Where the Veil Is Thin

by Alana Joli Abbott

  All these questions were more important than getting back to her register or, hell, holding on to her job. Anyone could fill out an application to work in retail. Sure, the market was competitive, but one bad reference wasn’t going to knock her completely out of the market. Seeing a unicorn, on the other hand…

  That felt like something special.

  Frankie worked her way through the merchandise as quickly as she dared, ducking behind racks and using shortcuts through the least popular areas, struggling to avoid customers. She could desert her register. She could avoid cleanup calls and even “forget” to check in with her manager. But if she blew off a customer who genuinely needed help, her ass would be grass, and like all grass, it would get mowed.

  She was almost successful. She had managed to weave her way through clothes, kitchenware, and storage, and was almost clear of the toy department when a voice said, in that bright, cheerful, unconsciously imperious tone used by customers everywhere, “Excuse me? Miss? Do you work here?”

  No, I wear a red vest and a nametag for fun, thought Frankie, but she was already smiling as she turned, ready to be a good associate, Ready To Help. The capital letters were key: they reminded her of the fact that in this moment, during this interaction, she wasn’t fully human. She wasn’t equal to the needs of the customer.

  The customer, who was had somehow traded jeans and T-shirt for a gauzy, flowing dress, although she still wore no shoes, who had a crown of blackberry thorns resting on her curls. She smiled blithely at Frankie’s obvious confusion.

  “I’m sorry, but I need grapes,” she said. “Big green grapes, the kind that don’t have any seeds in them. Do you know where those would be?”

  “The produce section,” said Frankie. She felt faint. The world was spinning slowly around her, and she was fairly sure that if she closed her eyes, even for a moment, she would be woken up by the clanging shriek of her alarm clock telling her that it was time to get out of bed and get herself ready for work. This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t happening. This ethereal woman wasn’t talking to her; there wasn’t an unattended unicorn somewhere in the store. There wasn’t.

  The woman’s smile grew, wide and serene and trusting in a way Frankie had never seen in an adult human. “Can you show me?” she asked. “Kevin and I get all turned around in these places, and last time I tried to do it on my own, he ate a towel.”

  Frankie blinked slowly, twice. The woman continued to smile.

  “Kevin is…” she said.

  The woman’s smile broadened. “With me,” she said.

  This had the potential to become a terrible comedy routine in very short order. Frankie nodded quickly, and said, “Of course. He’s with you. I’ll show you the way to produce.” She started to walk. A hand on her elbow stopped her. Frankie turned, more confused than shocked. Customers never touched employees. It wasn’t a fear of assault charges—at least not for most of them—or anything like that. More a seeming fear that if they touched too many associates, they’d wake one day to find a red vest in their own closet, like working retail was contagious.

  “We need to go get Kevin,” said the woman. “He’s waiting for us at the end of the aisle.”

  “Oh,” said Frankie. Then: “Why didn’t he come with you?”

  “Don’t be silly.” The woman dimpled. Actually dimpled, like she was something out of a Shirley Temple film. “He wouldn’t fit.”

  This time, she was the one who turned away. Frankie trailed after her, too bewildered to do anything else.

  They walked down several aisles, until even Frankie felt like she was getting turned around and lost in a store she knew like the back of her own hand. She’d been working there for four years, even though she hadn’t been planning to stay for more than one. She’d started out as a seasonal hire, one of the bright-eyed, straight-shouldered newbies who thronged in the stockroom every time the holidays rolled around, trying to keep the shelves stocked with “the latest thing,” whatever that happened to be. Most seasonal hires were let go at the end of their contracted term, released back into the wild to resume their lives. Not Frankie. She’d been too competent, or maybe not competent enough, and she’d found herself trapped, just comfortable enough to want to stay, not comfortable enough to ever quite relax.

  They walked, and they walked, and then there he was: the unicorn. Kevin.

