Bloody Unicorn

 

I found myself standing rigidly still, frozen, as if my feet were glued to the floor.  My thick legs and boot-clad feet were most definitely too heavy for me to lift.  My mouth gaped as if I wanted to scream.  How badly I so wanted to scream.  The skin on my arms felt as though snakes were caressing me and prickled as if electrocution was inches away.  I wanted to scream out so badly.  I felt a disturbance of my peace that encumbered me such that I could barely breathe or stand to live during this moment.  If I could have ended it all with a quick stroke of a knife, I may have done it, for the agony was too intense and I despised agony.  I despised it with every fiber of my being such that I would choose to end the state of living, if I knew how to do it immediately without hesitation at this very moment.  Agony of trembling anger, rage and destructive power that brewed inside of me, yet I was still trapped inside of an invisible bondage that I could not escape.

 

I wanted to run, but all the effort I put forth into my muscles was in vain and only exhausted me.  Not even a hint of sound escaped my lips and I wondered at the inability I was experiencing in utilizing my vocal chords…..or is it chord….  I guess I have said vocal chords many times in my life and I don’t even know if that is a sensible statement.  Do we have chords in our throat that sound travels up through like electricity?  It would be easy enough for me to find out.  Just a quick search on the Internet and I would have my answer and not be speaking ignorantly, ending a thirty year trek of foolish speaking.  That would have to wait though as I was trapped at this moment.  Trapped in a very strange place.  Not just trapped, but immobilized.

 

I was standing in the center of a large, crowded room with a high ceiling.  In the middle of the isle amongst all of these strange faces, I stood unwillingly.  Without any idea as to how I arrived here, I wanted to fall down in the hopes that someone would carry me out of this building in an ambulance and take me to a hospital where they could diagnose and of course, hopefully fix me.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I don’t know, no one in this large church, as I determined it to be a church, even seemed to notice me at all.

 

The stares of the church attendees appeared to me to be stony and iced over for the most part.  To my left, I saw a man in the center of a row of seats.  He was smirking and whispering to the person sitting next to him who seemed to have a flash of concern cross their face as if begging him to shut the fuck up.  Immediately after the man’s barely audible whisper occurred, a loud aggressive voice shouted out, “Shut the fuck up or I’ll blow your goddamned brains out!”  I then heard the cocking of a gun.  Not that I had ever heard the cocking of a gun before, but I seemed to know it as if by instinct.

 

I tried to duck down and bend my legs at the knees, but this was to no avail.  My head spun around to see where the voice had originated.  That was something at least.  My head was moving.  It was the only part of my body that I had control over.

 

I wanted to drop my head down and hoped that the rest of my body would fall along with it, but I knew that would be entirely useless as I seemed to have been starched thoroughly by some overzealous dry cleaner who had taken me in with my brown trousers that I would need for work the next day.  I looked my body up and down for the neatly pressed pleat in the front of my pants, but found none.

 

A preacher stood at a tall, darkly stained wooden pulpit at the front of this church.  He looked like a preacher at least.  He had a long black robe and a white square directly in the middle of his neck.  To his right stood a large, bulky man in full camouflage army regalia with a frickin machine gun in his hands.  Now it was pointed in the direction of the whispering culprit and apparently in this church silence was a golden rule and speaking was a fatally punishable offense.  The priest didn’t seem to wince at either the loudness of the armed soldier, the violent tendencies of the man, or of the term ‘goddamn’ used in a church.  It would seem that even an evil priest would take an issue with the term goddamn, but not this preacher.

 

“Oh my God!”  My mind shouted out.  What is going on here?!  Where am I and what is happening?  Is this place possibly real?

 

Suddenly, I heard a loud growling sound erupt from behind me on my left.  Some sort of creature leapt into the air and seemed to fly right through me to the right, sinking its fangs deeply into the neck of the man who had smirked and god forbiddenly muttered a sound.  Blood seemed to spray out from the sides of this monster’s face and spatter the parishioners sitting all around the smirker, but they did not move a muscle.  The lights in their eyes changed.  Their pupils may have grown and shrunken, but I could barely tell.

