1 post tagged “unicorn”
They weren’t real, or so she’d always been told – when she was a young girl her mother had called her a liar, and she had quickly learned not to bother mentioning it to her. A figment of her imagination, she was told, and over time she almost accepted that fact as her own reality; except she still saw them everywhere. She would be on her way to work at the office and there beside the road would be a white horse, running along side the bus, eyes full of sorrowful wisdom watching her. She tried to ignore them, she honestly did. After all, they weren’t real. After mentioning the unicorns to Daniel, her husband of five years, she had learned that her mother was right. Unicorns simply were not real creatures. Nevertheless, they were everywhere she looked, and in time, she began to suspect she might possibly be a little crazy. Who sees unicorns everyday?
It was quickly becoming too much, however, when they started showing up in her backyard. She would be outside, trying to work in her garden, when they would come up and start eating her carrots. She couldn’t reason away the missing vegetables, nor could she reason away the feeling of them nipping at her ears as though they were a delicacy. Daniel persisted in informing her that the missing carrots were, in fact, bunnies, but there was a small fence to protect them from that sort of thing. In fact, if she weren’t so sure that they weren’t real she would have to start believing that they were really there. But when she started to think like that she reminded herself that even if they were real, a unicorn wouldn’t come to her. A unicorn only comes to a maiden, and that wasn’t a word that could describe her for too many years; in fact, she hadn’t been a maiden since her fifteenth birthday when her first real boyfriend, Jack, had decided that two weeks was long enough to wait to get into bed with her. He was her first, and certainly wasn’t her last, both non consensual and not. Sometimes she thanked God that Daniel was at least gentle with her, but there were days when her pale skin was marked with purples, greens, and yellows and she began to wonder just what was wrong with her.
Sooner or later, something had to give, and it was a crisp fall day when she finally caved under the pressure. She’d been working in her garden again, enjoying the feel of the breeze ruffling her hair, the sun beating down on her shoulders. The stack of vegetables was growing larger in the basket, and as she twisted to add another carrot to the pile, it was caught in the teeth of one of the unicorns. Freezing, she gazed into the clear brown eyes so close to her own. There was a gentle tug at her hands and the carrot was wrenched from her limp grasp. Okay… so maybe they weren’t mere figments of her imagination… after all, she’d never heard of a figment being able to do that. Well, there had to be a logical explanation for it, but oh, how she wanted to believe it!
The carrot disappeared quickly, and she felt the velvet nose of the unicorn butting against her cheek, another demand for attention she could normally ignore; but not after last night. Today she found her hand, trembling in suppressed agony, bones twisted and wrenched out of joints, stretching up to pet that nose, startling in its softness. It was nothing like she had ever imagined it could be, she’d thought that imaginary creatures would be, well, softer and more insubstantial. The nose was soft, and warm, heaving puffs of warm air against her fingertips as they stroked silently. It was the gentleness of such a large creature that brought the first tears to her eyes, and she cried quietly in the garden, hand continuing to brush over the velvety nose, and down the cheeks. If something so pure and innocent could allow her to touch it, then perhaps there was nothing wrong with her. The revelation caused the tears to fall harder, and she leaned her forehead forward, resting against soft velvet.
A toss of the head, and her hand had slipped up over firm cheeks to rub down the neck, the hair stiff, coarse, and still so unbelievably soft beneath her hand. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could have prepared her for this. She could feel her hand tingling from where she touched the unicorn, and breathing out on a sigh she moved in to brush her cheeks against the unicorns, her eyes closing slightly. It felt, well, like magic. She imagined that had something to do with the fact that she was sitting out in her garden hallucinating that she was petting a unicorn. The thought slipped away however, and she opened her eyes to look at the creature once more. It stepped back, away from her hand and dipped its head low, horn brushing against her cheek in an almost soothing way. With that light touch, she felt the tightness, the doubt release her, and she smiled, watching as the unicorn left her garden as quietly as it had come. But she was changed, touched, loved. It was time for her to call her lawyer and get out; the unicorn had taught her that she deserved magic and love.
Maybe, just maybe, unicorns did exist.
