The Unicorn
Allen Dwiggins lived by himself in a brick townhouse in an old, forgotten neighborhood. A graphic designer, he went to work each day in a building overlooking a network of canals which, having once impelled the city’s industry, now dashed picturesquely past streets and under bridges. On the weekends Allen went for long walks in a cemetery at the edge of his neighborhood — a quiet, sylvan surround decorated with prim statues of Grace and mausoleums like gothic garden sheds.
Amidst this memorial splendor one Saturday morning, Allen met a unicorn. It was a sunny, bracing day in early Spring; he was sitting on a low wall listening to a flock of chickadees rustle in a nearby bush when the creature walked out from behind a great rock and clumsily folded itself into a knot at his feet.
The unicorn was spectacularly ugly. Swollen and thickly-jointed, it reminded Allen of a rhinoceros rather than the gracile equine of the old tapestries. The size of a middling hog, its hide was grayish-green, carbuncled, and hairless but for a few thin, coarse strands that sprung from its spinal harrow. In place of a mane, it sported a wiry, close-cropped bristle thick enough of knap to scrub a ship’s hull. Its tail was no silky brush but a twisting, wrist-like stump terminating abruptly in a shrubby tangle of hair. Its eyes, wracked and inflamed, were yellow and bulging and punctuated with a black iris. But the horn — the horn was the thing: no flute of ivory and spun gold but a blade of obsidian, glossy and black, which rose to a narrow, jagged point. Its cloven hooves were of the same adamantine cast.
The unicorn looked up, its whiskered eyelids twitching. Allen felt a chill of anxiety run down his legs; the chickadees had gone still, and the whole scene, the wall of puddingstone and the bruised grass and the vacuous graves, seemed to gather around the unicorn’s pricked and empty eye, pressing in and locking together in a glimmering tunnel of vertigo. Allen could put no name to the sensation — vague desire absent the pressure of longing, a sudden quietude at once active and rooted, settled in time and place. The unicorn blinked, and its mouth wrenched itself into a blistering grin.
After a time the unicorn ended the staring contest, rose stiffly, and began to amble about. It made no sound other than a high, nasal rooting as it snuffled last year’s windblown leaves gathered into the margins of the hedges. In subsequent visits, Allen found that the beast never tired of these browsings, although it never seemed to glean anything edible in the process.
It had a disconcerting habit of stopping every now and again to fix its gaze on a headstone. At first Allen wondered: could the creature be reading? Could it be sussing out the vital facts of the entombed, pondering their mortal traces? After a few such episodes, Allen concluded it was not genealogy but geology that captured the beast’s interest, as it was just as happy examining the backs of the stones as their graven fronts. Each time Allen resumed his walk through the cemetery, the unicorn followed, mincing along on its quick, splayed legs like a pug-dog in high-heeled shoes. But it would never travel far from the low rock wall with the bird-bustling hedge. Allen would climb a low rise or turn a corner, and the knotty, esoteric creature would be gone.
It took no time at all for Allen to become attached to the unicorn and its uncanny, silent companionship. One Spring evening, he stayed in the cemetery past closing. The unicorn’s eyes glowed faintly, reflecting and concentrating the evening’s crepuscular glow. It was a moonless night, and only a few stars appeared to prick the darkening orange tarp of the sky.
“Does it bother you that the sky is so empty?” Allen asked aloud, craning his neck. The unicorn vented a weak, baritone croak and settled into its customary crouch. “It’s always disappointed me. That’s not how it looks in the textbooks, on public television, in science museums. There it’s all toroid clouds of stars blown apart, lacy rings a thousand light years across, galaxies spinning and glowing in a thousand colors. But it never really looks like that, does it, the sky? Instead it’s just points of light, unchanging, very faint. The scientists use special lenses and software and equipment to make those pictures. But look with your own eyes and all you see are those faint points of light, always unbearably far away.”
He looked down at the unicorn, its eyes nebulizing, titrating the light. “Animals are like that, too,” Allen continued. “They’re always faint and faraway. It’s not just that nature is mostly empty space. It’s that everything is repelling everything else.”
The unicorn settled its head stiffly, stacking its wide snout atop its forehocks and shutting its pixellated eyes. A sheen of starlight swirled in its mirrored horn.
If the unicorn had any idea of Allen’s considered notions, it never disclosed them. The two continued their idle tours, however, and Inevitably, others noticed the unlikely pair. Dogwalkers would approach in amity only to find themselves tugging at the leashes of their dogs, who lay themselves at the unicorn’s scalpeled feet in mute, quivering submission. Allen found himself ever more scrupulously avoiding funeral gatherings for fear of disconcerting the mourners. As weeks passed and the weather warmed, however, passersby traded revulsion for curiosity in increasing numbers.
