Penitence

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fiction

Jonathan Starke

Penitence

 

 

I never saw my father bleed before. But there it was, running down his cheek in a wavy line. The first drops drew breath from the crowd. I heard it in gasps, their voices sucked out like wind pulled through a tunnel. It mattered to them, his blood, because they’d never seen a centaur bleed. It mattered to me because I was made of that blood.
  My father held a closed fist up to his eye, rubbed at the blood with his knuckle. The leaking smeared pink down his cheek. He was boxing a giant called Axio Nop Avanboa or Tall as the Avanboa Tree. Axio smiled when the blood came. My father reared on his hind legs to create distance and walked backward until he touched the shaking ring ropes.
  I wasn’t supposed to be at the fight. I wasn’t supposed to know about it. But after my mother left us, my father would go away each night, tell me to stay inside and tend to my weaving, skin apples for drying, and turn over the fire. And I did these things. For weeks. For months. And at some point I thought my mother would come back, that I was skinning fruits for her pies or weaving cloth for her to cut and shape and make into winter garments. But the only thing that came through the door was my sweaty and welted father, his coat often dusty, his tail full of swatchoo burs, stinging in his eyes. And after he’d take his shoes off, the four clanks they’d make, he’d come into my room and smooth my hair with his warm hands and settle onto his belly on the floor and wait, wait out the night.
  My mother was human, like me, and my father would say nothing of her leaving, except that sometimes you have to . . .
. . . . . . .
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