That was the first generation of girls, Janice said, and I was in it.
Most of them were regular, but some of them were not one hundred percent girls; the only way to know for sure was when they played horse. You’ve all played horse, right?
We club members found it embarrassing to admit to ever having played such a babyish game, even though we had loved it when we did. Playing horse was like being caught in the act of “talking” for a doll or a pet — the only way it worked was if everyone was playing and there was no audience. To play horse you held your arms out with your elbows bent and your wrists cocked for the reins. On a real horse the reins would stay at the horse’s withers, but since the rest of the horse was you, this was the only way to clarify the separation between horse and rider, a distinction that was, in any case, fluid and boundary less and subject to infinite change. The best part of the game was executing different gaits; it was also tricky to accomplish this on two legs instead of four. Cantering was the best.
You know what a centaur is, don’t you? Janice asked. She handed round sticks of gum but not everyone took one — most young people’s gums bled easily from what was said to be vitamin C deficiency.
A ballplayer? asked one of the little sisters.
Not that kind of centaur, said someone else.
You mean a mythological creature, said the curly-haired girl, but since the National Velvet remark Janice had ceased to acknowledge her presence.
When the first generation of girls played horse they made the vacant lot into a racecourse. Back then the lot was a mess. No one mowed the grass and it was full of dog shit. Drunks often passed out on the benches, leaving behind paper bags with empty gin bottles inside. The girls had to watch where they put their hooves without losing sight of the other horses. They’d also been trained by their parents to keep an eye on the sky — everyone was still vigilant after the Rain of Beads. It was the job of a diabetic girl who’d lost one of her legs and hadn’t gotten her new one yet to shoot the pistol to start the race. She used a real starter pistol one of the other girls had found in her father’s workbench.
The gun went off and the girls began to gallop. They were just girls, most of them, in their shorts and T-shirts and silver shoon, their manes and tails French-braided and their tack polished to a high gloss with saddle soap.
From his vantage point atop the water tower the sorcerer was watching the race through his telescope, which he’d set up in the gap between two of the crenellation’s stone teeth. The sorcerer had never been interested in little girls; he was watching their necks, not their bottoms. It isn’t in an animal’s nature to look up, Janice said — I bet you didn’t know that. Animals don’t have the muscles and bones needed to move that way. By noticing which of the girls tilted their necks and which ones didn’t, the sorcerer could tell which girls running around the lot were girls and which were centaurs.
The Centaurs are ahead of the Rockets, said the same little sister, breathless with excitement at having something to add to the conversation.
Shhh, said her older sister but Janice wasn’t paying attention.
Everyone kept looking up because they thought danger came from the sky, she said, since that was where it came from the last time. This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past. It was like the past was the future. It never occurred to anyone that they ought to be looking at their own daughters.
Four of the girls weren’t real girls at all.
Would we recognize their names? someone asked. Did they live on the street?
I told you before, Janice said. No names. Why do you always want to hear names? Does that bush have a name? Does that tree? How about those fish?
It’s just that she hasn’t thought of any names, said the girl who wanted to be a writer.
The fish are called Mr. Poopie and Mrs. Poopie said the littlest sister.
Janice surveyed the group with enormous pity. If I told you the names it would make your brains explode, she said. She took a seat in the middle of a bench, using her wide hips to bump aside the girls who were sitting there. Then she opened her pocketbook and removed a small Bible that had to be unzipped to be read. Janice’s boyfriend was very religious; she went to Bible study class with him. He used to be planning to be a priest before he met Janice.
Some people think what you’re supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that’s not how it works. In here, she said, unzipping the book, it says there will be ten thousand times ten thousand angels and so on milling around the throne. In Bible days they thought ten thousand was an impossibly huge number. Like in the song, when we’ve been here ten thousand years bright shining as the sun. When you think about it though, ten thousand isn’t all that much. When you compare it with eternity, ten thousand’s nothing. And nothing’s exactly what you’re supposed to be filling yourself up with.
The girls’ horse parts were invisible to everyone except themselves. One was white and one was red and one was black and one didn’t have any color at all. I guess you could say the red one was roan. Because they looked like girls no one thought they weren’t. Eventually it was time for dinner and everyone went home — the centaurs lived in numbers 22 and 23 and 35 and 44. Many families were having spaghetti and meatballs as a special treat, it being Saturday. Aside from the family of atheists in number 22, they all said grace first. Bless oh Lord this food to our use and us to thy service.
And make us ever mindful of the needs of others, someone finished, but Janice was too involved now to hear anything but herself.
What each family saw was nothing like what the four centaurs saw. Three of these families saw a girl sitting with her head bowed over her plate of spaghetti, saying grace. These girls were especially attractive physical specimens. The one with white horse parts looked Scandinavian like her parents, the one with roan parts, Irish. The black centaur’s father’s father had been an African king. The atheists’ daughter was albino but even so her parents watched adoringly as she arranged her paper napkin on her lap and began twirling strands of spaghetti around her fork. Her mother called her my little fragrant one, due to the sweet aroma of her skin. The dining rooms were all identical, the houses having been built at the same time by the same developer. An identical light fixture hung above each dining room table, a kind of chandelier with six “arms” and six round bulbs that were aimed at the ceiling instead of the table, creating an interesting pattern overhead but making it hard to see what you were eating.
Ours has a dimmer switch, someone said.
The dimmer switches got added later, said someone else.
Do you want to talk about dimmer switches or do you want to hear what happened? Janice asked.
For the centaurs it wasn’t like being inside a dining room. For them it was like being in an open place without anything in it where the sky was thin and transparent like a colored mist with blue and green and yellow stripes you could see the moon and stars through. Then the sky was gone and they could see all the way to the beginning of time and the end of time. These are the same thing, as everyone knows who came into this universe via a wormhole.
In the Rain of Beads girls got taken away. Blue Boy and Pinkie were gone forever — or if not forever it might as well have been. That was years and years ago, Janice said, adopting a matronly tone.