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Twenty-Four

 

"I was looking for my people," the unicorn said. "Have you seen them, magician? They are wild and sea-white, like me."

Schmendrick shook his head gravely. "I have never seen anyone like you, not while I was awake. There were supposed to be a few unicorns left when I was a boy, but I knew only one man who had ever seen one. They are surely gone, lady, all but you. When you walk, you make an echo where they used to be."

—Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

 

I awoke at the sound of something crashing through the brush. It was midmorning. Shaughnessy's naked form was curled beside me. Something was coming toward us, something big, from the sound. Conscious of my nakedness, I picked up Fred and waited as the trampling neared.

The bushes parted and Ariel emerged.

She stopped when she saw me. Her head came up as though she were sniffing the air. She stepped toward me and stopped suddenly after a few paces. Her head was cocked questioningly, the way it had when she'd been blind.

There was a rust-colored smear on her neck where I'd hugged her in the Empire State Building. The dried blood on her horn had begun to flake off. Her hair was matted and tangled. Gone were the glossy rainbow ripples that used to spread across her in the sunlight as she moved. For the first time in her life, her coat was dirty. She looked like a wild thing, a thing that had never before seen a human being.

The first time I had ever seen her I had waded cautiously from a lake. I hadn't been ashamed of my nakedness then.

She blinked. She'd begun to put weight on her right front leg as she walked, and that was good. It would heal now. The pain was gone, New York but a memory. A bad memory, one with scars, but one that would also heal, with time and love.

She looked thin.

A stirring beside me as Shaughnessy moved in her sleep. I looked at her nude body and remembered.

"Ariel," I whispered. She couldn't have heard.

I stepped toward her. She didn't move. Stepped again, until I stood before her. I reached out and she backed away. I was close enough to see the outline of my naked form in her dark eyes.

Not this. Please, not this.

But as I stepped toward her again with both hands outstretched, she snorted and turned her head aside. A pool formed at the bottom of each dark eye, and a single tear flowed down her muzzle, crystalline.

"Ariel," I said again.

We looked at each other. I have walked the road with you, my beloved creature of purity. We've laughed and cried and traveled and fought, and now it's come to this. I felt cold inside.

"I can't," I said. "I can't, I can't." A spasm took me, a wave that made me twitch once and then was gone. The side of her muzzle glistened from her tears. I stepped closer to her. "Please—"

And she stepped back.

My sword had fallen from my hand, unnoticed until now. I looked at it and lowered myself to my knees before her. I looked up at her, then at the sword. She stepped forward and placed her horn between my hand and the blade. Gently, she nudged the sword away. I looked into her eyes and the pride was still there, now a part of the wildness. I tried once more to touch her, and she gave the barest shake of her head.

Tears brimmed and I shut my eyes. I brought my clenched fists to them and rubbed hard, as if it would scour me clean somehow, and when I opened them again she was gone.

I stared at the space where she had been for a long time and something broke inside me.

 

* * *

 

It feels as though a lot of time has passed since then, though only a year has gone by. We like to think our lives stop at these climactic spots, that all else will be superfluous, but of course that isn't so. The cliché holds true: life goes on.

Shaughnessy and I set ourselves up in a house in North Carolina. The place was in pretty good shape but required some repairs, and for a few months I lost myself in work. When that didn't satisfy me I hunted alone for days.

Even when I surfaced from my fugues I was cold to Shaughnessy, treating her more as a roommate than as the friend she wanted to be, or even the lover she was. Sometimes at night, when she lay breathing deeply beside me, I would lie awake in bed and, if I strained hard enough, just at the threshold of hearing, I felt I could hear the sound of wind chimes tinkling, the sound of silver hooves. I didn't, of course—life goes on, yes, and our capacity for self-deception accompanies it. It must have been hard for Shaughnessy to live in a shadow.

We went on like this, living our separate lives together, until the middle of winter when I was tracking a deer and thought I saw a unicorn. I couldn't be sure; it may have just been a trick of the snow. Somehow the incident pried me open and made me see what I had kept inside for half a year.

I spent that night crying in Shaughnessy's arms. I had been numb too long. The house, the work, our relationship. The façade.

But no more charades. We talked, Shaughnessy and I, and it surfaced that there was something between us, something I had too long denied, something we both thought worth saving. But the foundation of our relationship couldn't lie in the past, and I could no longer be content with the stagnancy of the present. Rolling stones and moss, I guess.

Before I could reconcile moving on, however, I felt the need to cauterize old wounds, and so this account was written. I will leave it behind when we go. It was intended as a cathartic, but if you wish I suppose you may read it as a sort of subjective history of the first years of these odd times.

Shaughnessy and I are taking only what we need to get by as we wander the land. It is less safe than domestic tranquility, perhaps, but I would rather live the life of a dolphin than that of a clam.

Besides—the world is a different place now, and I haven't even begun to scratch its surface.

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