. “We had chocolate?” he says. “We had chocolate all this time?”
“I wanted to be able to save something special for all of us when we made it through the winter,” she says. Always the same calm, knowledgeable voice.
Heather thinks of Tasha in the greenhouse—an animal crouched down on the floor, writhing and wild.
B fingers the bar, watching Tasha. And what about the people who didn’t make it through the winter? he wants to say—Heather can see it in his eyes. Instead he unwraps the chocolate and breaks off two small pieces, squats down, and tucks them into the mouths of his girls.
“Here,” Tasha says, and hands a bar to Heather. “How are you feeling?”
How is she feeling? At once stretched and lost—as though she is both a ghost and something more than herself.
“Any problems?” Tasha prods. “More spotting?”
She can feel B watching. “No,” she says.
Tasha nods. “I’m glad to hear it. You know where I am if you need me.”
“Yes.” Heather says. “I know.”
“Tasha,” B says, and she turns to him. “How much food have you got hidden away?”
Her voice is still light, unconcerned. “It’s mostly just the chocolate.”
“And all these—gifts?” B moves his arm in a wide circle. “Just waiting for better weather while people died in the cold?”
Tasha flushes. “We had to make some har—”
“I know,” he interrupts and looks away from her. He seems so disappointed that Heather almost feels sorry for him. “We’ve all had to make hard choices. I get it. But—people died, Tasha, while you sat on all of this.”
She won’t meet B’s eyes now. “I know the names of everyone who died,” she says. “Believe me, Brendan. I know. But I also knew that if we survived the winter we would need something…celebratory.”
“And if we plant the gardens again and nothing grows?” Heather asks. “What kind of celebration will we have then?”
Tasha looks at her, but doesn’t reply. Instead she walks back to the trailer and climbs up on it, then holds up her hands for silence.
“I am so glad to see you,” she calls out when even the children are quiet. “To see each and every one of you.”
The tired lines in the faces of everyone around them seem to lift a little.
“We’ve been through so much,” Tasha calls out. “But we survived because we did it together. And we will continue to survive because we’re doing this together.”
There is a smattering of applause.
“We’ll plant the gardens soon, and more—we’ll create a proper farm,” Tasha says. “We’re clearing the vines from the roads and soon we’ll send out scouting parties. If we’ve survived, other people must have too.”
She continues to speak, and the applause grows louder. The faces around Heather and B begin to shine with something other than fatigue.
You can do it, Tasha says. Her eyes burn with hope and love. We can do it. The clapping becomes a cheer, becomes a chant. Tasha. Tasha. Tasha.
Heather feels the words lift around them and become something else. A legend, a story.
There once was a city in the shadow of the mountains. Then winter brought the cold, and many of them died. But with the spring came warmth and hope, and the strongest among them held hands out to the weaker and lifted them up to the sun.
We will be whole again, they said.
We will find others, they said.
We must believe in something larger. We must believe we’re not alone.
She thinks of Tasha, weeping on the greenhouse floor.
“Where will the animals come from?” she hears herself call. The clapping dies down. “For the farm. A proper farm needs cows and chickens, at least. Where will they come from?”
“We’ll find them,” Tasha says. “The scouting parties will be looking for animals, too.”
“And if you don’t?” Heather says. “What then? What if there are no animals and the gardens don’t grow again and we have to survive another winter—what then?”
“Maybe the Food Angel will come back,” someone yells, in a voice that’s only half joking.
“We can’t rely on the Food Angel,” Tasha says. “We have to rely on each other.” She looks straight at Heather, her eyes so bright they look feverish. “The gardens will grow this year. They have to.”
“You don’t know that!” Heather cries. B puts a hand on her arm; she shrugs him off, steps forward.
Tasha opens her mouth to speak, but an outraged yell drowns her out. They turn, as one, to see Elyse walking toward them, half dragging what looks like a bundle of rags. As she gets closer, Heather sees that it is a bird, brown and mottled. A chicken. One of Joseph’s chickens.
The yell comes again and now they see Joseph, striding up the road behind Elyse.
