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sending-the-message · 7 years

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The Unicorn by Ilunibi

There’s little else in this great big world that can make a little girl in the ‘90s more excited than goddamn stickers. Glittery Lisa Frank nonsense by the roll, bought in needlessly pricey gift sets that peppered the caps of the pink aisles, princesses and My Little Ponies; hell, I used to get excited about the stickers that came on the fruit my mom brought home, or the foil stars my kindergarten teacher stuck to my spelling tests. I was a goddamn ferocious sticker collecting machine, and nothing made me or my friends more needlessly excited than badly printed cartoon characters on shitty adhesive paper.

Nothing.

In fact, the pecking order of my childhood group of friends was usually decided by who had the largest, most unique, most vibrant collection on the whole block, in the same way that some of the boys used their trading cards. She who had the newest set of rainbow dalmatians and sparkling pink horses was essentially the alpha female, and the more glitter and holographic film we had to show off, the better. We’d pile together in our living rooms with shoe boxes of treasures and try in vain to compete with the reigning champion in the neighborhood: my cousin, Rebecca.

Rebecca was different than the rest of us. She wasn’t a resident of that impoverished corner of town, but she was a frequent visitor. My aunt and uncle had barreled their way out of the slums through a combination of hard work and luck (which they’d never admit to), so Rebecca had a lot more at her disposal than a bunch of first and second graders who scrounged together their allowance to buy a couple of sheets of stickers from the drug store. No, she was the cool, older kid with literal boxes of untouched sheets and rolls of Disney characters and multicolored unicorns and cute puppies and fuzzy kittens. And, while she wasn’t in any way mean or unkind to us, she was an absolute scrooge with her collection. I suppose I would be too if the situation were reversed.

We could marvel at her recent acquisitions, but we couldn’t actually touch. Trading with her was like talking to a brick wall, because she was more there to gloat than to take part in our mad scramble. Occasionally, if the wind blew in exactly the right way and the sun was aligned properly with the planets, she’d bestow upon us a gift from her hoard, though I could never peg whether it was goodwill or showing off. It doesn’t matter. She gave me a rainbow shark for my birthday and I still have it stuck in my drawer of sentimental junk.

Additionally, she was very particular about her stickers. I can’t think of time when, at the end of our sessions, she didn’t comb the entire room just to make sure that everything was in its place. I’m not sure how an eight-year-old girl manages to memorize exactly how many sheets of identical Casey and Caymus stickers she has, but it never failed that she would always notice if something was missing. Sometimes, things got mixed up and we’d have to sort through our own piles to find the errant stickers, and sometimes we’d spend half an hour looking under furniture until we found where it fluttered to. She was anal about it.

Which is why it shocked me when she left for the day and I discovered she’d forgotten one.

It was a regular day of our swap meeting, sitting beneath the picture window of my mom’s living room, the only anomaly being that Rebecca seemed more than a little under the weather. The other girls who could make it wrapped up early because their moms needed them home from lunch, but Rebecca lingered until well into the evening until her parents finally picked her up. She counted out her sheets, we spent way too long looking for a missing dragon she’d got from a fifty cent machine, and once she was satisfied with her inventory, she packed up everything and left.

Only, as soon as she was out the door, I noticed something sitting where she had just been. It was on white wax paper and was the size of a Skittle, but it was a fluorescent yellow that caught my eye immediately. I dove on it out of curiosity and a weird sense of first-grade desperation. I didn’t care that, technically, it was stealing. I just cared that Rebecca had somehow missed one of her treasured stickers--probably because she was too sick to notice or care--and I could add it to my own collection.

It wasn’t anything impressive: a yellow circle with the tiny, awkward silhouette of a unicorn on it. In any other situation, I’d think it was the dullest thing I could ever cram into my pile, but it was Rebecca’s. That made it special.

As I shuffled it into my shoe box of wonders, I justified it to myself by repeating the mantra that, if it meant that much to her, she would have noticed it was gone regardless of how ill she felt. Maybe it wasn’t even her who dropped it. Maybe it was Cathy or Ashley or a girl from a previous get-together, and I know all of my friends wouldn’t mind if I kept something as insignificant as a teeny, tiny, pinkie-nail sized sticker with a poorly drawn unicorn on it. If they did bring it up, I’d just give them one of my gold stars or weird, bug-eyed smileys from the doctor’s office. In my mind, it’d balance itself out.

Predictably, after half an hour of gloating to my stuffed animals, I did what any kid would: I completely forgot about it. That unicorn sticker was lost in the fog of dressing up a Beanie Baby in doll clothes so he could have a lovely night out at Pride Rock with his girlfriend, bootleg Hello Kitty. By the time my mom forced me to take a bath and ordered me into bed, the unicorn sticker was barely a blip on the radar, at least until Rebecca finally called me out on my theft.

Or, normally that’s how it would go, except for the fact that I barely could sleep that night. I was plagued with nightmare after nightmare, waking up to stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, feeling like something was glaring at me. I’d always doze off again, but the dreams would go on like a sick, twisted clip show: finding Rebecca eating my neighborhood friends alive in the kitchen, watching my dog get slowly crushed by a car, drowning in the river beside my house. And it just went on and on.

