This has always been the way, for as long as he can remember. For almost as long as he can remember.
Brief snatches of memory creep from the corners of his mind at odd times, almost crueller than the hands and mouths that come for him at every hour. A pool with sweet water. Fruit, cool and crisp on his tongue. The soft whicker of his father’s breath. A song his mother sang to him. Strong, calloused fingers on his brow, soothing fever as his horn pushed through his skin and he wailed like a child teething, not understanding the pain.
Although it was never spoken aloud, he knows his mother took his father against his will—thus is it always with their kind—and that she wept for it ever after. Overcome by wanting first, then grief afterward, blinded by desire and need. But unlike any other, she stayed, did her penance by remaining to guard his father from future wanting hands, and by raising his child.
There is no one to guard or protect him. Only a thin chain—fine as sunlight—bound around his ankle and chafing his skin, running to a ring of iron bolted to the floor. Sometimes, he thinks he hears footsteps pause just outside his door. Hope and fear bloom in these moments, but in the end, neither is fulfilled. The door does not open, and he is left alone.
Slender as it is, the chain binding him will not break for him. He has cut his hands trying. So there is only this room, the silken hangings, the soft pillows his face is pressed into to stifle tears and cries. Beyond these tapestry-hung walls, he knows nothing of this place, save there are other beasts here. He hears their cries sometimes—a peacock’s mourn, the howl of a lonely wolf, something vast and dark snuffling in sorrow through the halls.
At least he cannot bear a child to the monsters who come for him with ravenous hands. At least his mother had the foresight and courage to smother his sister before she drew her first breath, in the instant she followed him from the womb.
The unicorn boy wakes from a fever of lips and teeth and tongues all tearing at him to a different kind of heat. His skin flushes from moonlight to dull mother-of-pearl, hair matted in sweat. And still they come for him. He whimpers low, too weak to protest, but the hands that part the hangings of his bed don’t immediately reach for him.
Through the shine of sickness, he sees blunted nails, torn, bloodied to their beds. The fingers are strong, rough when they touch his brow, but they do not tug at him. They drag a wet cloth over his too-hot skin, skirting his horn in a way that makes him shudder. A face leans into his, yellow-eyed, breath smelling of carrion, hair brambled wild to frame it all.
“Who?” He has never seen her before.
She smiles, not a kind thing, showing broken teeth. Blunted, like her nails. Broken by force, to tame her. He knows all this in a heartbeat; he knows what it is to be shattered and chained.
Bells decorate her tangled tresses, circle her wrists, and her ankles below the tattered hem of her robe. Yet she made no sound in her approach, makes none now as she refreshes the cloth and lays it on his brow. Seeing him looking, her grin widens, showing more of the shattered stumps of her teeth, the meaty-darkness of her maw.
“Once upon a time, my children wove bells in my hair to honour me. They placed cinnamon in my mouth. I was a queen, a sorceress, a warrior. I was fierce sunlight scouring desert sands and stripping men’s flesh from their bones as the day wound down.”
A scar crosses her left eye, leaving it milky. She smoothes more water over his skin. He shivers as it dries, cold, and the chain around his ankle chimes in answer. In a deft movement, she snaps one of the bells from the bracelet at her wrist, holding it out to show the clapper broken.
“Here, they made me wear bells to warn them of my approach, so I could not sneak up on them and take their life by force.”
She raises her arms, makes a little step, a turn; all her bells are silenced. Her expression is sly a moment longer, wicked light, curved as a sickle moon, sliding through her eyes. Then her expression sobers, posture softened and turned inward once more.
“I have spent time in the slave pits, been forced to fight battles not my own. I bear scars not of my choosing.”
“And now?” the unicorn boy asks, mouth dry.
“I am old and forgotten. They think me harmless. They tell me you are sick and send me to care for you.”
“Why?”
“Monsters must see to monsters, the beautiful and the horrid.”
She sits, uninvited, on the edge of his bed. He flinches from her heat and smell, from the memory of hands and wanting.