“Tasha!” he yells. “Tasha!” He begins to run, passing Elyse, making for the trailer. He is weeping, incandescent with fury. “You fucking hypocrite. You goddamn murdering piece of shit.”
“Joseph,” Tasha says. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
“She killed one of my chickens!” he shouts, thrusting a finger at Elyse. Elyse lays the dead bird gently on the ground. There is blood splotched over her face, splashed up her arms. In her other hand she holds a knife; she sets that down on the ground too. She pays no attention to Joseph, staring at Tasha and Annie. “I did what had to be done,” she says. “He won’t let us take the hens for eggs, but we can eat them, at least.”
Tasha looks troubled, and suddenly so tired. “Elyse,” she says. “You can’t do that.”
“He can’t do that!” Elyse cries. “We barely survived the winter. And he had chickens in the house that whole time!”
“Four chickens are not going to feed a whole fucking city!” Joseph yells. “Three chickens even less. What’s wrong with you?”
“The rest of us are starving!” Elyse shouts. There’s a grumble around them after she says this, a whisper of unease through the crowd.
“Elyse. Just stop,” Annie says. “You’re only going to make things worse.”
“Why am I the only one who sees what we need to do?” Elyse cries. “We’re going to starve if we don’t make even harder decisions. You can’t celebrate any of this aw—” She bends over and coughs heavily, her shoulders heaving. She stumbles forward, then rests her hands against her thighs and heaves again. Her cough is thick and wet, insistent. All-consuming. When she is finally able, she straightens, her face resolute. “It was just one chicken.”
“She’s not just a chicken,” Joseph says. His voice breaks. “She and the others are all the family I have left.”
“Joseph,” Tasha says. “I’m so sorry.”
“This is all your fault!” he shouts at her. “I should have left months ago. We all should have left months ago.” He gestures wildly to the dead bird at Elyse’s feet. “You want that chicken? Fine. Take it. I am leaving this place. Fuck all of you.” He turns and begins to stalk back to his house.
A man breaks away from the edge of the crowd and follows him.
Then another person, a woman this time.
Another.
Another.
“Joseph,” Tasha calls. “Joseph.”
None of them turn around.
At last, Tasha turns back to the crowd still standing in front of the wagon. “We’ll be all right,” she says. “Don’t worry. We have a plan.”
But the spell is broken now. People begin to drift away from the square to their homes, leaving whatever else Tasha might have said to them unspoken.
“Maybe they should go,” Elyse says, after most of them are gone. “That’s more food for us, anyway.”
Tasha’s eyes rest on Heather, who has stayed with B in the square. “They’ll come around,” Tasha says. “You’ll see.”
The next morning, Joseph’s house is empty. He and his chickens are gone.
The weather gets hotter. They eat a bowl of rice a day, topped with one can of beans, split between the two of them and the girls. They plant the gardens, and hope, as their stash runs out.
Sometimes Heather finds apples or other fruits in their backyard. B is too beaten down to ask about such gifts now; he just accepts them, and eats his share.
He still goes to the strip mall to help Tasha and Annie when he can. But sometimes he sleeps away the day. Sometimes they all sleep, as the vines grow over Joseph’s old house, choke it into memory.
On the days that B leaves, Heather musters the strength to take the girls to the greenhouse. One foot in front of the other.
Then, at last, one day Estajfan comes out from the trees when she grows close.
“Heather, please don’t come to the greenhouse anymore,” he says. “Save your strength.”
“I can do it,” she says. It is still possible—even with her belly, even with the girls. Delirium keeps her going now. These terrible, hysterical gifts.
“Heather.” Estajfan comes to her and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Heather, stop coming here. Please rest.”
“I rest here or I rest at home.” She shrugs. “I’d rather be here with you.”
He watches her face. “And your…B?”
She looks away. “All you have to share now is what grows on the mountain, right?”
“We still look,” he whispers. “We go farther and farther, but things are harder and harder to find.”
She closes her eyes. It is not hard to see. This abandoned city, that abandoned town. Large humps of green that used to be houses, smaller humps that might have been cars on the roads.
