The Wife-Hunters | Lindz McLeod

The wife-hunters are hidden in the long grass. Their scent carries without need of a breeze—a pulsing cloud of back-slapping belt-swagger thick enough to swallow. The season has been a lean one so far, with only a couple of my herd picked off. I’ve seen these captured sisters moving through the street between the boarded-up houses, clad in yellow cloth, their antlers hidden by soft knit caps. They foal their young behind closed doors. Fire now takes what we would have drowned, given the chance, in our own throats.

The young men are ravenous. Starvation spikes their dark, damp hair, shapes their teeth into savage spirals. Today might be the day they’ll bag their own spouses. Hearing the stories, their future sons will puff their scarlet chests out, inflamed with pride. Their future daughters will escape from lazily-tied leashes, long legs lapping up the ground between town and flock. While there will be a few years of growth and maturation between escape and capture, girls understand upon arrival that we have never really been unchained. One noose, simply exchanged for another, looser one. Eventually, it must tighten again.

I press my muzzle to the ground, antlers snagged in dark branches. The herd shift around me, unwilling to desert one of their one. I hiss, pray with libations of cold sweat to go unnoticed, but the men have periscope eyes for every hint and subtle clue. I hiss again and the herd slide away, fading into the darkness beyond the trees, leaving only the smell of fresh-chewed grass. The men approach, no longer bothering to hide, holding guns taut between their thighs. Every barrel is aimed at me; my spotted hide, my long jaws, the elegance arch of a neck not yet bent or broken.

I am spineless, terror-limp, and they handle me like the dead weight of pre-cut meat. They check my hooves, one leg at a time, crowding and probing. They open my mouth, spin a finger inside, look past my gift teeth into the cavern of my chest and send a canary down into the shaft, small, bloodied claws descending by degrees. The bird flutters, betrays me by sending up one plume of purple smoke. The men smile, and sound me out for resonance, tapping a soft-headed hammer on the notches of my spine. 

“She’s ripe,” they murmur. “She’s ripe.”

Impossible, I know. I rotted, seconds before I was caught.

Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by Catapult, Flash Fiction Online, Pseudopod, and many more. She is a full member of the SFWA and is represented by Headwater Literary Management. www.lindzmcleod.co.uk