The story below is the winning entry of the 2026 Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition Short Story category, written by Anjelica Rush.
Anjelica is a writer and bookseller living in Melbourne/Naarm on Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung lands. Her short fiction has been published by Island magazine.
I saw a centaur on the Capital City Trail. Her coat was teak and at first I mistook her for a park bench. This was because I was wearing my glasses with the out-of-date prescription in them, which I use mostly at the end of the year when my health fund has maxed out and I can’t afford new contacts.
On this particular morning, the writing was not going well. I’d been fiddling with a clunky sentence but my efforts to fix it, my tinkering and reworking, had only made it clunkier. This stroll down the Capital City Trail, then, was intended as a circuit breaker. Something to get me moving, loosen me up.
The outdated lenses helped in this: with them on, the trail took on the quality of a Monet painting. The bike track washed away into a winding yellow path fringed by emerald-stained grass, studded with white splotches that might have been daisies. The effect was deeply relaxing and quite pleasant, and I could almost feel the problem sentence dislodging itself, right up until the moment when I discovered that the bench I was attempting to park my rear on was, in fact, the naked flank of a centaur.
‘Oh, honey,’ the centaur said. ‘I don’t think so.’
She was striking. Mature-looking, but with skin that was poreless and bright. Hers was an unearthly face, as if Angela Bassett’s and Cate Blanchett’s had been blended together, then re-moulded over a skull designed by a Grecian architect. The cheekbones were like marble domes soaring above shadowy hollows, the forehead a smooth, impenetrable vault, the jaw all chiselled cornices and sharp throughlines. And set within it: the eyes, unblinking, jewel-bright, in a cruel shade of blue.
It was the kind of face that would have been jarring on a human, but which on her was just right. A face that made the rest of her (the horse torso with the four legs folded underneath, and the human top half with the breasts hanging pendulous and free) seem almost inevitable.
I straightened up.
I said, ‘I’m very sorry.’
Then I said, ‘You’re not wearing a bra.’
I think it was the shock. But I meant it in a good way. Like a hell-yeah-I-read-a-chapter-of-The-Female-Eunuch-for-my-gender-studies-class-too! type of way. The centaur raised a hand to her brow, blocking out the sun, and gave me a luxurious, drawn-out once-up. The blue eyes lingered on my own breasts which were, for their part, stuffed into a sports bra I had rescued from the dirty pile.
‘A centaur wearing a brassiere’ – she used that word, ‘brassiere’ – ‘is like a human wearing a dog collar. Tacky. Perverse. Against nature.’
And, maybe it was because this hurt my feelings (why was it that her boobs were too good for a ‘brassiere’, while mine were not?) that I said: ‘Um, that’s kink-shaming.’ The centaur stared at me.
‘Your ‘dog collar’ comment?’ I said.
She continued to stare.
‘Maybe you’re not aware of this, but some people actually enjoy wearing dog collars. They’re actually a whole subgroup. A sex subgroup.’
The staring went on.
‘So yeah, what you said? Labelling that whole community unnatural? That’s not okay.’
‘Which community?’ the centaur said.
‘The dog collar community?’ I said.
‘And you are one of these dog-collar wearers?’
‘Oh no – ’
‘I have offended you.’
‘No, no, not me as such – ’
‘I apologise.’
‘No, don’t – ’
‘Do you wear it around your neck?’
‘What?’
‘Your dog collar.’
I coughed. ‘I think we’ve got our wires crossed somewhere – ’
She said, ‘Why aren’t you wearing your collar today?’
She said, ‘Is it in the wash?’
She said, ‘Do you have lots of different ones? Do they all have little tags with your name, address and phone number on them? Is your nickname bedazzled around the circumference? Can you attach a lead to it? Who takes you for walks? May I take you for a walk?’ She repeated it. ‘May I take you for a walk? Now?’
I felt like a child, playing catch-up in a game devised by an older sibling. The centaur’s words moved so smoothly, and her tone was so reasonable that I heard myself saying, ‘Um, I guess. Yeah. Let’s go for a walk.’
The centaur got to her hooves. She rose, in a single, powerful movement, to her full height, which must have been two or so metres, hoof to head.
In the absence of a leash and collar, which I was still trying to convince her I did not generally wear, she reached one strong Amazonian arm towards my head. My hair was in two plaits that day and drawing these together into a makeshift rein, she clicked her teeth together to make a ‘chyah’ sound, and said: ‘Coffee.’
So I led her, or she drove me, towards the coffee window overlooking the trail. It was mostly cyclists at that time of the morning, and, as the centaur pulled me over to the window, they talked in loud, overly chipper voices about banal things (the kids, who were well, the parents, who were not) which made it clear that they had spotted us. I felt their eyes flitting over to us, looking at us in the way they might look at an erratic passenger on the tram – out of the corner of their eyes, curious despite themselves and praying that we would not interact.