There are smaller humps even than those, almost imperceptible in the green. This one big enough, perhaps, to have once been a person. A child. The flowers that bend around them are bright and terrible—orange and purple and a brighter yellow than she’s ever seen, giant half-moon traps that hang off the vines on other houses. Bushes with dark, juicy berries, soft white oleander plants that choke the hydro poles that stand still and useless, lining the streets.
She takes a breath, then opens her eyes. “You need to take us up the mountain.”
He looks at her. “You should have left a year ago.”
She laughs at this. “Well, I didn’t. You really think I could leave?” Then she says it again. “Estajfan. You need to bring us up the mountain. Me. The girls. And B.”
He shakes his head.
“Estajfan. Please.”
Silence. She watches him clench and unclench his fists. Then he says, “I can bring you.”
“Yes,” she says. “And the girls. And B.”
“Just you. The mountain is the centaurs’ home.”
She steps back from him, one arm around each of the girls, a hand half covering their ears as though they understand. She opens her mouth. “N—”
“Heather.”
She turns as Estajfan jumps back into the trees and disappears. The ground rumbles beneath her feet.
Elyse is coming toward her, from the field. She stops in front of Heather, breathing hard. “Heather?”
Heather digs her fingernails into her palms. The girls whimper, weak, against her collarbone. “What, the horse?” she says.
“That wasn’t a hor—”
“You’re tired, Elyse.” Heather starts to walk back in the direction of the city.
“That—that thing—it was more than a horse!” Elyse lunges forward, grabs Heather’s arm. When she tries to shake her off, Elyse holds on even tighter.
For a moment, everything around them stops. There is no birdsong, there is no rustle of the leaves. There is no wind.
“In the beginning,” Elyse says, and she lets Heather’s arm fall, “a horse fell in love with a woman.”
“That’s just a story.” Heather resumes walking, her heart beating loud in her ears. She fights to keep from screaming. Estajfan. Estajfan.
“It’s up there, isn’t it?” Elyse says, stumbling after Heather. “On the mountain. My grandmother—she used to tell us stories. It’s up there, and—” she coughs, ugly and painful, but keeps coming— “oh my God, Heather. Did he say—I heard ‘centaurs.’ Are there more of them?”
She doesn’t turn around. One foot in front of the other. Forward. Forward. Never back.
“What’s on the mountain, Heather? Do they…” Elyse falls silent for a moment, and Heather can almost hear the gears working in her mind, pieces falling into place with terrifying precision. “Was it them who brought the food? Is there food up there?”
Heather keeps walking, willing herself not to cry. Elyse struggles relentlessly behind her. “No one has been up the mountain in years,” she says. “There is no food. We all know that, Elyse. We’ve told stories about the mountain forever.”
“You were there! You—” And then Elyse stops. “You knew,” she says. “You’ve known this whole time.”
“You’re making no sense, Elyse.”
“I’m making perfect sense!” Elyse cries. “You kept this from all of us while the whole city was starving?”
“Is starving,” Heather mutters. She feels Elyse watching her. “We are starving, Elyse. We will continue to starve until it ends.” The footsteps stop, and finally Heather turns to see Elyse half hunched over in the middle of the overgrown road. She and the girls are almost home; she has to shut this girl down. “You didn’t see anything,” Heather says. “I walk the forest all the time, Elyse—I know how the shadows and the light can trick you. Stop grasping for hope that isn’t there.”
“I know what I saw,” Elyse insists. “And it wasn’t a horse.”
“What did you see?” It’s B, on their doorstep, coming out to meet them.
Heather shrugs. She lifts Greta out of the sling and passes her over so that B’s attention shifts to the baby. “Nothing,” she says. “A trick of the light in the forest. That’s all.”
Elyse laughs. “The only one with tricks around here is you.” She looks at B. “Did you see it too? Do you know about the creature in the forest?”
B pauses only for an instant, but it’s enough. “What creature?” he says.
“Half man, half horse,” Elyse gasps. “It was—Brendan, it was like something from a dream. Like the stories we used to hear when we were kids! But it was real. I swear.”
“If there are magical creatures in the mountains,” Heather says, trying to sound weary, not panicked, “don’t you think someone would have talked about them before?”
