A pellucid morning. A morning limpid with the aftermath of winter rain and the sensation of spring sunshine. Everything coruscating brilliance, reflections everywhere, darting scintillates of bright into the eyes.
She was walking without thinking further than getting to the college and the class on time, though she was going to be lucky with the latter. Late. Always bloody late and it was going to show up in the reports. She’d be bloody lucky to
All thoughts flee into what is ahead of her.
It’s preposterous. Ridiculous.
But it’s there. Sublime and indisputable. A unicorn walking towards her, delicate hooves barely visible through the shimmering air. She couldn’t, in a split second’s clarity, see whether its hooves were cloven or not, though the rest of the creature had the sense of deer about it, not quite, but unmistakable. And small. So delicate it didn’t seem real. But it was. There. In front of her. Creamy hide taking in light, breathing it out in fluid movements aligning it with the liquid medium of the morning.
She stopped, unaware her mouth was wide open.
Flowing mane that seemed made of light it was so white. Or perhaps it was. Light. Instead of long hairs, they were long tendrils of light playing about the shoulders, the slender neck, or the tail visible about its hind legs, blowing in a wind she didn’t feel.
Creamy flanks and arched neck,– but not quite creamy white. There was a hint, a mere suggestion of rainbow. Colours where shadows would normally gather: between forelegs and chest, between hind legs and the smooth undercurve of belly. Between the slender arch of neck and the smooth plane of cheek. Rainbow hints instead of shadow. How could that be?
The unicorn sidestepped through a stream of light bouncing from one of the many pools of rainwater lying in otherwise indiscernible flattened hollows in the great paving slabs covering the Plaza.
Light concentrated at the tip of its horn, spiraling down into the mane that flowed over its forehead, highlighting eyes of an indescribable shade that was both dark and light and perhaps they were grey which was weird.
It sidestepped into the stream of light and was gone.
“Oh,” she breathed and didn’t move, eyes fixed on the point where the unicorn had been and wasn’t any more.
The coruscations were still there, the lucidity of the light above the reflections darting, spearing, dancing, flickering across the Plaza, shattering against the library glass walls and reincarnating into smaller slivers that flitted about to be lost in the trees lining the faux avenue of the remnants of James Street, killed by the absorbent sandstone of the old Museum walls.
But the unicorn was gone.
She just stood there, eyes wide and round, mouth half open, unaware of the sunlight falling down around her to puddle in brilliance around her feet. Her body reflected down through the paving to an eternity below her of skies blue and white cloud puffs in the epitome of serenity gilded by reflected sunlight.
A unicorn. She’d really seen a unicorn.
But didn’t see its hooves, or all of its tail, though it had been so like a deer. Yet not. No. Not quite. Small though. Not entirely unhorse-like, but not like a horse either.
How the hell do you describe something like that?
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