On any other day this attention would have discomforted me, but the centaur’s taut grip on my plaits was reassuring. Easy, girl, her grip said, steady on. Beside her, I too became an object of fascination: something unusual and unpredictable and, maybe, dangerous.
I had to relay the centaur’s order to the barista because she stood head and shoulders above the window: a latte for me and a quadruple-shot long black for her. I paid. When our order was up, I passed the coffee in its takeaway cardboard cup to the centaur’s free hand. She took a sip, then the smooth features screwed up in a grimace. ‘Piss weak,’ she said.
‘I think the barista heard that.’
‘Good.’
We started down the trail again. In my periphery, her big horse booty listed left then right then left. Her hooves made a satisfying hollow clopping sound on the paved track. ‘The best coffee I ever had,’ the centaur said, ‘was brewed by a monk.’
The monk, she explained, had lived in a monastery carved into a cliff face. It had been perilous for her, she told me, visiting that place which was made for two feet, rather than four. The tight staircases, roughly hewn and wending down to the kitchen, had squeezed her great body and forced her to duck her torso almost horizontal. She had persisted, though, because the monk whom she had come especially to visit spent his days down there, grinding and brewing.
‘It started as a way to beat fatigue,’ she said. ‘The monks sipped coffee during their communes with God, marathon prayer sessions which stretched from dawn one day to dawn the next. But they had grown addicted. Each man was averaging six cups a day and neurotic as all hell. Monasteries one is inclined to think of as peaceful, quiet places. This one was not. It was like an ants nest, roiling and spiky, mad monks scurrying everywhere, arguing fast and loud about obscure points of theology and thorny interpretations of scripture, and always – before they could do anything else, before the start of prayer, before lunch, before tending to the vegetable patch or giving alms to the poor – they would dive into the bowels of the monastery to where the barista, who was the maddest monk of all, was powering the whole enterprise, brewing coffee in enormous vats. As he slaved over these vats, he too drank the thick, black coffee like it was water. In the time I was with him, which was a period of several weeks, his body shook the whole time with nervous energy and he never slept.
‘But his coffee really was the best. You felt the rich, furious buzz of it as it entered your mouth, pinching every taste bud, tugging at every nerve. Did you know that coffee can be like that, if you use enough beans?’
I told her I did not know that, but I would be interested to try it.
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘He died. Centuries ago.’
She said this so carelessly that I almost missed the implication.
It ought not to have come as a surprise. The fact that the centaur’s lifespan stretched hundreds of years was, after all, no more impossible than her human torso transitioning smoothly into the silky chestnut coat. Or her hoofed feet. Or her tail.
Still, my pulse quickened, envisioning her wandering through the ages. An ageless intelligence, bearing witness to the rise and fall of empires, of civilisations, breaking bread with mad monks, madder kings, duchesses, artists, philosophers, revolutionaries, heroes, villains – and now, me. I felt singled out and giddy. It seemed clear to me that if her purpose was to plumb the depths of human ingenuity and accomplishment, to sample its many flavours, then my purpose, as the writer she had chosen to speak to, was to make a record of these experiences.
‘What happened during the Renaissance?’ I asked greedily.
The sheer, unapologetic pageantry of the Renaissance had always appealed to me. Indeed, the story I was currently grappling with was set during that period. I’d fancied that it would serve me well in fiction, but, in practice, I’d found that the lushness of the era was working against me. The glittering wealth, the candlelit intrigues, corrupt cardinals, grinning harlequins, pale-faced virgins – it was all too ripe, every possible storyline too tempting.
An anecdote was what I needed. A way into the narrative. It tickled me to think of the centaur’s hooves on Florentine cobblestones, to imagine her dining with the Medicis, maybe, talking with them as she was talking with me now, offering advice as to which up-and-coming artist – a young Michaelangelo or a Da Vinci, perhaps – deserved their patronage.
‘What did you get up to during the Renaissance?’ I asked again. The absurd, improbable shape the question made coming out of my lips made me smile.
‘Oh, I wasn’t around for any of that,’ the centaur said.
I stopped smiling.
‘Where were you then? During those years?’
‘On an island in the Indian Ocean.’
Again, she did not have to pause to recover her memories. The past seemed to come back to her immediately; she had perfect recall in the way a musical savant has perfect pitch. She told me that the island, at that time, had been covered in dense rainforest. It was a loud, busy place: frogs hiccupping throughout the night, insects chirping through the day, and, always, the chattering of birds, whose calls would plunge down the great gorges and monolith waterfalls, ricocheting off the slate, so she could make out their echo on the other side of the island.
‘It reminded me of Tokyo. Or New York City.’
Which struck me as an odd comparison.
‘But it was uninhabited?’
‘No? I just told you: it was infested with life.’
I laughed. ‘I meant, no humans lived there?’