“You did,” B says. Low and unmistakable.
She glances at him. “What? I did not.”
“Right after you came down, when your father died. You told the doctors there were creatures on the mountain. And no one believed you, so you stopped talking.”
Heather swallows. “How would you know?”
“I went to school with you, remember? People talked. Everyone knew about your time in the hospital. Everyone said you were crazy. I said it too, once.”
She looks away from him. The sting is so old it doesn’t even hurt, but the panic building in her chest is something altogether different. “I barely remember you from school.”
“Why would you?” he says, still in that strange voice. “You didn’t talk to anybody.”
She laughs. “And everyone remembered me anyway—because they said I was crazy? Because I walked funny?”
He doesn’t deny it.
“They’re up on the mountain,” Elyse interjects. She has B now—soon she’ll have the whole city. “Brendan—they have food up on the mountain. We have to go up.”
He hasn’t stopped looking at Heather. “Is that where the fruit came from? And the flowers?”
She doesn’t meet his eyes. “There is nothing on the mountain,” she says, again. “If we go up there, people will die.”
“People have already died!” Elyse shouts. She takes one more step closer to Heather. “If you aren’t going to do what needs to be done, then I will.” She turns and starts to walk to the town.
Heather lunges after Elyse, all her careful resolve disintegrating in panic. B’s hand on her arm is the only thing that stops her. He has Greta on his hip; Jilly, still in the sling, looks up at her, confused.
“You need to tell me everything,” he says.
“You’re hurting me,” she says. She watches Elyse hurry away from them, then glances at his hand on her arm. He doesn’t let go.
The ground rumbles beneath her feet.
“We can’t go up the mountain,” she whispers to B. “It isn’t safe.”
“Why isn’t it safe, Heather?”
“It just isn’t.”
She finally wrenches her arm away, and he laughs—a short, sharp bark at the sky. “You can’t really be serious. Half man, half horse? What kind of joke is this?”
“It isn’t a joke,” she says, dully. “But it doesn’t matter. We can’t go up there.”
“Tell me,” he says, and she knows what he means. “Tell me all of it.”
And so she does—standing there in front of their house as the sky begins to darken and the breeze rustles through the trees. The day her father took her up the mountain. The songs he sang. The beasts in the trees and her father’s explosive joy. The way he touched the palomino. His sudden stumble and fall.
“How could he do that?” B interrupts.
“How could he fall?”
“No—how could he take you up the mountain? On a path he didn’t know was safe? A child like you who couldn’t even walk straight on normal ground?”
“He helped me.”
“What if you’d fallen? What if you’d gotten hurt? Would he have left you there with God knows what while he went down for help? Didn’t he think about that?”
“He believed in me,” she retorts. A reflex, her loyalty so deep it splits her in two. “I wanted to believe in myself too. To know that I could do it.”
Help us, she remembers him saying. Help my daughter.
B shakes his head. “So—what—your father fell and this—creature—carried you back down the mountain? And then what?”
She thinks of it—night after night of hushed escape from the house. Estajfan, smiling as she drew him on the paper. Estajfan, telling her a thousand stories.
“I had no one else to talk to,” she says, eventually.
“You had people to talk to!” he cries. “You didn’t want to talk to anybody else.”
“People wouldn’t have understood,” she says. “You don’t know because you weren’t there.”
“I’m here now,” he says. “I’ve been here for almost two years. And you’ve never told me any of this.” B looks away, for a moment. He doesn’t believe her entirely, she can tell. But who can blame him? They are all malnourished, weakened, beaten down by this disaster. What’s easier to believe in—magic or despair?
“I’ve tried so hard to be good to you,” B says. “But you never let me in. You’d rather believe in the stories you tell yourself instead.”
“This isn’t a story,” she says, softly. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“Not just this,” he says, surprising her. “Everything you believe about yourself is a story.”
She blinks. “What?”
He sighs. “Everything. The mountain. These—centaurs. The way that everyone treated you at school.” She opens her mouth to protest; he just shakes his head. “I know we weren’t perfect. I know I haven’t been perfect. But—people change, Heather. I’ve tried. Tasha has tried, and tried, and tried. And all you show us is a wall.”
