“Ah, thank fuck I found someone. I’ve been lost out here for hours.” Fellis leapt over a wooden fence, landing unsteadily on three of her hooves, and stepped into the clearing, shivering from the cold, to greet the stranger.

The woman turned to look at hearing the voice, and stood speechless at what she found.

“Am I somewhere near Baigna? I need to get back there, I had shit to do today.” Moments passed in silence as Fellis came closer. “Hey, uh, can you not hear me, or…”

At that point Fellis got a good look at the woman and what she was doing. She was a young adult white woman, thin and tired looking, wearing simple, modest clothing: a traditional dress and fur coat, with a white bonnet on her head. In her hands, red from the cold, she held a hammer and nails, which she was using to mend a decrepit-looking wooden fence.

“Oh, you’re a, what’s the word? Not mormon, uh… mennonite? Yeah? I guess you don’t see many people like me out here in your, uh, commune, or whatever it’s called…” Fellis reached the woman and held out a hand to shake. “I’m Fellis.”

“Louise.” She dropped the hammer into a bag at her side and tentatively reached out to the offered hand. “Louise Donnelly.” She lingered a moment, letting Fellis’ fur warm her hand a bit, then blushed and looked down at her feet.

“Say, Louise, do you think I could get something to cover up? I have no idea how I got out here naked and my synthesizer’s out of juice.” Fellis lightly patted one of the saddlebags she was wearing. “This freak storm or whatever sure is something…”

Louise nodded and pulled a slightly ratty wool blanket out of her bag. Fellis grabbed it and wrapped it around her more human half.

“Our house is just over the hill there. It’s about a half hour walk to the edge of Baigna from there.” Louise turned back to her work. “You could stay with us tonight if the cold is too great for you. I have business in town in the morning if you’d like me to show you the way.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” Fellis sat down, curling up her hind legs and keeping her forelegs straight, giving the impression of a normal human leaning on an object at waist height. “That close, eh? I would’ve thought we’d see the smoke from here. Guess the fuckin’ storm shut down the plant?”

Louise looked over at Fellis briefly, confused, but said nothing. She continued her work for a few minutes before saying anything else. “What manner of creature are you?”

Fellis, who’d been staring at the snowy ground and trying to keep bundled up in the blanket, started a bit at the question. “Well, most of us use the term deertaur or dryad. Uh, I don’t like dryad. We’re not really what people think of when they hear that, eh? But deertaur is kinda a fake-sounding word, y’know. But I guess it’s the better one, overall.”

Again, Louise briefly stared at Fellis with a baffled look on her face before turning back to the fence. “Are you some breed of fairy?”

“Uh, wow.” Fellis stood back up, visibly angry for a moment, before calming herself down. “I mean, I have relationships with both men and women, so yeah, I guess? Calling it like, that or not is kinda…” She gingerly stamped one hoof, which had been sore when she woke up in these woods. “Uh, could I help you with anything?”

Louise pointed to a thick rail that had fallen on the ground. “Could you lift that for me?” She was once again left speechless as Fellis easily picked it up with one arm, despite how thin and frail she appeared.

The two continued to talk as they worked, and on the walk back to the Donnelly homestead. By the time Fellis collapsed on the floor of the house in exhaustion, she was convinced that Louise was totally sheltered and ignorant of the outside world, and Louise in turn was convinced that either it had all been a dream or that Fellis was insane.

*****

“What in God’s name is it?”

Louise’s husband, Kevin, stood staring at Fellis, asleep on the floor with her torso propped up on her saddlebags. Her antlers gently tapped against the wall with each breath, and her tail twitched intermittently, but otherwise she seemed to be in a deep and comfortable sleep.

“She called herself a ‘deertaur’.” Louise stepped over Fellis lightly to put more fire into the stove.

“She?” Kevin looked pointedly at the place between Fellis’ hind legs.

“Oh, my lord.” Louise’s face turned bright red as she picked up the blanket that had fallen to the ground nearby and covered the deer-like half of Fellis’ body.

Kevin’s gaze moved from the still noticeable bulge in the blanket to Fellis’ average-sized human breasts.  “What kind of creature…”

“In any case, she mentioned something about being born human, and changing herself into… this.”

“With some manner of witchcraft?”

Louise shook her head slightly as she put on a pot of water to boil. “It sounded more like science, or some machine, but nothing I’ve ever heard of.” She searched the cabinets, pulling out ingredients to make an oat gruel for breakfast. “Last night, I was convinced I was dreaming. The things she was saying made no sense, so I just put them out of mind. But when she was still here in the morning…”

“It… She said she wished to go into town with you?”

“Yes, but it’s strange. She kept calling it ‘the city’, and it seemed like she thought there would be others like her there.”

“Let the children sleep late, I’ll wake them after you leave.” Kevin began to pull on his coat. “I have to check on the animals, make sure none got out.” He paused a minute to watch his wife cook before stepping outside. “Take care of yourself today.”

With Kevin gone, Louise knelt down and tapped Fellis on the shoulder.

