The Unicorn

The night my mare gave birth to a unicorn, it rained. It was November, and winter was in the air, and the rain that raged all week would make the roads slick and icy when the temperature plunged the next day.

I discovered that she was inexplicably in foal on the same day my brother visited me for the first time in five months. He rarely ventured out this way in the winter - the excuse of the roads being dangerously slippery due to lack of maintenance always making sense to me when I was young, but as I grew, it became clearer and clearer that the winters were his most convenient excuse to stay away. That November had been the rainiest one to date, at least since I had been alive, and I was surprised when I heard a knock at the door that one particularly damp and grey evening.

But I let him in, fed him fresh venison stew, and put the nice candles out on the table, despite the unease I felt when I’d opened the door to be faced with his unreadable expression. He was quiet - more than usual - and my concern blossomed into dread that lay heavy in my gut as I took my seat at the dinner table and watched him eat the stew.

“Why are you here?” I hadn’t touched my bowl, as my palms had become too sweaty to even grip my spoon. My brother looked at me, his solemn face shadowed with some inexplicable emotion that I sensed was akin to guilt.

“Well.” My brother sighed, placing his spoon back in his bowl and taking a painstakingly long moment to pause. “You’re turning eighteen in a month.”

I regarded him in silence, and the fear turning my bones to rubber curdled into rage. I knew this day was coming, though I’d always idolized my brother ever since I was a child. When you grow up you start to understand who the people around you really are. He said that to me once, and now it felt as true as ever.

“You’re cutting me off.” It wasn’t a question, but he nodded once in response, before averting his eyes to the table, the chipped oak wood, the twenty-year-old tablecloth, our mother’s porcelain dinner bowls.

“Not me,” he said after a beat. “The government. You know that. You know that I could never take care of you on my own. It’s not my choice -”

I stood up, grabbed his bowl and mine, placed them in the sink and poured scalding water over them, letting the steam waft up into face with such force it prickled my skin.

“It’s not like you’re going to be homeless,” my brother went on. “You’ll still have the orchard. You can sell the horse. You can work at the cafe - I’ll even put in a good word for you.”

I wanted to hit him. Instead, I thanked him for the warning. I stood there and watched as he slipped on his jacket, and my hands curled into fists at my sides, but I kept my mouth pressed firmly shut.

“I really am sorry,” he said - his parting words.

“I know,” I answered, and swallowed a spew of vitriol and hatred that had sat dormant over a decade in the making. I wouldn’t see him until the spring.

It was long since dark outside when I shuffled down to the barn, my feet going cold and numb in my rain boots, sheets of icy rain pelting against my coat. My mare was at the back of the barn, and that was the first strange thing I noticed. She always waited for me at the door. The next strange thing was that her belly had nearly doubled in size since I’d seen her this morning. I hurried over to her, and when I laid my gloved hand against her barrel, I felt it; a kick, as unmistakable in horses as it was in humans. She had always lived alone, my mare, in her perfect little barn built just for her, with the lone barn owl that lived in the rafters being her only companion. She’d never been on the same property as a stallion; none of the neighbouring farms owned one.

I noticed the next oddity as I climbed the ladder to fetch her hay; the barn owl was not on his perch. He never made a sound, but his absence filled the barn with an eerie silence. I gave my mare her hay, and a bucket of steaming warm water.

That night, I went to sleep with a sense of fear, of helplessness so heavy it sat on my chest like a weight. The next day, that suffocating fear had morphed into a general feeling of wrongness. I woke that day to a slate grey sky, climbed out of bed, and walked down to the barn in my house coat. A wave of nausea hit me when I opened the barn door, and my heart dropped to my stomach when I saw her.

She was laying down. That was the first thing I noticed; the second was that the barn owl - her only friend - was by her side, perched on a nearby bale of straw. He didn’t seem to notice me as I approached her, my mare, my only friend, my lifelong companion. The owl didn’t even move when I knelt beside her and examined her stomach, ran my hands over her sweat-slicked coat. She nickered softly, but I knew a suffering horse when I saw one. My throat tightened. I couldn’t call the vet, because what would I say? My horse, impossibly, became pregnant yesterday, and today she looks as though she’s in labor. The people in this town had been waiting for a reason to get rid of me, ever since I was born. They’d hated my parents, and they wanted my land. This would be their chance to send me away, have the courts deem me out of my mind, and that would be the last I’d ever see of my house, my orchard, my barn… my freedom.

I kept my mouth sealed shut as I ventured into town that day. At the hardware store, I grabbed beet pulp, which didn’t raise any eyebrows, although it was not my mare’s usual diet. It was all I could think of; she’d need her strength, no matter what happened. The sky was darkening when I got home. I made myself a mug of chamomile tea and watched the barn from the kitchen window. It had started to rain. The wind was howling. The light in the barn’s window looked dim and uncertain, like a candle struggling in the darkness.

