One of the Dublin characters profiled in Any Other Dublin, is aspiring authoress and burlesque performer, Jolita Grīnberga. Jolita, who’s had great difficulty finding a publisher for her unique work, has asked that we profile it on this site. We’re proud to present a segment from Jolita’s first ‘sexy centaur’ novel, the first book in her ‘Chronicles of Centauria’ series.

The Chronicles of Centauria

Book One – A Girl Transformed

By Jolita Grīnberga

Chapter One – A Horse is a horse, of course of course… Or is he?

Silmalarian, High Hoof of the great heard of the Silver Plains, forth Manemaster of his name, flight of fetlock and glib of gab, proud of shank and staunch of withers, fierce hearted prince of the ancient race known throughout Centauria as Equus Magnificus, sat in Mrs Feltzwitches biochemistry class and stared out the window; his face a mixture of boredom and of handsomeness.

Alone at her isolated desk at the back of the classroom, where she had been exiled by the cruel jibes of the trendys and the plastics, who ruled her school like an empire of cool, a kingdom of funk – if funk was still cool (but it’s not, though they knew it and she didn’t), MaryLou-Ann, the least popular girl not only in her school but possibly the universe, literally dropped her jaw onto the floor. ‘What the hell’, she thought, ‘Why is there a centaur sitting in my class? The new guy is half horse’.

Silmalarian whineyed softly. When would he find the human mate he had been sent to earth to seek? Pulled from his loving home in the foothills of Magnesia by the ancient Drafhoon pulled through an interdimensional rift to this strange world of boy bands and iphones, like the eldest son of each generation of his family every generation for twelve thousand years before him. These earth girls could not hold the interest of the 300 year old prince of a proud race of centaur men. Besides, he thought, ignoring the simple human biochemistry on the blackboard – most of which he had learned as a toddler of 50; he just wanted to stay here in ‘Bushwick High’, and party.

‘Mr Clydsdale’, said Mrs Felzwitch, cutting through his thoughts like a spur pierces the flank of a once free stallion – ‘I hope you’re paying attention to my biochemistry class.’ But he wasn’t, for Silmalarian had caught the eye of MaryLou-Ann, a girl who had almost no idea she would soon travel to Centauria to become lady queen of the Centaurians.

‘What the actual fuck’, she thought to herself. ‘He is absolutely equilicious’. But love was briefly a one way stable. For Silmalarian could see nothing of interest in this most mundane of the mundane, this callow girl with her homemade gingham dress and her two lazy eyes, each competing to be the most lackadaisical, as though her face were a job in a factory and they were in a union. Her hair resembled straw, not good fresh tasty straw but old yellow straw like you might find after deflating a bouncy castle you’ve set up for the summer, weirdly stained, with things crawling on it, so that you have to call around to the neighbours and apologize and hire a Mexican to plant new grass. That kind of straw. She was a big girl too. To call her plump, would have been to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word fat.

MaryLou-Ann had always been different. She had somehow always felt closer to friends of four legs than of two; and though her mother could never have afforded a pony, and their trailer wouldn’t have fit one anyway, she had found herself, many times, sneaking a peak at the frolicking unfettered nags in the fields near her trailer park. But something was always missing, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, something magical and thrilling which would make her horsey friends complete – a human upper half.

‘She knows’, realized Silmalarian with a shock like the cruel bolt in a slaughterhouse that sends an old stallion’s head to the glue factory and the rest of him to a French restaurant, ‘nay… she can’t!’ But she did.
Somehow this plain human Jane could see through the magical disguise which made Silmalarian look like any ordinary burly human jock, with any ordinary six pack and the usual shark tooth necklace: Concealing his enormous, swollen quarters, his thick mane like a scarf of silk, his coarse but fine combed tail, like the bell pull in a stylish hotel. And pull on it she wished she could, summoning something, she wasn’t sure what, but she craved it like the heard craves fresh water after crossing a desert. How she yearned to climb upon his unsaddled croup and ride him like nature intended – bareback, without the sheath of a saddle between her girl flesh and his sweating torso area.
As the stare continued between them, like a river carrying ice cold salmon, and water, and promises, and boats; something swelled in the great stallion’s heart. Something greater than any hu-man possessed. Something wild and horsey, something rigid and proud. Although he knew of course, that any girl transported to Centauria would be made instantly beautiful no matter how ordinary she seemed or actually was; there was something special about this girl, something that even her retainer and leg braces and orthopaedic shoes and the inches of goth makeup layered on to conceal her blistered pizza face, could not conceal. ‘Yes’, he thought, stirring like a wedding dress in the wind, ‘perhaps she is the chosen one!’