She swallows. She’d expected anger, not this.
“You might as well be up on that mountain already,” he says. “You’d rather be in a fantasy world than here.”
“Can you blame me?”
His face hardens. “I can, a little. It’s like you believe that the only person who can change is you. You went into the forest while everyone else tried to keep the city alive.”
“I had the girls,” she protests. “I kept the girls alive.”
“You did,” he admits. “That’s true.” They stare at each other, and then he sighs again, and says, “So. These—centaurs—on the mountain. Is there food? Like Elyse said? Can we go up there and get it?”
“We can’t go up,” she says. “B—it isn’t safe. People will die.”
“People are already dying,” he says, echoing Elyse. “If there is food up there, we have to try.”
“B,” she whispers, “no one can go.”
“So that’s it, then? They’re going to let all of us starve?”
She doesn’t say anything—her face says it for her. She watches the realization slide over his face with something like horror.
“Not all of us,” he says, eventually. “Not you.”
Heather swallows, puts a hand against his arm. “He said he could take me up. I said—”
He leans over and plucks Jilly out of the sling. “Go, then,” he says. “Get the fuck up the mountain and leave us alone.”
She is too shocked to protest. She watches him turn away from her as if in a dream. He walks up the steps to their house, carrying the girls, then stands for a moment, his hand on the doorknob.
It’s a dream, she thinks. It’s only another dream.
“Go,” he says, and he doesn’t turn to her. “That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“I have to warn him,” she whispers. “I’ll come back. I promise.”
Beneath her feet, a steady rumble, rumble, in the ground.
Estajfan is not at the greenhouse. She heads past it, toward the forest, pushing her way through the underbrush. Sweat pools in her collarbone and trickles down between her breasts. When she reaches out to push the vines out of the way, her hands sting where they touch the green. She stops to examine them—small welts rise and fade as she watches. A trick of the light, she thinks, and pushes ahead, ignoring the pain. She’s good at that.
Another rumble hits—so hard and so loud she almost falls. When she rights herself, she’s barely past the greenhouse. She retreats back against it, looks up into the trees.
“Estajfan,” she calls. “Estajfan.”
“Heather.” Suddenly he’s beside her, before her, everywhere. Mountain air and light and sky.
She wants to collapse, to cry, but she gets a hold of herself. “Estajfan, listen to me. They’re coming up the mountain. You have to go—you, Aura, Petrolio. Please. I don’t know what they’ll do. They’re—everyone is so hungry, and so desperate.”
Estajfan shakes his head. “They can’t come up the mountain.”
“I know that—”
“No.” He grips her shoulders again. “Heather—something deeper is wrong. I’ve been trying to figure out what the ground magic is saying—”
“Ground magic?” She stares at him.
An unleashed banshee wail shoots at them from all directions. Heather covers her ears and bends low. Low enough to see the lilies around the greenhouse open their petals like mouths and scream. The glass shatters. Vines crawl through the shards and loop around her arms. She yanks free but the vines wind tighter, pull her down to the forest floor. Tiny green tendrils burrow into her arms. A thousand tiny pinpricks, a thousand pictures in her head.
A father tucks his son into bed, lifts up the pillow, and smothers the child. Then he jumps headfirst from a third-storey window and his neck snaps like a twig.
A mother bursts into tears at a dinner table and stabs her daughter through the eye with a fork, then takes her own life.
Children face down in a filthy tub. The mother and father slumped against the sink, a gun on the floor, blood and brain matter splashed over the wall.
In their city. In cities far away.
Then her girls and B, dangling from a beam in the kitchen.
The screaming. The screaming. She’s screaming with it.
The ground surges around her, green things thrumming in triumph. The air smells like the world has a fever.
Estajfan rips the vines away and picks her up. She turns into his shoulder and feels them start to climb.
Mama, says Greta’s little voice inside her ear.
Da, says Jilly.
They are gone—her girls.
There are no stories that will protect her from this.
They are gone from her, forever.