The night my mare gave birth to a monster, it rained. And I was a coward. I approached the barn with panic brewing in my bones and I knew when I opened the door that I was too late. That I’d stalled in town and hid in the house deliberately so I wouldn’t have to face this. So I wouldn’t have to watch.

I was sure it was my eyes playing tricks on me in the faltering light thrown from the few lanterns I’d placed around the barn. My mare laid there still, collapsed on a bed of straw. In front of her was a foal whose coat was inconceivably dark - blacker than a winter’s night. From his head was a horn the size of a small sword, and he watched me with glinting coal-like eyes. And the owl observed me from his bale of straw, and I wondered whether he’d even moved at all since this morning.

I buried my mare the next morning. I’d taken some spare boards and hay bales and built a makeshift stall around the foal, who I placed into the farthest, darkest corner of the barn. When the farmer up the road arrived with his tractor and dragged my mare’s body from the barn, he didn’t suspect a thing. I’d told him she’d been pregnant, and delivered a stillborn, underdeveloped foal, which I’d buried in the garden. He buried her next to the orchard at my request, no questions asked. I went to the house afterward and didn’t come out for five days. From the kitchen window, I watched the barn, as a sickness spread throughout my body and I’d stare until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d be reminded everyday of the time my brother told me that my parents had died in their bedroom. My room was down the hall from theirs, and I had to walk by their door to get to mine. So for weeks after he told me that, I slept on the couch. Even looking at the spiral staircase that led to the bedrooms made me feel lightheaded. When I looked at the barn, I remembered the foal in sickening detail; that impossible horn sticking out of his head like a third eye; the blood on the straw surrounding him like an ink splotch; the owl, looking on, silently.

The endless rain had turned into snow, and from my bedroom window, I could see the pile of earth under which laid my mare’s body. The ground would be frozen by now. As I watched snow gather on the freshly overturned soil, I knew she was rotting away under there, becoming a part of the earth, and I wanted to cry.

On the fifth night, I went out, snow settling on my hair as I reached the barn. I would take the body of the foal - the thing that had killed her, whatever it was - and I’d bury it just like I’d told the farmer I had. And then I’d forget. I wouldn’t speak of it, not to anyone, and eventually, it would vanish from my mind.

But I heard its breathing the moment I opened the door. There it was, the monster, the… unicorn. It was standing now, having somehow found a way out of the quasi stall I had trapped it in, and the owl was perched on its back. I stood in the threshold with the door opening observing the strange scene before me for several moments. I felt frozen to the ground. The foal moved, eventually, and the owl flew to the rafters where it belonged. The creature that looked like a foal moved gracefully, too steady on its hooves, too calm. It approached me, and I stepped back, hitting the doorframe. The unicorn didn’t stop walking until there was nowhere left for me to go. It stood there, stared at me, almost expectantly. It was small and horselike; it could almost pass as a real foal. I reached out, tentative, and touched my hand to its face, just below its horn.

Penance. That was the first word I thought of.

Do you remember being born? the unicorn asked in a language that was not spoken aloud.

You don’t. You know that. No one remembers the moment they were spat into the cold from their mother’s womb. But he always kind of made you feel like you should remember, right?

You were a wriggling shapeless thing in your mother’s womb and your brother saw the outline of your tiny hand press against your mother’s stomach, and so he had to cut you out. Then you were a squirming red-and-pink-and-grey form and he wrapped you in his coat and that bundle - that bundle that was you - didn’t scream or whine or even whimper - and he treaded through snow and ice and asphalt, to get you to the hospital.

And when he got you there, you were an orphan, and he already knew this but the police confirmed that there had been some kind of break in - some dark figure had, for whatever reason, chosen your house, seen your pregnant mother asleep beside her husband, and had fed each of them a bullet. He spared you on purpose. He knew what you’d grow up to be. He knew that you’d take care of the house, the orchard, the horse. He knew you’d make the barn a warm and welcoming place, for when he’d finally decide to make his return.

I never got that job at the cafe. In fact, I never asked for one. I knew I wouldn’t need it, in the end. In the spring, I left the orchard unattended, let it grow in a wild tangle and didn’t bother to advertise its fruits. I spend the majority of most of my days in the barn, tending to the unicorn, brushing its fur, feeding it, shining its horn with an old dish rag, as the barn owl watched on from the rafters, a constant silent observer. I lived off the garden, and by summer, I hadn’t been to town in months. People were talking, as I knew they would. But I didn’t care.

Fall was coming, and soon it would be fair season. Countless fairs, held in my town, and in several neighbouring towns in surrounding counties. When I’d show up to every one of those fairs, unicorn beside me in a halter and rope, everyone would finally have good reason to stare.