It was only a matter of time before a video of Allen and his fey companion went viral.
And so it came that, one bright morning, Allen found himself on the rock wall, the unicorn staring off into space at his side, while a mob of reporters crowded in, baying and clamoring for answers. They asked him what the unicorn did and what its habits were; they asked when it came to him, and whether it observed any schedule or phases or rituals; they asked how it survived, whether it grazed the grasses or browsed the bushes or consumed meaner, perhaps unspeakable meals. Finally, they asked Allen, why: Why did the unicorn choose him?
Allen had pondered this question often, though never yet boldly enough to express an answer. His gaze drifted as he considered, and his eyes came to rest on a reporter’s tablet computer lying in the long grass playing an astronomical screen saver. It was high summer, and the reflection of clouds in the blue sky played across the sheen as planets and galaxies toiled in the tablet’s glossy void.
Allen thought of nature and the starry sky, recalling what he had said to the placid unicorn on a clear summer night weeks before. But all he managed was, “I don’t know.” And then, feeling stupid about it before the words ever left his mouth, “It’s a gift.”
It’s not because you’re a virgin, is it? came a cry from the back of the group, prompting vague chortles.
The reporters began to rustle and hum, absorbed in their own colloquy. Allen sat listening, hands laced together in his lap. The unicorn browsed at their feet, sniffing here and there; when it came to the tablet computer it looked down in curiosity and tenderly placed one cloven hoof in the middle of the screen, which broke with a sharp snap and a little puff of smoke.
Everyone fell silent as the reporter picked up her tablet and turned it over in her hands, examining it from all angles. The gadget still functioned, but its galaxies and star clusters spun now in splintery shards. Text and image alike now appeared in puzzles, like leaves of origami folded and rudely flattened.
The unicorn wandered away, as was its wont; and soon the journalists too disappeared, hying off to their own secret haunts. Allen watched as the unicorn fell to the ground and commenced snuffling the stump of its tail. “Nicely done,” he said to the self-absorbed mythical beast.
Allen wrote the reporter offering to pay for her broken tablet, but she told him not to bother. A few weeks later, he received another email: the gadget was still working, even though she hadn’t charged it in all that time. In that shattering of capacitive glass, the unicorn’s touch had imparted to the gadget some source of undying energy.
Soon, the story was all over the news. Pilgrims made their way to the cemetery, bringing their gadgets in hopes of receiving the unicorn’s blessing of unending power. Things got unmanageable for awhile; Allen and the unicorn appeared on talk shows (always shot on location at the cemetery, as the unicorn could not be coaxed away), and there was a harrowing episode involving an oligarch who wanted to harvest the unicorn’s glassy, fragile horn. Those episodes came and went, the kind of thing you read about in the news. And in about a year and half, scientists had reverse-engineered the unicorn’s secret, making gadgets with endlessly renewable power sources accessible to anyone with a credit card. The world changed, not as much as anyone had hoped.
After that, interest in Allen and his ugly little unicorn dwindled. Once explained, commodified, and made scalable, the unicorn’s secret had lost its glamor. But for occasional gawkers, pilgrims stopped coming to the cemetery. Allen went back to designing logos and arranging type on screens whose energies now never flagged. In his renovated solitude, he repaired to the habit of his walks, perambulating the cemetery twice a week save when illness or errands prevented it. Regularly he sat on the rock wall with the ugly little unicorn at his side watching the seasons come and go.
And so it continued as Allen grew old and infirm; and one day he couldn’t walk anymore; and one day he died. And still the unicorn watched by the rock wall. The seasons turned, blending into harshness year by year; headstones fell over and crumbled into dust; trees, shattering amidst the graves in ones and twos, were replaced by spiny vegetation with ground-hugging habits in ever-more sere shades of green. Those plants withered, too, and were not replaced. Snow fell, ice rose and retreated; ice rose again and sublimed. And still the unicorn watched; it watched as clouds of oxygen bubbled and flared green on the edges of galaxies; watched a billion suns wheel and fall into immense black holes; watched star clusters collide and die and fade into glowing storms of gas and the unicorn could see all these things, for the unicorn it all seemed unbearably close at hand.
In 2012, Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade Press released The Sovereignties of Invention, a collection of my short stories, several of which had previously appeared at Hilobrow.com. I’m revisiting (and revising) a few of those stories now, hoping to share them with a new audience. And I’m bracing myself to write a few more.