  He was just as big up close as he’d been from a distance, maybe bigger, since now there was no way to pretend that he was an optical illusion. He wasn’t an illusionary anything. He smelled of horse, that mixture of sweat and fur and hay and apples that Frankie had always found in the stables at the county fair. The woman had left him standing next to a display of house-brand granola, and he was occupied with munching his way through a box, sending bits of cardboard and organic nuts showering to the floor. No one seemed to have noticed them, yet. Frankie assumed that it was because the unicorn was still right there, blocking anyone from registering the consequences of its large, equine actions.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” said the woman, ghosting her hand across the unicorn’s flank as she stepped up beside him. “I found someone who can help us. See?”

  The unicorn turned to regard Frankie, snorting a hot gust of musky-smelling breath in her face. She held herself perfectly still, suddenly terribly aware that a unicorn was really nothing more than a horse with a large knife growing out of the center of its forehead. And because this unicorn was a really big horse, it was a really, really large knife. A sword, technically. A sword long enough to impale anyone who happened to get on the unicorn’s nerves or be standing in the unicorn’s way.

  Frankie did not want to be either of those things. Frankie wanted, with a vehemence that was more than a little bit startling, to live.

  The unicorn snorted again. The woman nodded solemnly, as if he had just said something very wise, or at least reasonably articulate.

  “Exactly,” she said. “This nice lady, she can see us. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s always so much easier to do our shopping when someone can see us.”

  Another snort, this time accompanied by a toss of the unicorn’s long, pearlescent mane. Glitter sparkled in the air, hanging as if suspended on moonbeams. Frankie thought she might be sick. Maybe if she did it close enough to the unicorn, no one would notice, and she wouldn’t have to clean it up.

  “Yes!” said the woman, clapping her hands in obvious delight. She turned to Frankie. “Kevin wants you to put your hand on his muzzle.”

  “Kevin,” said Frankie slowly. “You mean the unicorn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wants me to put my hand on him.”

  “Yes!”

  “My actual hand, on the actual unicorn.”

  The woman stopped clapping and looked at Frankie with some concern. “Yes. That’s what I said. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I don’t think I am,” said Frankie. The urge to sit down right in the middle of the floor was strong. She clasped her hands behind her back instead, to keep herself from touching the unicorn. She wanted to touch it. She didn’t want to touch it. If she touched it, she was sure, it would be too late; something would change, possibly forever, assuming it hadn’t changed already. Maybe seeing the unicorn meant that it was already too late. She should touch the—Kevin—and let whatever was going to happen, happen. It couldn’t possibly be worse than retail.

  “Did you still want me to show you to the produce?” she asked, and the unicorn snorted again, nodding its head up and down in what she could only interpret as vigorous agreement.

  “Sure,” said the woman. “You can touch him afterward. It’s okay. We have some time to shop.”

  None of this was within Frankie’s normal frame of reference. She didn’t want to think about it any harder than she absolutely had to, and so she slapped a glossy smile across her face, turned around, and started walking toward the groceries. Once the unicorn had his grapes, surely he would take his confusing barefoot woman and get out of the store. Y
es. This was how everything became normal again, and how she got her store back.

  There were already people in the produce section. Of course there were people in the produce section. This was where you came if you wanted produce that was cheaper than Safeway and better than Grocery Outlet, and not a single one of those people turned to look when the unicorn came trot, trot, trotting into their midst.

  The dreamy woman picked up a bunch of grapes and offered them to Kevin for inspection. The unicorn sniffed them daintily before consuming them in a single massive bite. No one said anything.

  Frankie felt faint.

  “Now,” said the dreamy woman, turning back to her. “Will you touch him, please? We don’t have all night, and the longer we spend standing around here, the higher the chances are that you’re going to freak out and run away. If you do that, Kevin has to chase after you. Kevin hates chasing people.”

  Kevin turned to look at Frankie, grapes dangling from both sides of his muzzle. Once again, Frankie was struck by how impossibly large and sharp the horn atop his head was. This was a horse designed for homicide. Maybe multiple homicides. He was big and strong and sure, he had hooves instead of opposable thumbs, but would that really stop him when it was time to hide the bodies? Somehow, she didn’t think so. Somehow, she was pretty sure this unicorn could figure out how to arrange a bathtub full of lye in no time flat.

