To begin with she was a mess. Understandable, of course, given the trauma
she had suffered. Attacked and savaged
by an animal she hadn't known existed.
She lay in a heap, small and very still, as I nursed her
towards full health. Each day I would
clean and dress her wound, a horrid gash down her calf, as she winced and
moaned, small tears welling in her eyes.
She seemed to be in almost constant pain from the swelling of her leg
(it had ballooned up to almost twice its size; I guess unicorns are allergic to
dog saliva). I crushed painkillers into
her porridge to try and remedy this.
First with whatever I could find around the house before working up to
ketamine.
When the swelling subsided, the pain passed and I stopped
administering the drugs. Her strength
had already started to return from eating the replenishing porridge. This, combined with the wooziness lifting,
caused the unicorn to wake up. Since the
attack she had been as in a dream, disconnected and distant, somewhere other
than there in the stable. Now she
returned to her full senses, seeing and understanding where I had brought her
and all that that meant. And she hated
me for it.
She was still not fit enough to stand or do very much about
her situation. The wound was still quite
open, the infection, though no longer causing her leg to swell, must still have
been stopping it from healing. Instead
of fighting me, then, she began by ignoring me.
She refused to acknowledge my presence or anything I did for her. She didn't even look at me, or not really, as
I busied myself by changing her food, water, hay and bandages and clearing up
her mess. If I walked within her
eyesight she reacted in no way at all, only continued to stare with glassy eyes
dead through me.
She soon tired of this, though, and of the silence once I
stopped talking to her. That was when
she got nasty. Snarling and spitting at
me when I came in, not ceasing until I was gone again. She let me change her bandage though and
everything else, she just made darn sure it wasn't at all pleasant. She even saved up her shit for when I had
just mucked out.
Her biting me was the last straw. I sat inside, alone, knowing that what I had
been striving for for so long was outside and the result was a bitter taste for
us both. I made a resolution to end
it. I would feed her the sugared
porridge to sedate her and once she was better I would take her back to the
forest.
The porridge certainly got rid of the nasty unicorn. It made her forget her anger toward me
completely and she became friendly towards me again. We even played Othello once more. And that just made me more depressed when I
was away from her - I was interacting with a fake. I started to spiral downwards. I knew I had to release her but also that I
could keep her in this state forever if I so chose. To get what I wanted for once.
That was when the darker moments began, the moments that
galvanised me into taking her back. They
were like a shadow that covers almost everything, leaving only the bare
facts. I want to believe it was a dream,
it feels like one rather than a proper memory.
But, at night, when the real me was asleep, I would sneak out to the
stable, having already slipped the unicorn sleeping pills, and gouge at the
wound a little to prolong our time together.
As I say, I want to believe it never happened and hope to God it did
not.
She did heal, though.
And quickly after the shadow had arrived. I led her to the van as I had in the forest.
I let her go at the edge of the forest. She darted away more quickly than I had ever
seen her move. I broke down in the
lay-by and wept.
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