Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Mom starts up the stairs, so I duck into my bedroom and pull off my clothes, stuffing the dirty stuff into the back of my closet. I’m in my underwear when she tries the door and I push against it.

“Mom!” I cry. “I’m not dressed!”

“You’re late for dinner! Why didn’t you call?”

I lower my voice, and then I tell my mother a lie. “My, uh, my period started at Katey’s house and it made a mess and I was too embarrassed so I walked home.”

“Oh, honey.” My mom’s voice is softer now. “Well, wash up and come downstairs. Make sure you get your pants in the laundry tonight, though, so it doesn’t stick. There’s stain remover by the washer downstairs.”

“Thanks,” I say. If the blood does stain, how will I explain getting my period all over my shirt? But that’s the least of my problems. After washing the blood off my arms and face—which grosses me out more than I can say—I pull on fresh clothes and log on to the Internet. I look up both how to care for orphaned deer fawns and how to care for orphaned lions, figuring that if anything, a unicorn is a mix of the two.

This is going to be harder than I thought. Apparently it’s not as simple as just giving them milk. Fawns drink something called “deer colostrum,” and lions take special high-protein baby formulas. Neither of which I have any ability to get my hands on.

What am I doing? I can’t take care of a baby unicorn. Even if I could figure out how to feed it, it can’t be legal! And it can’t be right.

Back downstairs Mom and Dad are waiting at the table. I slide into my seat, and Dad says grace. Dinner takes forever, and I can barely eat a bite. Dad doesn’t eat much either, because Mom is trying out a Moroccan recipe she got from Yves’s mother, and Dad thinks anything more exotic than spaghetti is too weird to count as food.

But it does give me an idea. Yves’s mom sometimes cooks with goat’s milk. Maybe that’s closer to unicorn than cow. After the endless dinner and the even more endless washing up, I turn to Mom. “Can I run over to Yves’s house really quickly? I need to get his notes from history class.” Lie number two.

“Be quick,” my mother warns.

Yves answers at the kitchen door. “Hey,” he says, leaning against the frame. “What’s up?”

“I need to borrow some goat’s milk.”

“Borrow?” He raises his eyebrows. “Like you’re going to bring it back?”

“No. I mean I would like you to give me some goat’s milk. Please.”

Yves shrugs and heads toward the fridge. “Just so you know,” he says, retrieving the slim carton from a shelf on the door, “it’s pretty nasty all by itself. What do you need it for?”

So I lie again. “My mom has this new recipe she’s trying out and she, uh, remembered you’d have some…”

“At nine o’clock at night?” Yves’s big, dark eyes are staring right through me. It’s not fair. It’s hard enough lying to my parents, but Yves?

“Yeah. It needs to… marinate overnight or something. I don’t know. She just sent me over here.” I look away. “So, in case we ever need to get more, where does your mom buy this stuff?”

“There’s a Caribbean grocer downtown,” Yves says, handing me the carton. “Hey, Wen, you okay?”

I step off the stoop into the darkness so he can’t see my eyes. Biscuit the cat is off on another of his nocturnal strolls. He’s shredding Yves’s mom’s flower bed. Mrs. Schaffer really needs to get that beast under control. “I’m fine.”

I’m not fine. I haven’t been this not-fine in months. And we both know what happened then.

Part of me expects him to come forward and touch my arm the way he’s been doing since last fall, but he doesn’t. He stays on the stoop, and there’s a space the size of Summer between us.

“Well, see you at school,” he says.

I return to my own yard and approach the garage with trepidation. I hope this works. I hope I’m not too late. How soon after birth should a baby unicorn eat?

What if it’s already dead? I catch my breath, freezing with my hand on the door. What if I went through all this and the unicorn died while I was eating dinner? All that effort, all that terror, and it might just croak in my garage, alone, without its mother nearby.

And maybe that would be all right. Maybe the wrangler knew what she was doing when she tried to drown it. After all, these things are deadly. Dangerous. Evil. Maybe she had the right idea, to never let it grow up. But then I remember the look in Venom’s eyes, and I rush inside.

Behind the storage freezer the laundry basket is still and silent. I open the lid, and the unicorn is curled up inside, nestled up against the plush unicorn doll on the blanket. I reach inside and touch its flank. A heartbeat flutters through its velvety skin. It starts from its sleep and turns its head toward my hand, noses my palm and wraps its lips around my finger. Something inside me lets go. Yes, it’s a tiny little man-eating monster. But it needs me.

I grab an empty water bottle, a rubber band, and a pair of my mother’s rubber-tipped gardening gloves. I cut a finger off the gloves and poke a hole in the tip. Then I fill the bottle with the goat’s milk and secure the glove finger onto the opening with the rubber band. A few moments against the back of the freezer, and the milk loses its refrigerator chill. That’s going to have to be enough.

“Come here, baby,” I say to the unicorn, lifting it out of the nest and cradling it against me. I try to get the bottle into its mouth, but the unicorn is having none of that, and struggles while goat’s milk streams out of the hole in the glove and smears over us both.

Gross. The unicorn begins to cry, soft little bleats, and tries to burrow into my torso. I bite my lip, knowing just how it feels. What do I think I’m doing? Goat milk. What a dumb idea.

I pull off the rubber and stick my finger into the bottle. “Here,” I say again, pushing my milk-coated finger past its lips. This time the baby unicorn suckles, its tongue surprisingly firm. I plunge my finger into the bottle again and again, and slowly, painstakingly, we make it through about a sixth of the bottle. This is going to take a while. There has to be a better way.

I put the glove finger back on the bottle, then squeeze my finger over it, covering both the bottle opening and the pinprick hole in the glove tip. Milk dribbles out and down my finger, but slowly, controlled by the pressure of my finger on the rubber. I place my finger back into the baby’s mouth and let it eat.

Its eyes are closed as it suckles, its spindly legs drawn up against its body for warmth. Its skin is mostly white, covered with a soft, velvety down. It doesn’t look dangerous at all. I guess this early, without its venomous horn, it’s not. Just soft and fragile and dainty. I run a finger down its delicate snout. Between its eyes is a reddish mark, like a starburst or a flower.

“Flower,” I say, and it opens its eyes for a moment and looks at me.

Oh, no. Now I’ve named it.

I can’t sleep. Down the hall, my parents’ room has been dark for hours, but I’m tossing and turning, trying to imagine what it’s like for the little unicorn, alone in the garage. Is it awake? Hungry? Suffocating? Dying of carbon monoxide poisoning from the fumes off the freezer?

Finally I toss a jacket on, slip into my flats, and tiptoe down the hall. Outside, the moon is bright on the lawn, and I realize I should have brought a flashlight. If my parents wake up and see the light on in the garage, they’ll freak out.

But once I’m inside the garage, I find I can see just fine. Maybe it’s the moonlight. Maybe it’s the unicorn. I peek into the laundry basket. Flower is curled up next to the doll again, and I can see its chest move as it breathes. I hope it’s a girl. Flower would be a pretty funny name for a boy.