“Morning, babe. I…” Fellis opened her eyes and realized where she was. “Oh. Right. This happened.” She awkwardly rubbed the back of her neck. “Uh, what day of the week is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“Holy fuck, I must’ve blacked out like three and a half days. I didn’t even drink that much, what the hell?” She slowly rose to her hooves, joints creaking. “I had like six appointments I’ve missed, Jesus.”

“What sort of food do you eat?”

“Oh shit, this is your kitchen. Was I in your way?” Fellis shuffled into the only unused space in the room, picking up her saddlebags and putting them on a counter. “Uh, I can eat whatever. I normally don’t have meat or dairy, but I’m not gonna be picky… Oh, you don’t have to feed me though, I can wait a bit longer.”

“It’s no bother, we have more than we can use at the moment. We’ve had a good season.” Louise placed the pot and a plate on the table. “Porridge and bread with marmalade, and I’m going to fry some eggs if you want some.”

“Sounds pretty fuckin’ good.”

Suddenly, a child’s voice called out from just outside the room. “Mama, why is there a deer in- you’re a person.”

“Yeah, a naked person!” another child added, laughing.

Fellis covered her chest with one arm, while the other made sure the blanket she still had on was covering her back end. “Um, hi, kids.”

“James, be polite. Go grab one of your father’s good shirts.” Louise had seemingly decided to ignore the interrupted question and act like everything was normal. “Angela, get some eggs for breakfast.”

Over the meal, the children followed their mother’s lead and, for the most part, treated Fellis like they would any other strange adult who’d showed up for breakfast naked. Soon enough, they’d all eaten and Louise announced they were leaving. When Fellis stepped outside, Louise stayed back a moment to talk to her children.

“Mama, I don’t understand…” Angela whispered.

“Me neither,” her mother replied. “but I’ll tell you as soon as I do.”

*****

“Cute kids.”

“Thank you.” Louise gave her a warm smile. “You have children, eh?”

“Yeah, a bunch of ‘em.” Fellis perked up, suddenly feeling the least miserable she’d been since her blackout. “How’d you guess?”

“You didn’t curse in front of them. I haven’t heard you go a minute without swearing since you found me.”

“Ah shit, sorry.” Fellis put a hand up to her mouth, embarrassed. “I mean, uh… sorry, I can try to stop if it bothers you.”

Louise just shrugged. “It’s fine by me.”

The two trudged through the snow for a minute in silence.

“But damn it’s cold! Isn’t it early in the year to be this cold? Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much snow.”

“Is this your first time coming to Baigna, then?”

“Nah, I’ve lived around here my whole life.” Fellis looked over and noticed the look Louise was giving her. “What’s with that face? You keep looking at me like you think nothing I say makes sense, eh? It’s making me fuckin’ paranoid.”

Louise decided that was a good time to change the subject. “Tell me about your children.”

“Eh? Yeah, sure.” Fellis reached back into one of her saddlebags and pulled out a small rectangular object. As she poked it, one face lit up with images. “Hm, no reception, still… C’mere.” She waved over the other woman, then stopped in her tracks. “Wait. Are you actually gonna tell me you’ve never seen a cell phone before?”

“That’s a… telephone? I thought they only had those in the big cities.” Louise moved nearer, bending forward a bit to get a close look. “It’s nothing like what I’ve heard.”

“Ok, well you’ve heard of phones, that’s a start.”

Fellis poked around on the device for a few moments, bringing up a picture of a dozen people. Each of them had a different blend of human and animal features, four of them with a quadrupedal lower body, although three of those were fox-like rather than deer-like.

“These are your children? They don’t look much like you.”

“Yeah, my wife’s a natural, and I’m a morph, so they take after her, mostly.”

Louise fought the urge to stare at Fellis in confusion again. “You’ve had a lot of them.”

“Well, me and Kass are both herms, so we’ve got a reputation to uphold. Eleven seemed like a good number.” Fellis chuckled at her own incomprehensible joke. “Plus there’s my oldest.” She pointed out a young woman in the picture, covered in patches of fur and reddish scales, sporting antlers bigger than her mother’s. “Her father was a dragon-morph. Died in the bullshit fuckin’ war when she was young.”

“The war? You mean Red River?”

“No, the gene war. You must’ve heard of it, eh?” The two women both looked at each other incredulously for a moment.

“We’re almost there, let’s keep moving.”

“Weird…” Fellis cocked her head. “No cars on the roads? Actually, I can hardly hear any sign of the city…” At this point, they rounded a corner and Fellis stopped as she saw Baigna. “What the fuck is this? Some pioneer village theme park?”

“That’s Baigna.”

“You’re fucking with me, eh? Real funny, but I seriously need to get home…” Fellis’ sight fell on the north side of town. “Wait a minute, there’s the train tracks, but where’s the highway? And that river…”

Fellis stood, puzzling over what she was seeing for a moment, as a grim realization hit her.

“Hey Louise… What fuckin’ year is it?”