He ran,” the unicorn said. “You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.” Her voice was gentle, and without pity. “Never run,” she said. “Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow. Walk very slowly, magician.
I’ve never really understood,” the unicorn mused as the man picked himself up, “what you dream of doing with me, once you’ve caught me.” The man leaped again, and she slipped away from him like rain. “I don’t think you know yourselves,” she said.
I don’t think I could ever see her closely,” the sentinel replied, “however close she came.
We are all ghosts,” Morris Klapper said at last. “We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done.
He would have cupped his hands around her smile and breathed it brighter, if he had dared.
That is most of it, being a wizard – seeing and listening.
It is said that love makes men swift and women slow.
No, my lady, you are wrong! Death lives among the poor. Death lives in the foulest, darkest alleys of this city, in some vile, rat-ridden hovel that smells of-” He stopped here, partly because he had never been inside such a hut or thought of wondering what it smelled like. “Death lives among the poor,” he went on, “and comes to visit them every day, for he is their only friend.
I hate selkie stories. They’re always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said “What’s this?“, and you never saw your mom again.
Anyone can say he’s a magician these days. The old standards are gone, the old values have been abandoned. Besides, a real magician has a beard.
This body is dying. I can feel it rotting all around me.
Do you know what I am, butterfly?” the unicorn asked hopefully, and he replied. “Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane.” He paused, fluttering his wings against the wind, and added conversationally, “Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name.
I have ended my betrothal to the princess I had agreed to marry – and if you don’t think that was a heroic deed, you don’t know her mother.
I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling.
I promised only that you would see some sign of unicorns, and so you have. Your realm is blessed beyond any land’s deserving because they have passed across it in freedom. As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn’t say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits. Think of that, and be still.
Julie raised her face, gasping and hiccuping, and he saw clearly how she would look when she was old. “Baby,” he said, and began helplessly kissing lines and hollows and wounds that were not there yet, sick with tenderness and fear.
She was one woman who knew what to do with a slight moral edge. The.
A good wife isn’t supposed to argue with her husband. My mother says you wait until he goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.
And in the whiteness, of the whiteness, flowering in the tattered water, their bodies arching with the streaked marble hollows of the waves, their manes and tails and the fragile beards of the males burning in the sunlight, their eyes as dark and jeweled as the deep sea – and the shining of the horns, the seashell shining of the horns! The horns came riding in like the rainbow masts of silver ships.
The Last Unicorn.