 

This must be hell.  This must be a dream, I thought.  Loud suction noises were all that I heard until the creature had completed his meal and stood up, appearing 10-feet tall by my calculations, but looking like a regular man to me now.  He bent his neck to the right and to the left and loud popping sounds occurred as his neck cracked.

 

I saw a large smile cover his face and he seemed at this point to be looking straight at me.  I was certain now that we had made eye contact and terror filled my body with a prickling sensation.  It seemed that I could feel every drop of blood flowing through my veins, but in such a way as if it caused my skin to bubble up.  It is not good to have the largest organ in your body all bubbly.  I couldn’t see it bubbling.  I could definitely feel it though.

 

I decided to put another big effort into moving my body, but it was futile.  I could fight all I wanted, but I was still stuck.  The vampire stepped casually over the laps of those he had just flown over to get his meal from and I was sure that he was walking right up to me.  His stride was definitely going in my direction.

 

I looked away from him for a moment to see what the military man was going to do.  He had pulled out a little pistol now.  The machine gun lay by his side.  He aimed it and fired.  The head of the vampire exploded.  He was now standing within a couple of feet from me and I felt myself covered in slime and ooze from the explosion, although I did not see anyone else get touched by this bloody mess.  I cannot be sure that they were not, however, since my eye sockets were now filled with his blood too.

 

It is a strange feeling to have an eye full of blood that is not your own.  Especially when you cannot even move your arms to wipe some of it away.  My eyelids felt heavy and thickly coated.  It might be the same feeling that one has when slimed on that old Nickelodeon television show.  The bottom lids of my eyes seemed to puff out from the fact that they were now pockets full of blood.

 

I thought first about what disease I may have just acquired from his blood seeping into my eyes, as I could not even do as much as move my arms to wipe my face.  But then I saw his head beginning to heal itself and I felt his hands grasp my arms and suddenly I was carried outside of this particular hell, having no idea as to what next hell I was being carried in to.  I couldn’t move myself, but he certainly had no trouble moving me.  The temporary loss of his head had not weakened him or slowed down his pace even in the slightest.  But who was I to know what the full capacity of his speed might actually be.  Certainly it could not be possible that he would not have experienced some sort of sense of weakness from such an attack.

 

He had flown through me like I was a vapor before, but now his grip was very firm and real and I was dazed, still as stiff as ever.  I was most tangible within his grasp at this moment.  This must be a dream, but it was by this point the most unlike any dream I had ever experienced before.  Damned dry cleaner did a fucking fabulous job on me, giving me no crumpling ability to control my stiff body members with.  Elation filled me, as with fresh incisors now grown into his mouth, he sunk his teeth into me while continuing to carry me along as if I was as light as the brown trousers I tried to have dry cleaned.
I had never felt so happy or ecstatic, but the pain was real and I thought to myself, “Baptism under fire….Baptism under fire….Baptism under fire….”  Or rather, I heard those words in my head.  I don’t know if I actually thought them, but what really is the difference between thought and thought placement.  The originator would have to be the difference, but who is to say whom the originator ever is?  Voices are always either out of your head or within or both.  Those of extreme Christian faiths often believe that the Devil is usually placing evil thoughts within them and that the Holy Father is placing the righteous thoughts within their heads.  Due to superstitious and religious idealisms, the facts and fictions of thought origination have all become muddled.  This probably happened at some point near the beginning of man’s existence on this earth when he wondered at what was happening to him when a sudden idea filled his head.  “Hey!?  Where did that come from?”

 

“I have a clever thought.”

 

“Who gave it to you?”

 

“No one.  I came up with it on my own!”

 

“You want me to believe that it just popped out of thin air and into your head?  That’s just crazy!  There must be some invisible being who put it there instead!”
”And that idea is NOT crazy?”

 

The debate continues to this day….

 

Whatever was happening, I was torn now between wanting to wake up and wanting to melt away.  What the heck this kind of feeling was or meant was beyond me, but it was as real to me as my first sexual experience.  This was happening.  I didn’t know how.  So, I had to just disconnect myself from it all, sit back and watch.  Very much still, the same as my first sexual experience actually.  But that, was a different story for another time and place, or maybe not.

