Your life is sad, a metronome of monotony and loneliness. You are confined to the perimeter of a barn. Your horns are twisted, grown into and around each other into the semblance of some malformed unicorn. When you were born you were abandoned because of this deformity, left to die. At the time we did not know why you were pushed away and almost trampled, but something inside your mother burned greater than distaste. You were wrong and she knew it. Culling the herd is nature’s way, but your smallness, your newness, was too overwhelming to discard. We kept you alive because we didn’t know better. Because we did not know the difference between pet and wild and did not know that as you grew we would abandon you too.
Now your horns outweigh you, make it hard not to stumble and collapse. This is why, over the years, you have learned to walk with your body leaning into the side of the barn, your horn scraping into the wood the record of your existence, a low and broken scrawl that can be heard day and night. You have stopped complaining. You make no noise, except for when you fall, and these times, you scream like a terrified child until someone rights you. I cannot imagine living like this: days made of rectangles. I hope you don’t know your own life.
I pray, with your head cocked to the side, that you see the world differently and more brilliantly than the other animals. This is what I need to believe to assuage the guilt of keeping you alive. I pray you see grass grow along its length and instead of looking down at just the tips, you marvel at the wide green ribbons of the blade. I pray you see the horizon like a door opening for the sun and the moon. I pray you see trees as the rungs of a ladder that you climb each day to escape. I pray on the night you disappear, when the coyote comes and sees you resting against the barn, exhausted and still, that you are not afraid, that your eyes are not wild, that with your head angled in the darkness you see its mouth as a smile.
Gwendolyn Edward writes nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Her work has been accepted by Crab Orchard Review, Bourbon Penn, Crack the Spine, and others. She retains a MA in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas where she worked with American Literary Review, and she is currently pursuing a MFA at Bennington. She works with Fifth Wednesday Journal as an assistant non-fiction editor and also teaches Creative Writing.
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