Half man, half bull, that’s me. Half myth; half monster. And you thought you had it bad. My mother fell for a white bull. Not that he ever loved her back. She had to have a false cow constructed, climb inside, and have it rolled into his field, before he’d give her a second look. Try explaining that next time someone asks, “And how did your parents meet?” Even the most liberal have difficulty understanding a woman degrading herself like that. Half-pathetic; half contemptible. I just tell them: “Don’t have a cow!”Not that I get out much, not since I entered my teens. My stepfather’s ashamed of me, won’t be seen dead with me. Oh, it was cute enough when I was a kid - people liked to pet my muzzle, watch me flare my silky nostrils – and I was always a hit at Halloween. But now I’m an adolescent - half-child, half adult - now it’s clear I’m not growing out of it, that it isn’t just ‘a phase’, he’s lost patience.“What?” he ask my mother. “I suppose you’d like to take him to a china shop?”   It was his idea to confine me to this basement labyrinth. “Not confined,” I can hear him telling her, overhead. “He can come out anytime he wants. I’m a man, not a beast. Maybe you’ve forgotten the difference?” Which always shuts her up. I feel sorry for her, in truth. Anyone can make a mistake. The heart is the heart. And now she’s gone from bull to bully. She visits me every day – I’m home-schooled – and even slips down in the night sometimes to cradle my head in her lap, stroke my velvety head. I lie very still so as not to gore her. Your father, she whispers, was a god;  Zeus in disguise. She means it as a consolation, but I fear I inherited only the disguise, none of the godliness.My demi-god, she calls me. ‘Demi’ being the polite word for a half of something worth having, the cup half full, the demi-tasse.Technically, of course, he’s correct, my stepfather: I’m not confined. There are no locks, no gates, no chains, no bars. I’m just here at the center of the labyrinth. The room’s pretty comfortable – cable, microwave, internet, even a cramped little bathroom (it’s hard to maneouver in a shower stall with horns). All the usual amenities you’d expect in a finished basement. Bow-flex, knotty pine, futon. And I can call out, order in – half pepperoni, half field-greens (the pizza guy used to bring his own thread, but now he’s got the route down). But it’s hard to leave, you know. Agoraphobia, is what I tell people if they ask (they often do in chatrooms). Sometimes, I say, I don’t have the use of my legs.But really, it’s this – at the door of my room, there are two choices: left or right. I stand there for hours at a time, looking down one passage, then the other, staring into the darkness. What would it be like to charge down there? Or there? But I can’t choose. If I think of going right, start to imagine it, pretty soon I start to feel half-hearted, regret not turning left. Then again, if I’m of half-a-mind to go left, I soon feel the same thing about the right. And the worst of it is, as I understand from the pizza guy, these choices just keep recurring, every few steps – left or right? Right or left? Of course, even if they didn’t, even if the labyrinth is a lie, an invention of my stepfather’s – he pays for the pizza, after all, probably tips the guy well – it wouldn’t matter. Why ten choices, or a hundred, when two are enough to stop me in my tracks, snorting and pawing a bald spot in the shag?The horns of a dilemma? My horns are my dilemma.Sometimes I hear my stepfather up there – he drinks, no surprise – when my mother is out. He likes to stamp around, sometimes it sounds like he’s doing a jig, sometimes a rain dance. And when he has my attention, he calls down, in a mocking sing-song: Pick me! No, pick me!I toss my head and snort hotly.“Half-breed? Half-wit!” he taunts. “Half-man? Half bullshit!”“Half-father?” I bellow back. “Half cuckold! These are your horns, old man! I got them from you!”“Want to give them back? Come on then!” He pounds the floor. “What are you waiting for? A red rag?”He wants to make me angry enough to choose, but I can’t. I can’t! For a long time, I thought it was fear, indecisiveness. Half-coward; half-Hamlet. But why does it have to be left or right? Why settle for half-measures? Given those choices, I refuse to choose.  And why just those two? Why not up, or down, or straight ahead. Why not a third choice? So I’ve been trying to make a new way for myself, charging and running my head against the wall, ripping through the pine and particle board with my horns. Beyond them, as I guessed, are dirt walls, hard packed, but dry and crumbling. It’s hard work - I have awful migraines that flash like sparks from horn tip to horn tip - but the sight of my own blood on the earth only urges me on. What’s a bull’s head good for, after all, if not butting and battering, gouging and goring.And all the while, over the ringing in my ears, I tell myself, This is my choice, and lower my head once more.