Couldn't Drag Me Away

I went to the town where I grew up, after many years of being gone. I'd never liked it when I lived there, and had been through enough that I couldn't navigate it anymore. This town, this place that I had spent eighteen summers of my life in... totally unfamiliar to me now, another eighteen years later.

My half-brother found me wandering around the shops near the gigantic clock. The gigantic clock was the only thing familiar to me about my hometown. The only place I had any real clarity of memory. Usually from a passing city bus. Or riding my mother's back towards an appointment somewhere.

"What brings you here?" he asked me as he bent to hug me. The passers-by all gave us strange looks "I thought you said you'd never come back."

"I don't remember saying any such thing." And it's true. I don't. I don't remember big chunks of things that happened before about five years ago. Then something would happen to me that would cause me to never forget any day since then: my horn grew.

All at once. All in one day. The headache was incredible. For three days prior to it, I'd gone into a strange fugue, feeling the desperate need to be somewhere... anywhere I couldn't be found easily.

The fourth night, I groaned and thrashed in the sheets of some fleatrap motel outside of my city. The motel cop came by and asked me if everything was all right. And then took me to breakfast the next morning.

I ended up marrying him the next spring.

*

This is what I told my half-brother as we walked towards our mother's house.

"You got married and didn't tell us?" he asked, incredulous.

"I dunno, Jake, is that what people do when they never want to see their family again?"

His face turned angry, and his tail swatted peevishly, brushing off invisible flies. "I never did anything to you."

I whispered, without wanting to. "You didn't have to."

"What?"

"Nothing."

*

We reached our mother's home on the outskirts of town. Her wings were in mid-molt, and her eyes had gone almost completely rheumy. No way was she ever going to be able to fly again. It would have to be public transport from here on out.

"Let me look at you," she said, pulling my head close, touching my horn gingerly. "Are you still a virgin?"

"Mother! You know I'm not."

"I dunno, Jane, honey. I've never seen this particular mutation in our family. We're equines, descended from some laboratory beaker a couple thousand years ago on Terra. Wings came into the picture sometime around the Fourth War, that I know. But this horn stuff? You didn't get modded, did you?"

"No, Mother. I can't afford that kind of frippery."

*

Dinner came, thankfully quickly. We ate in silence, listening to the clattering of a slow-boiling stew, lifting the lid with a long string of gentle puffs. Clicking of utensils, pouring of wine... it almost felt as if we'd only stopped eating together the night before. All the sounds were there. The requisite grunts. The buzzing of the kitchen lamp. The un-said but kept rule of total silence while eating.

"Mother, I want to come home."

All sound stopped, except for the buzzing of the light over us.

"You were in such a hurry to leave," Mother said, pointing her face in my direction. I knew she couldn't see a hand's breadth beyond her face, but she still tried to give me The Look. "What brings you back?  Are you broke?"

"No. You're old."

"I'm already taking care of her," Jake said, petulantly.

"No, you're not," said Mother. "You're out of a job and I have to beg you to do the dishes."

"Mom!" Jake exclaimed.

"Mother?" I tried to get her attention back. "Mother, I'm moving in because I'm married to a man who likes to hit me."

That shut everyone up for a moment. I exhaled. "And you're old."

*

"Who is this pigfucker?" Jake asked as I smoked from a pipe, walking in the backyard.

"I already told you. Cop. Hotel cop. Didn't mind my horn. I didn't mind his two. Or his cloven hooves."

"You literally married The Devil." Jake's voice had a finality to it, as if I'd done something he'd always suspected I would do.

"No, he's a Taur."

"Holy fuck. You married a Taur." Jake's face peeled back in disgust.

"Don't start with the racist bullshit, Jake."

"Well, why the fuck not?" Jake stomped and shook his body. "After all, he did hit you."

"It's more complicated than that." I started rubbing my horn absently. "I probably deserved it on some level. He was the first person to only know me this way."

"You know, it wouldn't have been so bad if you lived in town. We could have... I don't know. Taken care of you. Or something."

"Mom was too busy working all the time, and you were too busy... you were..."

Flash of memory, spiking down seemingly from the horn in my head. Almost as if I were physically there. My half-brother, watching from the doorway. Hands on me. No.

I sat. Jake came over to me and talked, but no sound reached my ears. I could still hear where the vision was leaving off. Eyes closed in the past, open eyes today, soundtrack only. Breathing, his. Sobbing, mine.

"...and I don't think you really understand how this is just throwing all of our lives into upheaval." Jake was finishing a sentence as the memory broke away from my ears.

*

That night, I sat up on the rooftop, looking out over the city, watching the traffic lights blink back and forth until the sentries snuffed them for the night.

Mother hobbled up next to me, holding out a warm cup of cocoa. I took it from her, but didn't say anything. I just kept looking at the clock tower in the distance, mere seconds away from midnight.

"There is no safe place in this world." Her voice came so plainly, so simply and without the gravel of years, that I had to turn around and look at her to make sure that it was still my Mom, up on the rooftop with me.

"What?"

"There is no safe place in this world of flesh, Jane. I am almost sorry that I brought you and your brother to it."

"Oh come on now, Mom, don't start in with that Death Goddess Worship shit. You made me go to Sunday school for twelve years."

Mom grinned. "Yeah, until you gave yourself a Mohawk and declared yourself an anarchist. That's when I was still angry at your father for being who he was." Mother waved a hand near her face in that delicate way she always did whenever she brought up something she really didn't want to talk about. Like she was swatting away flies. "Anyways, yes. In this world of flesh, there is no safe place."

I just looked at her. "Can you see me anymore, Mom?"

Mom's smile crinkled around her eyes. "Last time I saw your face was in that small portrait you gave me of yourself, about a year ago." She blinked back a tear. "It was a good picture. I'm glad that I can remember you that way."

Silently, we sat for a few moments, breathing small clouds of steam across mugs, and into silver-colored full-moon sky.

"I know about your brother. I know what he did."

My blood immediately ran cold.

"He told me when you went away. His soul is still tortured by it. He goes to church every Sunday, prays and whips his back. He hasn't been with a single woman since you left. He's vowed never to touch another woman again because of what he did to you."

It was as if the world had turned into a cheap imitation of itself.

"I even know about what your husband did to you. He called me this morning. He found me, and he asked me to find you. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not too old to tear the horns from his head with my bare hands."

I realized that I was standing up. My mother stood there, along with me, on the rooftop.

"Jane. There is no safe place in this world. That is why I have wings. I knew this coming to this world. I always need to be able to fly away."

I felt myself being pulled into the sky by invisible hands, large and comforting. My mother lifted her arms to me as if to embrace, or to say goodbye.

"I couldn't fly away from my lack as mother to you. But I could give you my wings, instead."

Leslie Powell