  Trembling slightly, tasting hot bile in the back of her throat, Frankie pressed her palm flat against the unicorn’s flank.

  Her first, somewhat nonsensical thought, was that Kevin—why did his name have to be Kevin? This was a unicorn. Unicorns were supposed to have poetic, ethereal names, like Mistwhisper or Rillrunner; they weren’t supposed to be called Kevin—was exactly as soft as he looked. It was like stroking a kitten’s belly, only about a thousand times better, and with the added bonus of not worrying whether she was about to find the kitten clamping down on her hand like a beartrap. It was like running her fingers through a cloud. It was also hot, and solid, and absolutely real. This was a real animal. She was touching a real animal, which meant this was really happening, which meant her window to run away and not be pursued by a heavily armed farm animal had probably already snapped rather conclusively closed.

  Honestly, it closed as soon as you saw me, said a mild, amused voice, somewhere in the space between her ears and the front of her forehead.

  Frankie froze.

  She was well aware that her brain was stored in that general area, but as she never exactly felt her brain, she had gone through life mostly pretending nothing existed there except for air and the occasional migraine. That certainly wasn’t a place where she ought to be hearing voices.

  But you are, said the voice. If you could please move past your understandable but tiresome human shock, I would be ever so grateful. This is a waste of both our time, and time is short. For you, at least.

  “Ma’am I think your unicorn is talking to me and it’s sort of upsetting me right now,” said Frankie rapid-fire, words spilling over each other like marbles rolling across a tile floor. She wasn’t entirely sure they’d ended up in the correct order. She was absolutely sure she didn’t care.

  “He does that,” said the woman fondly. She stroked Kevin’s muzzle with one hand before offering him another bunch of grapes. “This part goes better when he takes care of it. I always get all confused and then nothing fits together the way it’s supposed to, and anyway, just listen to Kevin, okay? Kevin knows what to tell you.”

  “Listen to Kevin,” said Frankie faintly. “The unicorn.”

  “Yes,” said the dreamy woman.

  Yes, said Kevin, and pooped on the floor again.

  Somehow, that was the thing that convinced Frankie that all of this was actually happening. Hallucinating a unicorn? Sure. That was the sort of thing she’d do. Hallucinating a hilarious unicorn poop incident resulting in a customer needing new trousers? Sure to that, too. Sure to everything. But a second poop? That was overkill. She’d never enjoyed it when a comedian felt the need to drive a joke into the ground. She wouldn’t have imagined a second poop, no matter how mad she was at the store, or the customers, or herself, for staying in the company of both.

  This was real. This was happening, and it was happening to her, and she reeled, hand almost leaving the unicorn’s flank.

  If you pass out, I will piss all over you, said Kevin sternly.

  Frankie stood up straight. “That’s disgusting.”

  It worked. Never question anything that works.

  “No one here sees you except for me. Why is that?”

  “You have the Sight!” The dreamy woman clapped her hands together. “It’s so rare anymore, it’s so special and hard to find, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to find anyone at all, but then Kevin wanted grapes and so we came here and we found you, so I guess you really can find anything at Target!”

  Frankie wanted to argue. She just wasn’t sure where, exactly, she was supposed to start, and so she didn’t say anything. Maybe if she stayed quiet, this would all be over soon.

  Now that we’ve found you, of course, we’ll be whisking you away to the world beneath the hills. It can’t be helped.

  “What?!” Frankie yelped. This time she did pull her hand away from the unicorn’s flank, taking two large steps back for good measure, as if some distance could change her overall situation. It didn’t, but it made her feel a little better, which helped.

  “Have you heard of the Gentry, the Good Folk, the People of Peace?” asked the dreamy woman.

  “You mean fairies?” asked Frankie.

  The woman winced. Kevin snorted and pawed angrily at the floor. “Yes, but we don’t like to use that word. You’ve heard of us, though?”