“You are scarce more than a mouthful.” She smiles again, showing cracked teeth, wounded gums. “You would not fill my belly.”
She leans in again, gaze raking him like coals. She touches the down of his mane, brushing it from his eyes.
“Would you learn to be terrible?” she asks.
The shine in her eyes frightens him. It shows the desert she described, ink-stained with shadows from the lowering sun, scattered with bones picked clean to leave meat-stink between her teeth. Once they curved wicked, strong, yellow like high noon.
“Beauty can be terrible, too,” he says, voice scant a whisper.
His eyes flutter closed. What might his terrible beauty be? Not the relentless pound of daylight, but the subtle burn of the moon. Sliding, insidious, to turn desire against those who would claim him and leaving them drained. Even after all he has suffered, bruises patterning his skin, and the hollowness left in their wake, he does not think he could do it. His beauty cuts inward. He cannot give back what is given to him, what is taken. Where the lion roars and devours the day, the unicorn thinks only of the soft whicker of his father’s breath, a scent like oranges, and his mother threading blossoms through a mane silver like his own.
“I want to run.” He opens his eyes.
“How far can you run? How fast?” Her anger is for him, not at him; she can see as well as he that his soles are lily skin, not hardened hooves.
“As far and as fast as I can. I hope it is enough.”
The lion whuffs, a breath that might be a laugh or only taking the scent of him. She presses the bell with its torn clapper into his palm, hard enough to dent the skin, hard enough almost to draw blood, and folds his fingers over it tightly. She picks up his thin golden chain, runs it over calloused pads before bringing it to her mouth.
“As do I. Run and tell my children of this place. Give them my token, and they will not devour you. Or,” she gives him another wicked smile, so he can see in her the ferocity, the youth stamped on her features, bright as a new-minted coin, just behind the tarnish of age. “Or, at least they will give you a fair head start. Tell them of this place as you run from their wicked teeth and snapping jaws. Tell them to come shatter its walls and burn it to the ground.”
She bites, gnashing with torn teeth, blood slicking her chin. He sees her, blazing in this room, standing in his absence to snap at those wanting hands and rending as many as she can before they take her down. He is frightened of her and for her. Perhaps they are the same thing. The chain breaks. Hot breath, blood-scented, touches his flank. She growls low in her throat, bells not making a sound at her movements. He runs.
Survivor
Dave Smeds
1967
G.I. Bob’s Quality Tattoos the neon sign declared, luring customers through the Bay Area summer fog with a tropistic intensity. Tucked between a laundromat and an appliance repair shop in lower Oakland, the studio was the only place of business on the block open at that hour. Troy Chesley scanned right and left as if he were on patrol, dropping into a firefight stance behind a parked car as a thin, dark-skinned man strode up to the nearest intersection.
“Easy, man.” Roger, Troy’s companion, grabbed him by the collar and yanked him toward the door. “We ain’t back in ’Nam yet.”
Troy’s cheeks flushed. He had been doing things like that all night. No more booze. It wasn’t every grunt that got a furlough back to the mainland in mid-tour, even if it happened for the worst of reasons. The least he could do was stay sober enough to a
cknowledge he was out of the war zone.
Troy was no longer sure why he had let Roger talk him into this. Nabbing some skin art was one thing; doing it in such a seedy locale was another. He jumped as the little bell above the lintel rang, announcing their entrance.
A man appeared through the curtains at the back. “May I help you?” he asked.
The hair on the nape of Troy’s neck stood on end. Or would have, except that his father had insisted on a haircut so that he would look like a proper military man for his mother’s funeral. (“Your lieutenant lets you look like that on the battlefield?”) “Shit,” he blurted, “It’s a gook.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he knew it was the wrong thing to say. Yet the tattooist merely blinked his almond eyes, shrugged, and said calmly, “No, sir. Nobody but us chinks here.” He spoke with no more than a slight accent, and with an air that said he was used to the ill grace of soldiers.
