Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “I’m home, Daddy.”

  It was a lovely spring day, the air tart as an old whore’s tongue, the apple blossoms beginning to throb red on their undersides and the sun slanting at a newly sharpened angle. Devlin Murphy was to play that evening at the county fair and Casey, still somewhat drunk on the nectar of freedom, suggested a day of it.

  They set out early, the three of them, a modest lunch and a hot thermos of tea carefully packed, sweaters and coats flung carelessly over shoulders that were soon too warm to abide them.

  The uneasiness between the brothers had vanished and they returned to old habits, taking turns at being bait to the other’s good-natured teasing. They put Pamela swiftly and tactfully at ease. She had a feeling it was a natural game with them, making strangers feel welcome and inclusive to all their jokes and boldly flung comments.

  The fair was set in a long field, rolling over small hills and knobbles of land like a green velvet blanket. It was crowded, overflowing and funneling with streams of people, people fond of fun but rarely fortunate enough to have an unfettered hour of it. The sun, taking part in the festivities lasted the whole day through, imparting a blessing on the children, parents and animals that wove through its rays. The countryside and its gifts were on full display: lacemakers, whiskey runners, wool blankets dipped in berry juice to stain them red, round ruddy cows, corkscrew lambs just past the wobbly legs stage and horses. Ah horses, the great love of Ireland. Dappled and silver, roan and black, legs so fine they seemed made of blown glass, high proud heads adorned with plaited and ribboned manes. Pamela, leaning over a paddock gate, closed her eyes and took a breath of heaven. Casey, an Irishman to the bone in most respects, was in this one, most assuredly not.

  “I cannot look,” he said, turning swiftly pale as Pamela bent her head to allow a big, evil looking stallion to nuzzle her neck. Pat, neither terrified of nor a supplicant to the mysteries of equine love, merely smiled and kept a safe distance from the large, bared teeth of the stallion who was now nosing, in a bold way, down the front of Pamela’s shirt.

  “Give me an apple,” she said to Casey who with a grim look fished one out and closing his eyes took the required step and a half to drop it in her hand and then jumped quickly back. She raised her eyebrows at Pat as the horse blew out a great gust of air and settled to chewing the apple with an air of content.

  “Horse bit him in the arse when he was four,” Pat said, “an’ he’s never gotten past it.”

  “Thanks for sharin’ that bit of information, Pat,” Casey said daring to open his eyes and shoot a filthy look in his brother’s direction.

  “Big ugly stallion was it?”

  “No,” Pat ignored his brother’s glare, “’twas a Shetland pony, a half-grown filly.”

  “It had,” Casey shouldered the lunch sack with injured dignity, “very large teeth.”

  “I’m certain it did,” Pamela said straightfaced and then meeting Pat’s eyes broke with him into helpless laughter. Casey, eyeing them both darkly, turned on his heel and strode off, away from the smell of horses.

  They caught up with him near the shore, where the tide had left all sorts of creatures in its wake—small scuttling crabs, fronds of kelp, tiny gelatinous beings that caught and refracted the sunlight into prisms and miniature rainbows.

  “We’re sorry,” Pamela said breathlessly.

  “We are,” Pat chorused and they both started to giggle again.

  “Ye can both go to hell, the two of ye,” Casey said and then face slowly cracking began to laugh too. Laughed and laughed until he had to sit down in the wet, rocky sand, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.

  “I still don’t think it’s funny,” he said and this put them all into fresh gales of mirth. “It’s just,” he finished a moment later, “so damn good to laugh.”

  Later when they’d all grasped some fickle straw of sobriety they set off down the beach, abandoning socks and shoes, running in great looping arcs around each other and then back again, opening their arms wide to the wind and the taste of freedom. Pamela, tying her hair over one shoulder to keep it away from her eyes, sprinted down the beach ahead of them.