  “Yeah,” said Frankie. “Everyone’s heard of you. Walt Disney—”

  “Was a good man,” said the dreamy woman, voice going grave. “He did a very good job, considering that he was a construct of fruit and moondust and water stolen from a witch’s well. We honestly couldn’t have asked him to do any more than he did. Why, I have a gooseberry bush in my garden that was sprouted from one of his seeds! Isn’t that just delightful?”

  Frankie blinked slowly, and said nothing.

  “I didn’t plant it, of course. We don’t work, exactly. Other people work for us. And of course, there’s a balance to be maintained. For every construct like Mr. Disney that we place here, on this side of the hills, we need to remove someone, so that the number of humans—or supposed humans—in the world will stay where it’s supposed to.”

  Frankie’s throat was very dry.

  “We try to take people who won’t be too awfully missed. People don’t really see us if they’re happy with their lives, but ‘not happy’ and ‘won’t be missed’ aren’t the same thing, you know? You can have three kids and a happy marriage and still be unhappy, if your brain chemistry hates you.”

  Somehow the word “chemistry” sounded very wrong dropping from the dreamy woman’s lips, which had been formed to shape poetry, not scientific terms. Frankie frowned. “You know what chemistry is?”

  “We’re the Fair Folk, not squirrels,” said the woman. “We keep up with what you humans are doing. It’s the only way to know what you’re likely to listen to. We follow the trends, as it were. Only instead of tabloids and cinema stars, it’s scientific advancements and what’s bringing in big money at the box office. We need to know the schema of the stories you’re telling each other in order to know which stories to start telling you on our own behalf.”

  Frankie blinked. There was a point tangled up in all of this talking, but it was getting harder and harder for her to see, like it was receding into a deep fog. “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Call it an introductory session,” said the woman. “Or you could call it a recruitment speech, I suppose, although it isn’t quite, since you’ve really already been recruited. It’s all very strange and a little non-linear and humans don’t usually understand it. But we need someone
on this side, and that means we need to take someone from this side. You can see us, so you’ve been selected.”

  Humans. Frankie seized on that word like it meant something. “If you’re fairies—”

  “We don’t like that word.”

  “—doesn’t that mean you have to be either good fairies or bad fairies? Can I get someone to come and argue the other side for me?”

  The dreamy woman cocked her head to the side. “Why would you want to? I’m offering you a world made of starlight and dreams, where the flowers sing and the clouds store up the sun, so that the night is never any deeper than we want it to be. Isn’t that better than this realm of plastic and steel and working your fingers to the bone for someone who’ll never appreciate you as you deserve?”

  Frankie opened her mouth to object. Then she paused, looking thoughtful. “Okay, lady,” she said finally. “One last question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you offer medical?”

  When her supervisor came back from his break—which had managed, as it often did, to extend for almost the entire second half of his shift—he found a pile of autumn leaves mixed with strange silver coins sitting on his desk. The leaves smelled of loam and wildness, of the good green places where people seldom went. He found himself almost overcome with nostalgia for the summer when he was twelve, the summer he’d spent roaming the woods behind his grandparents’ house.

  A single Post-It, incongruously pink, had been placed atop the pile.

  I quit. —Frankie.

  The store was overrun by squirrels, rabbits, and other woodland creatures the next day.

  Frankie Anderson was never seen again.

  — OR PERHAPS UP —

  by C. S. E. Cooney

  It was—I freely admit it—stupid to take the swan boat out for a spin. What had appealed to me more about it? The joke? The romance? All right, no, I know. The swan boat made me laugh out loud. And I hadn’t laughed ferdays. Boyfriend issues. Well, ex-boyfriend.

  I was following my map that late September afternoon through the Preservation Trust Town Forest. My “map” was in fact a picture of the map posted in the parking lot that I’d snapped with my iPhone, so it took some squinting. Several hiking trails snaked through the woods for the delectation of the pleasure walker: the colored lines on the map corresponded to colored dabs on the trees. There was the short green loop, the longer red loop, the yellow trail—which led to some picnic grounds—and the blue trail, which wandered right down to the bottom of the woods, to the river. Which was where I found the swan boat.