“Sorry. Been drinking,” Troy mumbled. But drunk or not, it wasn’t like him to be that much of an asshole. For some reason he felt menaced. The man was such a weird-looking fucker. He appeared to be middle-aged, but in an odd, preserved sort of way. His shirt was highly starched and black, his skin dry as parchment, his fingertips so loaded with nicotine they had stained the exterior of his cigarette. He sure as hell wasn’t G.I. Bob.
He had no tattoos on his own arms. What kind of stitcher never applied the ink to himself?
“Come on,” Troy said, tugging Roger’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here.”
Roger slid free. “We came all this way, Chesley my boy. What’s the matter? Are the guys in your unit pussies?”
Those were the magic words. Troy barely knew Roger—their connection was that they had shared a flight from Da Nang to Travis and, in seven hours, would share the return leg—but he was his buddy of the moment, and he couldn’t let the man say he lacked balls. He was a God-damned U.S. of A. soldier heading back to finish up eight months more In Country.
“All right, all right,” Troy muttered.
“Do you know what design you want?” the stitcher asked. When both young men shook their heads, he opened up his books of patterns. “How about a nice eagle? Stars and Stripes? A lightning bolt?” He opened the pages to other suggestions he thought appropriate. To Troy, he seemed to give off a predatory glee at the prospect of jabbing them with a sharp instrument.
In less than two minutes Roger pointed to his choice: a traditional “Don’t Tread on Me” snake. The artist nodded, propped the book open on the counter for reference, and swabbed the infantryman’s upper arm with alcohol. To Troy’s amazement, he did not use a transfer or tracing of any sort. He simply drew the design, freehand, crafting a startlingly faithful copy. The needle gun began to whir.
The noise, along with Roger’s occasional cussword, faded into the background. Troy turned page after page, but the designs did not call to him. It had finally struck him that he would be living with whatever choice he made. A sign above the photos of satisfied customers warned, A Tattoo Is Forever.
Whatever image he chose had to be right. It had to be him. He finished all the books: No good. They contained nothing but other people’s ideas. He needed something he hadn’t seen on anyone else’s body.
It came to him clearly and insistently. “Can you do a unicorn?” Troy asked.
The artist paused, dabbing at Roger’s wounded skin with a cloth. “A unicorn?” he asked, with the seriousness of a man who used powdered rhinoceros horn to enhance sexual potency.
“A mean son-of-a-bitch unicorn, with fire in its eyes and blood dripping from its spike.” Troy chuckled. “That’d be hot, wouldn’t it, Rodge?”
“That’s affirmed,” Roger said.
The stitcher lit a new cigarette, sucking on two at once, and blew a long, blue cloud. He closed his eyes and appeared to tune out the parlor and his customers. When he roused, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a fresh needle gun, its metal gleaming as if never before used. “Yes. I can do that. But only over your heart.”
Troy blinked, rubbing his chest. He hadn’t considered anywhere but his arm, but the suggestion had a strange appropriateness to it. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
The artist pulled out a sketch pad and blocked in a muscular, rearing horse shape, added the horn, and then gave it the intimidating, man-of-war embellishments Troy had asked for.
“That’s fabulous,” Troy said. He bared his upper body and dropped into the chair that Roger had vacated.
The man pencilled the design onto Troy’s left breast, with the unicorn’s lashing tail at the sternum and the point of his horn jabbing above and past the nipple. He performed his work with a frenzied fluidity, stopping only when he reached for the needle gun.
“Point of no return,” he said, which Troy thought odd, since he hadn’t given Roger that sort of warning. It was at that moment he realized why the symbol of a unicorn had sprung to his mind. During the funeral, while the minister droned on, Troy had been thinking of an old book in which the hero was saved from death by a puff of a unicorn’s breath.
His mind was made up. He nodded.