  Initially the boys gave chase, but soon it became sport between the two of them. Brother against brother, shoulder to shoulder, pushing, jostling, vying for the lead, sand flying silver beneath their feet, sweat breaking clean upon skin under sunlight. Legs of similar length flew, feeling the sweet, shuddering burn of long muscle and sinew stretched to extremes. Rocks loomed ahead, black and glistening, slick with salt spray. They fought for toeholds, fingerholds, air. Feet, used to the confinement of shoes, blossomed with bruises. Mind played subservient to body, agility and stamina becoming the only qualities of worth.

  Casey pulled ahead ever so slightly, veered sharply to the left and chose sheer lunacy over nimbleness of limb. Before them stretched a quarter mile of massive boulders, sharp upthrust rock and myriad small, glinting razor edges. Casey had chosen instead the sheer face of the cliff, opalescent blacks, grays and whites in the clear spring light. Pat, knowing that he who hesitates never wins the race, veered in turn and hit the cliff face right behind his brother. It was an impossible climb, handholds consisting of sand-encrusted quarter inches, purely vertical from base to nape. Ten feet up muscles were screaming for mercy, fingers numb with tension, lungs seared and burning. Twenty feet up reason was abandoned without regret.

  Casey moved gently, feeling the wall like it was the body of a woman to be explored with leisure and the luxuriant presence of every sense. The meager handholds held, bore his weight which he’d centered into the heart of the rock and then crumbled in his absence. Pat had to find his own path and grimly did so as sweat stung his eyes and nose and his legs began to cramp in long rippling seizures. He spared a swift glance down the beach through a fug of rose red pain and saw Pamela picking her way gracefully through the last of the rock. He turned his attention back to the cliff face and, body strung like wire across a minefield, followed in his brother’s wake.

  There was a sharp, short scream from ahead causing Pat to lose his tenuous handhold and drop down the sheer face, landing painfully on his rear end in a mound of sand-skiffed kelp. Casey, face now pointed towards the sound, never flinched, ten feet along the face of glittering rock and he’d cleared the worst of the stone below, fifteen feet and there was sand beneath him. At which point he pushed himself out from the cliff face and dropped lightly to the ground, legs moving across the wet wrack before his feet had even made certain contact. Pat lost sight of him instantly and it was another panic-stricken, scratching, scraping, bloody five minutes of it before he caught a glimpse of him again. When he did, his first emotion was confusion, for Pamela was turned into his brother’s chest, Casey’s arm protectively across her back, the other hand stroking her hair in a comforting motion. An emotion, bred in his chest, cut with the finest edge through his heart as he surmounted the last rock and ran the final length of green and silver ground.

  The cause of the scream was instantly apparent and the sight of it some thirty yards down the beach took the words from his throat. At first glance from high up and far away it had seemed no more than a gleaming half-submerged rock. Closer though he could see that it was too smooth by far, too smooth and shaped for movement not fixation. A thing of eons but soft with life, sleek with speed and silence.

  “Christ, how do ye suppose it got there?” Pat managed as Pamela’s white, stricken face emerged from his brother’s shirt front.

  “They beach themselves, it happens,” his brother replied shortly. “Come on we’ll have to see if it’s still alive.”

  That it was not alive became swiftly apparent as they shortened the distance between themselves and its carcass. The smell was ripe and splitting to the nose, catching with the rot of seaweed in their throats. Casey nevertheless put a hand gently over the blowhole, pulling back the muscular flap which had closed in death, to s
ee if there was even the slightest hissing exhalation. There was not.

  “Been here a few days,” Casey said hand gliding down the back that shone blue and black in the sun. “An old male, suffocated from the weight of his own body, works beautifully in the sea but they’re their own worst enemy when they land.”

  “How can you tell?” Pamela asked, still pale but looking with interest over the dorsal fin, the cream coated tail flukes, the yellow tinged underbelly.

  “Size. He’s near to thirty feet long, only the really old males get that big. A lot of them beached here during the last war; scientists figured it was the submarines did it, mixed up the whales’ internal sonar or something an’ threw them off their natural routes.”

  “Orcinus orca,” Pat said softly.

  Casey’s head came up and he smiled, a fine, white smile of memory shared.

  “Class mammalia,” he answered.

