A Fork in the Road

In every generation, there are a few centaurs born with human traits that extend beyond the ordinary. Most of the time, they are born with the characteristics of a human being extending to the torso, and a horse's bottom half. Sometimes however, nature intervenes with a different plan. Rarely, a centaur is born with two or four human legs attached to their horse half. Others are born as hairless as a human excepting pubic, chest, and arm hair. Occasionally, a centaur's human half contains horse traits, like a pair of horse ears or a long horse mouth and nose affixed to a human head. Even more rare: the centaur who is otherwise typical, but with the penis with the proportions of a human rather than a horse.

It was the happiest of days when Bylon and Werna awaited the arrival of their little one in the centaur birthing barn. Werna had prayed to the gods that this one would be different. The other foals she'd brought into the world were sickly little creatures that never survived past infancy. The first one had a tiny head, the size of an orange. The second had two-inch long horse legs. The third was born with proportionate and normal human traits and horse legs, but a horse body the size of a watermelon. The vet said there might be something wrong with Bylon's tiny swimmers, because his tadpoles all seemed to have jumbled features, not the human head and ponytail of normal centaur sperm. The best reproductive scientists had tried to alter the anatomy of his seminal fishes, and they felt they re-spliced enough of them to give the worried couple a one-time chance to have a nice little seahorse-shaped blastocyst, tricked out with the finest centaurian features.

Nine months earlier, Bylon asked his more-than-friend Werna, "Will you lie with me?"

"I don't know what that means," she said.

"What I meant to say is, may I row your boat to Blissville?"

Werna looked at him with confusion. "Come again?" she said.

Bylon coughed and shuffled his feet. "Let me put it another way. Can I peel your potatoes while you add the girl gravy?"

Werna, still confused but beginning to suspect his intentions, looked below her more-than-friend's horse frame and observed the inflation of his flesh baton. "Ohhhh, I see what you want," she said with a wink. "Now that the doctors have fixed your fishes, I feel ready to receive your baby maker so we can make a nice, normal little foal." Bylon breathed a sigh of relief. With a brief kiss and a handshake (as was centaur custom at the initiation of coitus), Bylon move to the rear, taking care not to stumble over his substantial flesh tube. With little effort, he was welcomed into her labial temple of temptation. A few moments later, a million little swimmers sought the narrow road to her bulbous egg factory. While many seekers met their end on the road of no return, one lucky tadpole found sanctuary within her loving capsule of life.

Nine months later, Bylon watched their schmutz-clad foal squeeze through Werna's dilated baby hole. After wiping off all of the amniotic goo, they held it tight in their arms as its tiny lungs came to life. The tinny swimmer, now an air-breathing creature of the earth, had left the placid sea behind forever. It squalled, its plaintive wailing a futile remonstrance at the injustice of being forced from the protection of mother's belly into the cold and hostile external world. At first they beheld the newborn with joy.

"Four hooves and two arms," said Bylon.

"Look, he has your eyes and my lips," said Werna tearfully.

"Truly, oh truly, he is the most blessed creature, a fit, strong, example of our race, a gift from the Great Horse."

"What shall we call him?"

"How about Ertron?"

"So noble, a fit name for a fit foal."

But their delight turned to despair as they turned the helpless foal on its side, for there they discovered a defect. There, below the strong, horse rib cage, the perfectly formed legs and hooves, there their eyes betook the most terrifying sight a new centaur parent ever beheld.

It was a human-sized, human-shaped, bifurcated penis. A tiny, sad little thing, a worm better suited for burrowing unseen through the mud than attached to any member of the most noble race The Great Horse ever saw fit to create.

Bylon and Werna burst out with inconsolable sobbing at the sight of their tiny unfortunate. All the intervention of centaur medical science had not been able to prevent this ill-omened, misshapen freak from being thrust upon them, and the world.