The needle bit. Troy clenched his teeth until his mouth tasted of metal. As the initial shock passed, he forced himself to relax, reasoning that tension would only worsen the discomfort. The technique worked. The procedure took on a flavor of timelessness not unlike watching illumination rounds flower in the night sky over rice paddies fifty klicks away. Detached, Troy watched himself bleed. He could handle anything, as long as he knew he was going to survive the experience. Wasn’t that why he was there—proving like so many G.I.’s before him how durable he was? To feel anything, even pain, was a comfort, with his poor mother now cold in her grave, with himself going back into the jungle hardly more than a target dummy for the Viet Cong.
To be able to spit at Death was worth any price.
“What the hell is that?” asked Siddens, pointing at Troy’s chest.
The squad was hanging out in a jungle clearing a dozen klicks west of their fire base, enduring the wait until the choppers arrived to take them beyond Hill 625—to a landing zone that promised to be just as dull as this one. They had spotted no sign of the enemy for a week, a blessing that created its own sort of edginess.
Troy, bare from the waist up, held up the shirt he had just used to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The tattoo blazed in plain sight of Siddens—the medic—and PFC Holcomb, as they crouched in the shade of a clump of elephant grass.
“It’s a unicorn,” Troy said, wishing he had not removed the shirt. “You know, like, ‘Only virgins touch me’?” He winced, too aware of being only nineteen. The joke had seemed so good when he thought of it, but in the past three weeks, the only laughing had been at him, not with him.
But Siddens did not laugh. “You got that back in the World?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
The medic turned back to Holcomb, obviously continuing a conversation begun before Troy had wandered over to them. “See? Told you it had to be something.”
Siddens and Holcomb were a study in contrast. Siddens was wiry, white, freckled, and gifted with a logic all his own. Holcomb was beefy, black, handsome, and spoke with down-home, common-sense directness. But Troy thought of them in the same way. Siddens was the kind of bandage-jockey a grunt relied on. Dedicated. He was determined to get to medical school, even if his family’s poverty meant taking a side trip through a war. Holcomb was steady as a rock. He wrote home to his widowed mother and eight younger siblings back in Mississippi five times a week—he had a letter-in-progress in a clipboard in his lap at that moment.
Troy, who had dropped out of his first semester of college, and who had managed to write to his mother only three times between boot camp and her death, wanted to be like both these men.
“You guys want to let me in on this?” Troy asked.
Holcomb smiled and pointed at the tattoo. “Doug here thinks that’s your rabbit’s foot. Your four-leaf clover. Ain’t no
thing gonna touch you now.”
Troy laughed. “What makes you think that?”
“We been watching you since you got back. Remember that punji pit you stepped into? How do suppose you landed on your feet without getting jabbed by even one of them slivers of bamboo?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“And where you figure all that luck comes from?” Holcomb asked. “You were never that lucky before. Remember your first patrol? You be such a Fucking New Guy you poked yourself with your own bayonet. You slashed your ankle on that concertina wire.”
Troy nodded slowly. The story of his life. Broken leg in junior high. Burst appendix at fifteen. Nobody had ever called him lucky. Little mishaps plagued him all the time.
But not for the past three weeks. Not since he had acquired the tattoo.
“Causality,” Siddens intoned. “Everything happens for a reason. Remember Winston?”
Troy remembered Winston very well. When Troy was first assigned to the platoon, the corporal had been a short timer just counting the days until his deros. He used to meditate on which boot to put on first. Some mornings he started with the left, some days with the right. When he doubted his choice, he was jittery as a rabbit. On one patrol, his shoelace broke. His cheeks turned the color of ashes. A sniper wasted him that afternoon.
“He knew he was fucked,” Siddens said. “Nothing could have saved him. You’re just the opposite. You’ve got the magic right there on your chest. It’s locked in. You’re invulnerable, Bozo. You’re immortal.” His voice dropped. “And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
Troy rubbed his chest, frowning, wondering if the two men were just trying to mindfuck him. But Holcomb just nodded sagely, adding, “Some folks get to know whether their time a comin’. The rest of us, we just keep guessing.”