  “Order cetacea,” Pat rejoined.

  “Family delphinidae,” they chorused together.

  Pamela looked from one brother to the other, eyebrows arched in delicate lines of soot.

  “’Tis a game,” Pat explained, sensing her unspoken question, “that our Daddy used to play with us when we were small. He said if we understood the hierarchy of things an’ the connections we’d have a greater appreciation of life an’ the world we live it in. How all things are connected an’ work in various ways together. He’d name an animal an’ we’d see who could name the class, order, family, genus an’ species first an’ whoever won would get a toffee. It worked well until Casey started demandin’ cigarettes an’ whiskey as his due.”

  “Here,” Casey said and took Pamela’s hand, placing it on the silken underside where the flipper, limp in the air-laden atmosphere, joined to the force of body. “Ye’ll never feel its like again.”

  “It’s softer than a baby’s skin,” she whispered and heedless of smell stepped in closer, caressing the flipper with her own hand where it curled with a fragile sigh across and over her arm. “It feels like an enormous hand,” she breathed as if afraid that she would wake the great leviathan from its deep blue slumber.

  “That’s because their flipper bones are very similar to our own finger bones. ‘Tis believed that they once lived on land many millions of years ago an’ that we are more closely related to them than we could have suspected.”

  “We have to put it back in the water somehow,” she said turning tear-bright eyes on the two of them.

  “D’ye have any idea of the weight of the thing? It’s likely near to three tonnes. Nothin’ short of God’s hand coming down an’ scoopin’ it away is goin’ to move it back into the water.”

  “We could at least,” Pat said softly, “put a piece of its heart back into the water, a creature should rest where its heart lives an’ for a whale that’s the sea. We can’t move it but we can move the part of it that beat an’ felt an’ sustained its life.”

  Casey regarded him for a long moment, as if he were weighing and measuring the insanity of the suggestion or the plausibility of it.

  “Yer right,” he said finally, “I suppose it’s the least we can do.”

  “We’ll have to take it out a ways,” Pat regarded the sea, a heavy green, with trepidation.

  “Aye, we’ll manage.” Casey leaned down then and pulled his pant leg up in one quick yank. Beneath the cloth, next to his skin nestled a knife, innocuous enough in its mother of pearl casing, but transforming into a wicked-winged butterfly with one smooth flick of his wrist.

  “Why are ye carryin’ a knife?” Pat asked through gritted teeth.

  “Habit,” was the terse reply.

  Because the whale had beached on its side, it made a near to impossible task slightly less impossible. The skin, generally tough and oily, was dried by days in the sun and more susceptible to the knife. There was a small cracking noise as Casey split it and then there was a good eight inches of blubber to breach. It leaked an oily, heavy smell that lingered hard in the nostrils. He cut in a long arcing strip just beneath where he’d gauged the ribcage’s end, hands slicked with whale oil and then, as he hit the hard shoal of bone, a black ooze of blood.

  “Jaysus Christ,” he yelled, leaping back before the worst of it pooled in the sand. “Pat come help me will ye, this was yer godforsaken romantic notion.”

  “Yer goin’ to have to cut a triangle in the flesh or we’ll never get to the heart,” Pat said and then took the knife and with the precision of a surgeon, cut a perfect triangle beneath the massive ribcage. It took an hour to reach the organ cavity by which time both brothers were soaked with an aromatic variety of oil, blood and sweat.

  “It’s there,” Casey said at long last, arm completely disappearing up into the cut. Pat in turn felt and shook his head.

  “That’s the liver, go left.”

  “Is the liver not a life sustaining organ?” Casey said irritably, the original romance of the idea buried in the ruination of his shirt, pants and scent.

  “It has,” Pat’s face was grim, his arm submerged up to the shoulder, “to be the heart.”

  And the heart it was, though it took another fifteen minutes and a great deal of dexterity on Pat’s part to emerge with a three inch width of it, jagged and torn in his hand. He looked purely pagan, bloody tissue held aloft, face spattered with blood and oil. It might have been a thousand years ago and he painted with the viscera of his enemy, part of the barbarian horde that terrorized Europe. The words that came from his lips completely incongruous with the portrait he presented. “Will I take it in then?”