What is a penis, really? It's such a small part of the anatomy, usually hidden from sight (except in the centaur world, where trousers are unknown), barely used for anything, especially when compared with arms, legs, eyes and ears. It is not a sense organ. It offers no means of perambulation. It's a hindrance in combat why is it so important? But the penis is more than merely the "fifth leg" (for a centaur). It is the organ of generation for the species, the maker of legacy, the flesh rock that sends every centaur dude to the creamy center of horny heaven. A weird penis on a centaur is almost worse than no penis at all. For the world pities the penisless, but feels threatened by penile weirdness. For an abnormal penis is more than unfortunate, it reminds every other penis-bearer that penile normalcy is not a guarantee, but luck. It's no different than the fear that the healthy bear for the ill and diseased, because anything in the body that does not belong is a harbinger of death.

At the Chiron Institute for Horse Half Health, a team of surgeons worked to lengthen the lad's longitudinal organ. They attempted to excise the left-sided penis and graft it to the end of the other one, but even if this perilous operation had succeeded, only human girth, not centaur width would frame the thin, pale, sad tube that had already caused so many bitter tears to fall. The operation failed. The vitality of the right penis rudely pushed the grafted penis off of itself like a gaunt, overheated, porcelain gentleman throwing off a heavy overcoat in a fire-warmed drawing room. If that was not enough, a new left penis grew from its terminal bud as quickly as a tree shoot in mid-May. The bifurcated penis, it appeared, demanded its right to exist.

The doctors were stunned that Ertron was able to grow a new, offshoot penis, but Bylon and Werna were horrified. They resolved to one another, "We will mask his penis and give him a normal life."

This was difficult, given the fact that centaurs of both sexes do not wear pants. Instead, the desperate parents turned at a fork in the road where science had failed them. They climbed the 10,000 stone stairs up Mount Mii to visit the workshop of Old Grandfather Widdlework, the magical wood worker. Old Grandfather was said to be the oldest centaur alive. He had a beard whiter than the snowy, forbidding glaciers surrounding his isolated home. It was so long that it hung forty feet from his cross-hatched window to his front door. Visitors pulled on it when they sought entry. It was attached to a small string of bells further up the beard, and they tinkled whenever the beard was pulled. It was said that a caller had better have serious business with the old curmudgeon because he was crusty, and he disliked having his beard pulled even though it was the system of his own creation.

Widdlework's age was placed at somewhere between 100 and 1000. He spoke to the stones around the mountain and told them dirty stories, and the stones in turn did him small favors, like hammering nails and things, because the stones were lonely and bored, having nobody to banter with. Old Grandfather Widdlework crafted nothing of practical value; he laughed at any who came looking for a chair or a really nice dinette set. His objects were strange, bent, crooked things that contained powers even he didn't understand: staffs that cried tears that became steel arrow-heads to make any arrow true, boxes with no door and no hinges, a wooden hand that caused any who touched it fall in love with its holder.

As they neared the remote mountain hut, a magical blizzard full of shimmering sparkly things overtook them. The path became unclear. Finally, the snow stopped, and the sun peeked through, cold and distant. Old Grandfather Widdlework's hut appeared in front of them and they pulled on it three times.

"Who is it? What do you want?" came the irritated reply.

"We are pilgrims from Centaurland. We're having a problem with something," they shouted up to the window.

"Well, what's the deal?"

"It's sensitive, "said Werna. "Can we talk about it in private?"

"No," said Widdlework. "State your business or get lost."

"Do you want to tell him or should I?" Bylon said in a hushed whisper.

"Maybe you should. I'm sort of shy."

"Fuck...," said Bylon. "Alright. I'll try."

"Old Grandfather," he said. "We seek a magic penis for our boy child. You see, he was born with a bifurcated, human-sized flesh arrow."

"Ah! A human penis! Yeeeeeeeeees, I have seen one before. It was written in the secret sacred scroll that there would come one such as him. He will know great torment and pain unless..."

"Unless?"

"Unless, what do you think, stupid! Unless I build him a magical centaur-sized fat fucking cock dick."

"Will you do it?" the anxious parents asked.

"I shall. It will be the largest lady-jabbing javelin a centaur has ever known. It will be harder than Mount Mii. It will be as rigid as the ice covering Lake Glopherglot. It will feel more keenly than the Lips of the Jaggeron."

"Oh thank the gods," cried the worried parents. "Fortune again smiles on our boy's procreative organ."

