Crowdfunding Creative Jam

The crowdfunding Creative Jam is running today with the theme of "unicorns." Anyone can leave prompts or use them to create something.

What I Have Written

"Belief is Sight" a short short story about making your own magic

"The Longest Hunt" a short story about a challenge to hunt down a unicorn

 

 

From My Prompts

 

"From Town to Forest" by alexseanchai

Story: Belief is Sight

 This is a freebie for the January 2018 crowdfunding  Creative Jam. It was inspired by a prompt from ysabetwordsmith.


"Belief is Sight"

"Stupid, unicorns aren't real."

Jane stood at the front of the classroom in stunned silence. The words of her carefully crafted and memorized research report evaporated in her tongue. For her sixth grade class, it was the year's big project, a hour each week dedicated to working on it. Behind her on the display board she built, a corner of a color printout pulled free of the glue. The Unicorn in Captivity (late Middle Ages, Netherlands, she recited in her head) began to flap in the draft of the air conditioning.

She had made it all the way to her conclusion before Kyle scoffed. The line, "While many cultures have retold the stories of unicorns through history, real unicorns--," hung unfinished, lopped off at the head. In the wake of his outburst, laughter bubbled up like blood from a wound or juice from a split pomegranate.

The teacher tutted and brought the class back to order, but the moment malingered. Jane muttered her way through the last lines of her report, imagining the red marks ticking points off for eye contact and projection. She folded up the display board and carried it back to her seat with downcast eyes.

---

By the time summer vacation came, the wound in Jane's heart still had not healed. Most days, Kyle found an opportunity to pick it open again. It stayed new and painful for Jane, and the scent of fresh blood drew the more predatory of her classmates.

"Maybe it's time for you to move on to some more age-appropriate interests," her mother said, fingers tapping at the unicorn on the front of her math binder. Jane swept it out of reach.

The public library had lots of kids milling around the children's section and the lobby, where no one minded too much if they got a little noisy. Jane, clutching a scrap of paper with call numbers printed neatly in pencil, slipped between the stacks like a maiden into the forest.

The books there took two hands to pull from the shelf, heavy and hard-covered. Dictionary of Magical Creatures. Illustrated Guide to Mythic Beasts. Bestiary of the Imagined.

The tears started to fall, sparkling and jewel-bright in the light of the high windows. The pages she leafed through all talked about unicorns as just things from stories. They carefully picked apart old illustrations and the descriptions of naturalists, butchering her unicorns down into their component parts. An antelope here, a rhinoceros there, bits of animals seen from far off or out of the corners of eyes.

Jane knew they had missed the point. Not everything needed to be pinned down and examined. Not everything needed to be fact in order to be true.

Fine, Jane thought, scrubbing her eyes. Unicorns were magic and myth and imagined. That didn't mean they couldn't be real. She went back to the computers up front, pulled up the search page, and began again with "magic, nonfiction."

---

It took all summer and most of fall. Jane woke up early, stayed up late, spent weekends alone at home. The classmates who came with her new junior high took as little interest in her as she did in them. The summer, at least, had been enough to scab over the tender places; scar tissue broke less easily now.

On the back steps, looking out into a yard obscured by mist, Jane closed her eyes and concentrated. She had spent the summer performing the little rituals she invented herself: rituals of worship and of summoning, of belief and of sight. Small, simple things with tealights and shopping mall incense and intention.

In her moments of weakness, when the voice in her head said, "Stupid, nothing is real," she knew the rituals weren't real magic. They were daydreams. Meditations at best. Nonetheless, she performed them and dreamed up new ones. She trained her mind to see what wasn't there.

With the fog trailing its fingers across her cheeks, Jane opened her eyes. In the mist, shapes came together, hazy edges defining themselves by their silver linings. Drifting clouds settled into a mane she had run her fingers through in her mind, in dreams, in secret. Her unicorn stepped out of the mist on tiny, pointed hooves that left no prints.

It was real enough for her to see. And that was real enough.

---

Notes:

The Unicorn in Captivity is a tapestry, one of seven from the Middle Ages depicting unicorns.