 

My eyes opened slightly and I realized that I was staring directly into the face of, of all things, a unicorn.  A pure white bloody unicorn.  It was standing so close to me that I could feel it’s hot breath against my skin.  It’s one horn carressed the side of my cheek.  I looked into his eyes and he spoke to me, although again, this voice I did not hear externally.  But this voice seemed to come out of my gut or heart or somewhere else in my body besides my head, but wherever it originated from internally, I knew without a doubt that it was from this weird, gory unicorn and I felt comforted by his words.  It was gory because it was strangely perfectly pure except for the portion of its flesh that was showing through and was very bloody.  It was as if a bite had been taken out of it.  Some blood was spattered over other parts of it.  The unicorn did not behave as if it were in any pain however, and what part of it was not bloody, gave off the remarkable glow of absolute pureness such as does not exist in the mortal, every day world.

 

You are safe now.  You always were safe.  You, however, may not be safe to others.  But I am still going to let you live.  I didn’t know whether to thank him or scream at the top of my lungs, but then I didn’t think I had the ability to do either anyway, so I just remained silent.  I thought to him, “What the fuck?!  What could you possibly mean?  Why aren’t you helping me?  What is going on?  What happened to you anyway?  Why don’t you seem to be hurt by that bite?”

 

The unicorn stepped back and a loud braying sound came out of his mouth.  It hurt my ears, but in my heart I heard him laugh.  Laughter was his only response, although I somehow just knew without a doubt that he had heard every single word that had passed through my mind.  Yet, he just ran off without further explanation.  I think he was going to get laid, but that might just have been my imagination.  He seemed a bit worked up and I don’t know, but I felt like I knew exactly what was on his mind.  It was definitely a strange telepathic connection, the likes of which I have certainly never experienced before the meeting with this gory unicorn.  I think he may have been a psychotic unicorn, but he didn’t hurt me, so alls well that ends well I suppose….although, what, at this point, I wondered, could be ending well?”

 

I noticed my finger twitching and then tried to move my body and it was, yay!, a success.  Lightly grassy dirt stuck to my brown trousers and I felt my feet were now bare, slimy and mud clung in between my toes.  That was just fine with me.  At least I could wiggle my toes.  Somehow I knew the way to walk back home and it wasn’t very far at all.  Why, I wondered, did the unicorn say that I might be a danger to others?  Why, if that was the case, did he decide to let me leave?  My final thought on that subject for the moment was why was I hallucinating so badly that I thought I’d just seen and communicated with a gory unicorn.  That may have been the biggest, most important question of all.  Maybe.  How could I know though?  It was all, entirely strange.

 

Hesitantly, I opened the door of my small town home and walked inside, directing my efforts straight to the bathroom where I shed all of my clothing, with plans to burn them when I finished soaking in a long, hot bath.  I made a point of locking and bolting every single lock on the door.  There were four locks on that door, but I usually only bothered with two.  Tonight would be a four-lock night.  This being the case, even though my door had been locked before when I somehow found myself under the spell of very strange and violent magic.

 

Wherever I was.  Whatever I was doing.  However I got there.  I never figured it out, but one thing was for damn sure.  I didn’t want to go back.
I saw an empty bottle of whiskey on my bedside table as I climbed naked into bed.  The sheets felt so soft against my sore, bare skin.  There was a scab on my neck now and I didn’t care about work for this day because I was going to sleep.  My boss could suck my cock, if I had one.  What the hell was a girl to do when she lost her boots, watched a man get murdered in a church with a machine-gun carrying soldier with a voice she never wanted to hear again, got attacked by a vampire herself, and then saved by a frickin gory unicorn that had a bite out of it’s side.  Sure, I would just pretend like the whole world had not just stopped making sense.  No, that simply wasn’t going to happen.

 

I sure as hell didn’t know how to handle it all.  Sleep was all I wanted.  So I drifted off and decided to worry about the rest of the world tomorrow.  I got into a car accident.  That would be my story and I’d be sticking to it.
Maybe I should lay off the whiskey.  If only it didn’t taste so damned good…