She gave me a long look, then. It reminded me of an expression I have sometimes encountered when conversing with a person who is bilingual. I might pronounce something in English, some phrase or question which to me might seem innocuous but which would, unexpectedly, make my interlocutor pause, furrow their brow, or lean back slightly. And I would become suspicious that something had been not so much lost in translation as gained. As if my own words had exposed me in some way of which I could not conceive, and would never conceive so long as I dealt exclusively in the English language.
‘I lived with the birds,’ she continued. ‘Polite creatures. Welcoming. They took to me instantly for they, too, were ground-dwellers. They had two redundant wings, fixed like feathery decorations to their left and right sides. But their flightlessness never bothered them, for they were swift on their sturdy little legs. It was something to watch them forage: the flock would zoom into the underbrush at speed, like hordes of children converging on a playground.
‘And in many ways it, the island, was their playground. You’d think it had emerged from the sea just for them: always fertile, trimmed with seeds and berries and nuts to feast on, no predators to steal their eggs or menace their young. And if any of their number got into trouble – became trapped or lost or hungry – they would simply call out, and their cry would carry to the rest of the flock, who would come, swiftly, to their aid.
‘The birds repaid the island in kind, never taking more than they needed, always apportioning the food fairly, every one of them taking on the responsibility for digesting the seeds and then dispersing them around the island, so that the forest grew ever lusher, ever thicker.’
She said this like the birds knew what they were doing. Like they had consciously agreed, via avian referendum, to ‘disperse’ at different locations around the island. There was a note of wonder in her voice which itched at me. I had a sense that she was deviating from our agreement, our tacit compact to chronicle – together – the great and small movements of history. Human history.
‘Paradise,’ she went on. ‘It was a paradise.’
‘Boring, though.’
‘Hmm?’
‘It must have been boring.’ I buzzed at my own audacity. ‘Running around with a flock of birds. No one to talk to. Nothing to talk about. It’s not very stimulating, is it? Intellectually, I mean?’
I was only trying to right the conversation, to steer it back into more interesting waters. The centaur, it turned out, did not like to be steered.
She tugged at my plaits. This was a small movement for her, just a flick of her wrist, but the force of it rippled through me. My body yanked to a halt mid-stride, neck snapping back, the skin where my hair met my scalp burning as if a thousand tiny needles were stabbing into my skull. Tears pricked my eyes. I felt her breath on my neck.
‘And what would I do with intellectual stimulation?’ she asked. Her tone was even, but she was close, too close, to my ear. Her breath smelled like black coffee on a muscular, unbrushed tongue.
I did not know how to answer. I tried to go on walking but it was as though my neck had been cast in concrete, so firmly was she holding me in place. We stood, unmoving, in the centre of the footpath. Families and groups of walkers and people on bikes had to swerve around us. Such was the centaur’s authority that not a single cyclist sounded their bell.
It was then I understood, for the first time, that the centaur was not a human creature. Which sounds idiotic. But really it is easy, when one meets a centaur, to assume that they are a sort of cousin of the species. A homo-sapiens with horse legs.
But no human woman had ever gripped another woman’s hair like that. It was a remorseless grip, and I was belatedly aware that no matter how hard I struggled, I was too weak; I would not be able to free myself. There was a cruelty to it. Not the messy, sordid cruelty of the human world, but the cruelty of the natural world: fierce and beautiful, uncomplicated by human anxieties over ethics or morals.
I understood that she could snap my neck in an instant if she wanted.
‘I do not require intellectual stimulation in the way you do,’ the centaur said. ‘I am not dependent on it. I am not in search of the next hit.’
I garbled something about intelligence being what set humans apart from animals.
‘It sets you apart by making it impossible for you to simply exist.’
‘No. That’s not it – ’
‘It elevates you at the cost of making you permanently unsatisfied.’
I glanced around at my fellow humans, streaming past me. If only I could enlist one of them to mount a defence of the species, to explain in a way that the centaur might understand that, actually, our intelligence was what made us special. But they were all on their way somewhere: to the kids’ football match, to brunch, to grandma’s, to the pharmacy, to the market, to their books and shows and games and phones, to the million little things that occupied them and made them different from other animals and which, I was certain, contented them, at least for a time.
The centaur sighed. It would be tempting to tell you that the sigh was like a horse’s snort, wild and out-of-control, lip-vibrating and alarming: anything that could place her more firmly in the kingdom of ‘animal’ and therefore biased against us.
But her sigh was delicate. Executed with all the skill of a concert flautist, a drawn-out compression of wind through well-structured nostrils. It was a sigh of exhaustion – not a physical exhaustion, but something knottier and less easily remedied.
She said, as if I had never interrupted her in the first place: ‘The birds went the way of the barista, in the end.’
Then she clicked her teeth together again (‘chyah’) and prodded me onwards down the trail.
The centaur related many other tales to me during our walk. But I was so consumed by my desire to escape her, that later, when she delivered me home, unharmed – how she knew where I lived, I did not know – I found I could not recall any stories but those first two. These, I have reproduced to the best of my memory here. My Renaissance piece remains unfinished.