You lie in the back of the wagon, your healing leg bolstered by Ma’s last quilt. You sway and drowse, until Pa stops for the night. You eat sausage rolls together, and he makes you beds next to a fire fed with dung and twists of grass.
“What’s next, daughter?” Pa asks.
“I’ll heal up and I’ll go back out.” Your teeth ache with clenching. It’s too hard to kill the vision of yourself in white, too hard to love the vision of yourself in red.
He just nods. He knows you for Martha Müller’s daughter.
You drowsed all day, so you lie awake on the cold prairie.
A chilly wind whistles through your camp, flattening the fire. You’re grateful for Ma’s quilt. Pa doesn’t even stir. You nestle deeper in the quilt, and for a time you sleep, in that wide-awake way where you don’t know if you’re dreaming or thinking. But you must have slept, for when you are truly aware of being awake, you are entirely comfortable and cozy, with a heavy warmth pressed along your side, a whole body’s worth of warmth. Pa still snores across the fire.
You tilt your head to look. What lies next to you is winter-moon white, gleaming softly like Christmas tinsel.
What lies next to you breathes in comforting puffs, like a family’s guardian dog.
What lies next to you is the thing you came to the prairie to kill.
Your hand creeps to your knife. A dozen stories crowd in at you, none so clear as Roland’s story of his grandmother in Bremen. A unicorn crawled into her lap.
Your hand stills on your knife and leaves it where it lies. You reach out, fingers descending slowly to the ‘corn’s beautiful hide.
Warm, living fur envelops your fingers. You are stroking a unicorn.
The beast snuggles closer, making a contented sort of sigh, warm breath soughing over your neck. Its breath smells of crocus pollen in autumn, cold spruce boughs draped in snow, the first asters of spring. Its breath sounds like the snores of children that would never be born and the hums of elders who were children long ago. Everything possible and everything alive is in the unicorn’s hot, fragrant breath, and breathing it in makes you dizzy and open-hearted.
What would Ma say right now? You wonder. Kill the unicorn. Take the dress. Ma died last winter. No—not last winter. She died when you were twelve; she died four years ago! And yet it is always last winter, just last winter, that she died, and always you are reaching for her in your memory and not finding her where you left her.
Leave the unicorn. Leave the dress.
Truth is, you knew your Ma as the ma to a child. You didn’t know her as an adult. You don’t know what she would say in this circumstance, with the knowledge of you now and the world you choose to live in.
You reach for the knife, this time to throw it away. But you misjudge, maybe. The handle isn’t where you thought it was. Your hand closes on the blade. A sting—a cut. You hiss and throw the blade far. And you reach again for the unicorn. True to the stories, you’re healed by touching him. Your wound closes up. But now there’s a wide dark streak of blood across his flank.
Eventually, the unicorn stands and shakes himself, looking down on you with eyes of sunrise. Behind him, you can see the doorway that opened for him and the whole of his harmonious realm beyond. You think of your mother again, always gone last winter, always alive the winter before that.
You let the ‘corn go, to slip through his doorway back home. Tiny insensate pieces of you slip into the beyond with him: the piece that dances on your wedding day in a white dress; the piece that almost died in a fissure on the prairie; the piece that’s always reaching for your mother and never touching her.
The doorway slides shut, and the moon sets. You turn your yearning heart towards home.
© Copyright 2020 Merrie Haskell
Merrie Haskell - [BCS313 S03] Page 2