Writing Challenge - Confessional

Challenge: write a confessional for someone else. Share their secret, but code it as another person with another gender and another back story- then? Tell the world.

CENTAUR

                          ALICE

I had sex with a centaur once.  Well, more than once, but only the one night.

It was right after my husband kicked me out of the house, but before I met you.

I don’t blame him for kicking me out of the house.  He found me in bed with the neighbor’s wife which I’m sure was a bit of a shock.

I’d wager the neighbor wasn’t too pleased either, but at least my husband knew both of them were lesbians.  My own Sapphic tendencies were more of a surprise.  After all, we had two little boys of our own and I’m certain he thought we were both having an equal amount of fun when they were being conceived.

We got married too young.  Well, I did.  He was fine until he found me in bed with the lesbian from next door.  I didn’t know who I was yet.  Everyone seemed convinced that marriage was the next logical step after college on one’s journey to self-discovery and it seemed to be working well for at least half of them, so I figured, Bob’s nice enough.  He’s nice to me.  He’d be a good father.  A good provider.  I could probably figure out who I was if I had the safety of building a life with him.  I know that doesn’t sound romantic but it was the closest thing my brain and heart could process to romantic at the time.  Meeting you cracked my heart and my head open in ways I couldn’t imagine back in my supposedly heterosexual twenties.

It’s Bobby, Jr.’s birthday today.  Robert.  He likes to be called Robert.  He doesn’t mind the occasional slip if I call him Bobby now and again.  God help anyone who calls him Junior.  He’s 18.  An adult.  Almost as old as I was when I met his father.

I haven’t seen him in ten years.

His father has a right to be angry.  Bob raised him.  Robert can remember who I am, but I haven’t been his mother for a decade.  He’s not going to go against his father’s wishes.  I suppose he can now, but there’s college to pay for, he’s not really out on his own yet.  He’s at least trying.  The calls, the emails.  He got his own post office box at the package store so I can send him things and his father can’t rip them up or burn them before Robert gets home from school.

Little Jake.  Well, not so little Jake since the growth spurt.  He’s only 14 but he’s the tallest of anyone in the family.  At least that’s what the pictures on Robert’s facebook page would indicate.  Jake doesn’t really know me.  Robert tries to tell his little brother about me, to make me real, but –

Right, the centaur.

Just got me thinking.

Anyway, not a male centaur, obviously.  So no “hung like a horse” jokes.  And she wasn’t half-human, half-animal.  The gods and other mythical creatures disguise themselves so they can walk among us, she said.  Have sex with us mostly.  That was her thing anyway.

It was a motel in the middle of nowhere.  Our rooms were next to each other.  She saw me check in.  She waited.  She made sure I saw her.  She made sure I saw her leave the door open a crack.  I wasn’t looking for sex so much as someone to talk to.  She didn’t push.  She didn’t have to.  She just had to wait.  I couldn’t sleep alone.  Not that first night.

Maybe I was high, maybe she was high, maybe we both were high.  Centaur, right?  I mean that makes no sense.  I don’t remember drugs or even alcohol.  The sex was – like nothing before or since.  Not the best.  You’re the best.  Obviously.  She just came along when I needed her and then she was gone in the morning.

Centaur as a pickup line is one of the dumber Hail Marys in the playbook.  But I guess I needed to believe that this whole thing, this scorched earth campaign I’d just unleashed on my former domestic life, that it wasn’t the biggest mistake I’d every made since I was born.  I needed to believe that it wasn’t only the right thing to do, but that it was miraculous.  Otherwordly.  Predestined.  Impossible to resist.

Because losing my two boys.  Hell, Bob, too.  Losing those three men.  Just for sex.  If that was truly all I’d done, then I am the most selfish person imaginable.  I have to be more unique than that.  This decision has to be more consequential.  It can’t be some garden variety suburban soap opera.

Or I’m an idiot.

So I had sex with a centaur once.  That’s what she told me.  I choose to believe her.  Because what other choice do I have?