"However...it comes with price," said the old one. "The child will grow into a randy lad, as all lads are apt to do, and when he does...he may never touch it except to go to the bathroom. If he ever knows the pleasure of self-stimulation, or if he ever burrows betwixt a lady maiden's unctuous orifice—his magic wonder pole will instantly revert to its present state once his seed bursts forth. Only in his twenty-fifth year may he know these pleasures."

"Alas," said Bylon. "This is too much. All centaurs lose their innocence by age eighteen. How will he ever cope?" Erton's parents struggled with the momentous decision. They decided that even with these crushing restrictions, the boy would never be a man without a centaur-sized cock rocket.

"You must make your choice because time is running out."

"Is it? Why?"

"Because I'm tired and I want to take a nap."

"Very well," they agreed. "We must."

After this conversation, Old Grandfather invited the parents to take a seat in his dumpy waiting room. There, they ignored weathered copies of Centaur Today magazine and pressed their faces to a window into the factory floor of Widdlework's workshop. They gazed with awe at a small army of stubby wooden creatures with muscular arms and legs and heads resembling pine trees labored under the direction of the Old Grandfather. They watched the creatures roll a stout oak onto a giant stone table. Old Grandfather bent low and waved a candle over the oak, which then became soft, and began to breathe. The creatures rolled it back and forth between their tiny, pale fingers until it became smooth sided, and a mushroom head poked through the end. They ran their oiled hands up and down the shaft until it pulsed to life. Widdlework looked up at Bylon and Werner and gave a wink. Finally, a door opened in the side of the mountain from the underground factory. Widdlework made flapping motions with his arms and the penis grew wings larger than the mighty honey hamhawk. They beat the ground until the hut shook. In an instant, the penis took flight off of the mountain, and they all watched it soar through the air, parting a flock of birds, not otherwise specified, until it was seen no more.

"Go now," said the old man. "The magic penis will find the boy, and become small enough to fit him, but remain large enough to stun even the most skeptical and exacting of maidens. Go, go and revel in it, but remember! Let no one touch it, not even the lad himself!"

The people all looked up at the sky as the winged penis descended like an avian torpedo, shooting like an arrow toward the genitalia of one lucky boy. No one quite saw where it went as it landed, for Old Grandfather endowed his magic dick with an amnesiac ambrosia that shrouded gawkers in mist and confusion.

The boy, Ertron, grew up, and as he did, his package grew ever larger. The people remarked on it, telling his parents they should be proud. The other lads stared on in jealously at the waterlogged chunk of wood. The girl centaurs stopped to smell it and take pictures of it with their phones. Bylon and Werna warned their lad daily that dire unspecified consequences awaited him if he touched himself. "Come now, mother," he said, "Everyone knows there's no such thing as a magic dick with stipulations."

"Don't say that," said Bylon. "You have no idea what will happen to you if you disobey us, and you must never ask us."

More and more often, Ertron was ostracized rather than adored. Those who didn't fear his dick, wanted it for themselves. And with a thing that big, no one could understand why Ertron was eighteen and still hadn't put his tool in a fine lasses' tool shed like every other lad had been doing for years already. He heard their stories and wept. "I want to know the love of a girl, but I never will because of what? Because my parents are religious? Why, why do they bid me wait?"

His parents had no ready explanation, and they weren't Christians, so all they could tell their ridiculously well-endowed boy: "just wait a few more years."

Ertron went to school where young men were trained to assume their adult stations as warriors and athletes, and girls were trained to oil down the men, shine their armor, and prepare their weapons—and bear their offspring. His current course load consisted of Bone Crushology, Plunder & Pillage for Fun and Profit, Advanced Village Burning Methodology, and Intermediate Applied Slaying. And for his centaur culture classes he was taking Line Drawing Using the Blood of Your Foes, and War Ballad Choir. Most of the centaur lads loved their weapons and killing classes, especially the field trips to the war zone where they became the adept slaughterers their society expected them to be. The girls watched them with awe, and fought over the chance to mate with the most fearsome, gruesome, and aggressive of the lot.