  “I’ll come with ye,” Casey said pulling his shirt off over his head.

  “No, I’ll do it,” Pamela stepped forward, “It was me that wanted him back in the ocean.”

  The brothers looked at her in twin consternation, brows furrowed in disapproval so identical that she had to smother a laugh.

  “Ye have no bathing suit,” Casey said as if indeed that settled the entire matter right there.

  “Nor have you,” she said pointedly. “Besides there’s no one else about and it’s not as if the two of you haven’t seen all I own before.” So saying she stepped, in one easy movement, out of her dress. Two throats cleared in unison, two dark sets of eyes appealed the heavens for rescue and found a cheerfully blue sky with no salvation written in its blameless hue.

  “Right then,” Casey said tightly, face still carefully averted, “let’s get this done.”

  The boys ran into the sea as if the pair of them were on fire, Pamela close on their heels.

  The Irish Sea was not by any means a hospitable body of water and uninclined to treat intruders gently. The cold knocked the wind out of a body immediately, the current had a savage pull to it and even the strongest of swimmers was advised to go gently. Pat and Casey cut through the icy green waves cleanly, Pamela, used to warmer waters, struggled to keep up, extremities at first tingling and then disturbingly numb. Her throat and lungs burned with the chill, breath forming just above the surface of the water. The boys had struck out in a diagonal, northeast line, swimming straight and true as if they were possessed of internal compasses, while she cut a wavering and exhausted line behind them. Close to, the water was black, not green, black and unholy as the waters of hell itself.

  Casey and Pat had stopped ahead of her some ways, treading water, though they appeared from a distance to catch and ride the cusp of the small, choppy, white-crested waves like sprites.

  “Are ye alright?” Casey called when she’d struggled some distance further.

  “Fine,” she shouted back gamely only to take in a mouthful of freezing saltwater. By the time she finished sputtering and wiping the salt out of her eyes Casey was beside her.

  “I think we’d best head back for shore,” he said and struck out at an easy pace that she could match without difficulty. When they were close to shore she turned back to fin
d that Pat was only an indistinct blur on the horizon.

  “How far will he go?” she asked through chattering teeth as they crawled out of the water.

  “As far as the limits of his strength will take him.”

  “That’s crazy, he could drown out there.” She found a warm patch of sand and proceeded to wring the water from her hair.

  “It’s his nature; it’ll be the only way that he feels he’s done the whale any honor.”

  “And if he doesn’t know the limits of his strength?”

  “I’ll go get him,” Casey said easily, casting her a sidelong glance as he toweled off with his ruined shirt. “Do ye not feel any shame?” His voice was curious not condemning, as if he found her puzzling.

  “If you are referring to my lack of clothes, no I don’t. Do you?”

  “No, but I figure that’s normal for a man. I’ve never known a woman or girl who didn’t make a big fuss over it. The Church an’ their mams tell them to keep hidden from the time they are wee an’ they never seem to shake the impulse to do so.”

  “I didn’t have a mother and church was a once a year occasion for Christmas; there was never anything to make me feel ashamed.”

  “Well that’s good, though I’ll not say as I don’t find it damned disconcertin’.” He smiled a sweet, wide grin that made her blush. She’d never been as aware of the physical proximity of another human being as she was of this man. His heighth and breadth, the deep lines that furrowed his knuckles, the fine hairs on his arms. How the crisp edge of his rolled up cuffs so white against the flesh of his forearm actually made her weak and dizzy. The way everything he did had a sharp edge to it, a physicality that was deeply erotic, as if he would waste neither word, nor movement, nor emotion. An intelligence tempering the brutality that would be his wont if not carefully and firmly channeled. He could hardly have been more different from Jamie on the surface, Jamie who was her ideal, precious and held tight against disillusion. Therefore it stood to reason that she should not find this man so damnably attractive and yet, oh and yet...