Human beings, ever the loyal subjects of the centaurs, lived on the margins of centaur society, performing menial labor tasks, the most successful among them rising slightly above their low station to become successful members of the mercantile class. Only recently had the more progressive-minded centaur leaders managed to gain hard-won rights for humans. Because of these changes, human beings were now allowed to attend centaur schools, a few even fighting alongside centaurs in the front-ranks as respected but expendable warriors. While humans were grudgingly tolerated, their blood was deemed inferior to their "older brothers," and while human and centaur marriage was officially accepted, it was considered loathsome by the rules of society. The human race was intended to supply drudges and peons, not weaken the strong blood that coursed through the veins of the champions.

It was here at school that Ertron, by dint of his intimidating but untried cock, was disrespected by the boys no matter that he was their equal in combat training. Unable to engage in the pursuits of a respectable warrior, he immersed himself in the degrading occupation of alt country singing and songwriting. His odes were so unconventional that he alienated his War Ballad Choir professor, even though his sonorous tenor enchanted even the harshest of critics.

One day, while walking alone in the rocky, moss and fern-covered glade in the wild surrounds of his school, he plied the strings of his long and rigid eight-string yoloan (a sort of centaur guitar) as he composed an ode:

"Like the river onward rushing, my lips are pressed and almost crushing...no, no that can't be right. Her love is like a soft baked apple. Her hands are gentle, soft and supple. I'll crack my spear but not the shaft, even whilst they call me daft. For her my resolve shall bend but will not break, luke warm things in the oven baked. Yes, yes! I think I've got it!"

There was a cough and a rustling from behind a spray of ferns. "Is someone there?" said Ertron, throwing down his yoloan, mortified with shame.

A tall, fair, pale human walked forward. Ertron had not had much contact with human beings. The contours of her body puzzled him for a moment, until he realized humans wore clothes.

"You are a female?" he said. "Why are you out here?"

She smiled a broad grin, casually perched on a rock with her knees up, and shook her long, auburn tresses out of a bun. He stared at her without moving. "Why are you here?" was all he could manage.

"I heard music. I came to listen."

"You...heard?"

"Do you speak English?" she asked. "You seem quite befuddled."

"I am...I do...I'm sorry. I've never met a human...female before. You're very interesting."

"You know, apple does not rhyme with supple."

"Well, but apples and hands can be supple, you know."

"If they're baked?" She winked.

"You mock me."

"I like baking too, just in a different way."

"Girl Human, you're very confusing. Do you hate my words? Do you mark me for a mere dilettante?"

"No...I find your words pleasing. Rhyme often sounds forced. I find what you write—consonance—easier on the ear."

"You are a grammarian, then? Ha! I know of no others like that. And my voice? And the way I finger my strings?"

"Shush! I will not divulge all of my opinions of either your merits or your flaws in one interview. I have enjoyed your music so far, but I will need to hear more before I decide about you."

"Before you decide to become my friend, you mean?" His eyes were like those of a deer, discovering something new.

"You are innocent," she said half to herself. "You are unlike the other man-horses I've seen, all cocksure, chest thumping, skull crushing rogues. I very much wish to be your friend."

"I am like them. I am just as much a warrior. I have just as much spirit, Human Girl."

She stood up from her rock, walked closer to him and placed her hand on his flank, staring up into his eyes. "I have offended you. I meant you have a refined spirit, something I have never seen in a centaur. I entertain no doubts that you are a man by any measure. Your culture as well as mine rewards aggression as a so-called manly quality. I don't doubt that hurling a pike has its merits, but holding a sharpened stick in one's hand and waving it about is but one means of self-expression."

Ertron started backwards. Her touched thrilled him, frightened him. He'd never been touched by anyone, expect with stabbing weapons during combat training.

"I must go."

"May we part friends?"

"Affirmative," Ertron stated, his face and tone betraying no emotion. "I find your friendship acceptable."

"My lips are pressed, my face is flushing," she said.

His face began to flush. "Pardon?" he said. "What was that?"

"I changed your song," she said, with a coquettishly raised eyebrow. "I like flushing better than crushing, but I understand: it's your upbringing."

"Wait a minute. Grammarian pixie! You can't just alter my verses. They're mine."

"I just did, centaur. They're not yours anymore."

"Whose are they then?"

"Ours."

There was a sound of thumping and brush parting as a group of centaur huntsmen arrived in the clearing. The girl dove behind the rock she'd appeared behind, and was gone.