And on. And on.

For days.

To say my mother was concerned by my night terrors was an understatement, but less of one than to say I was scared when I realized she would react to smells and glimpses of something dark that seemed to ooze around in our peripheral vision. You see, as the days marched on, the nightmares seemed to persist in small, strange ways once I woke up. I’d catch a whiff of vinegar and sulfur out of nowhere and watch, horrified, as my mother’s nostrils would flare and her brows would furrow in confusion. I’d see strange shadows slink around the wall, always bolting out of sight if I looked to them and, eventually, I’d watch my mom whip her head around to seek out the culprit, too.

It took almost a week for me to put two and two together, my house gradually becoming more and more unwelcoming and my sleep becoming less and less restful. I probably would have never figured it out if I hadn’t knocked over my box of stickers while staggering tiredly across my room. Amidst tears of frustration and kid-friendly curses that wouldn’t get me grounded, I started putting everything back into place and stumbled across that goddamned unicorn.

It was just as boring as I remembered it, lemon yellow with a awkward silhouette like some kind of girly Batman logo. I stared at it, it stared back, and then I got a whiff of something sour that was so strong that my eyes watered. I blinked and looked down, only to see a blank yellow circle staring back from my palm.

I screamed. I was too young to really register how crazy it sounded and too trusting in the idea that my mom would believe me, and she opted to chalk it up to sleep deprivation. She practically manhandled me to force a Benadryl down my throat, telling me it was for my own good, that I needed a nap, that she’d find a way to get me to the doctor within the next couple of days.

I fought valiantly, but was out like a light within a few minutes.

And I awoke in a nightmare, huddled in my bed, the floor stretching for miles and miles and the walls climbing up to the stratosphere. The only source of light was an ethereal ball of what looked like fire but, somehow, less substantial. It ebbed and flowed and glowed and the shadows seemed to dance with its erratic undulations, twisting and squirming like snakes and monsters. Some of them seemed to have faces, but they burned away in the light.

Fire or no, it was cold. I huddled beneath my blanket, breath creating clouds in the air as I stared, transfixed, at this strange ball of energy. Something dark began to grow inside of it, a shadow that wouldn’t melt, and as it expanded, the orange light grew brighter and more golden, almost radiant. I squeaked and tried to run as I saw four spindly legs, a long and crooked neck, and a jagged horn, but my body was paralyzed when it let out a horrifying scream.

Have you ever heard a horse when it’s angry? It’s petrifying. Terrifying enough, actually, that it was the basis for a dinosaur roar in many films. Loud enough that it makes your ears pop and your head throb. I clapped my hands over my ears and felt blood pool in my palms as it grew louder and louder and louder and louder. I screamed back and it drowned me out, one voice becoming two becoming three.

Though there was only one solitary creature standing in front of me, one twisted and deranged unicorn that jittered unnaturally and bent at weird angles, its voice came from everywhere. In its screams, I began to hear whispers, then words.

Threats.

Threats spoken in languages a six-year-old shouldn’t know, yet somehow I understood. Threats of what would become of me and my family, and lists of everything it knew I cared about. It detailed what it would do to everyone from my favorite toy to my family dog to my best friend to my long-dead grandmother who it shrieked, triumphantly, it could reach even though I would never see her again. I saw flashes of white walls and cups of medicine and a woman, with hair and eyes and skin like me, hanging listlessly from a pipe by her bedsheets with a toppled chair beneath her feet.

“This is what happens,” it told me. “This is what will happen. This is what I am. I am your worst nightmare.”

The screaming only stopped when I felt a horrible pain. I awoke on the floor in my room--my real room--with my mother at the bedroom door, pale-faced and hoarse. My face was sticky and warm, my left eye wouldn’t open. As I tried to push myself up, my mom screeched in a way that would have put the unicorn to shame.

She got me to the doctor that day.

The official story was that I’d fallen out of bed, and maybe I had. Cracked my head on the nightstand and nearly gouged my eye out, but caught my brow instead. They gave me a little clamp because it was too swollen for stitches and, as per usual, a sticker to help me feel better. I stared at it on the ride home, knowing what it was that I had to do.

When the weekend rolled around and we had our little trading party, Rebecca came to gloat, as always. The neighborhood girls clamored around her most recent additions, like a whole new set of glow-in-the-dark aliens and a few sheets of Disney heroines. They ooh-ed and aah-ed and thankfully paid no attention to my bruised and battered face as I sat there, fist clenched around that fucking unicorn as I struggled to force a smile. I couldn’t help but notice how much more alive and refreshed and energized Rebecca was as she flittered around, grinning and happy.

Not like she was when she made me scour the living room for that goddamn dragon sticker the day I found the unicorn.

She had done it on purpose, hadn’t she? She’d left that thing in my house trying to get away from it and look what it had done. Anger was my fuel as I waited for her to turn her back, grabbed a box of her stickers, and chucked the unicorn in. I shook it for good measure, so the tiny thing would settle somewhere in the bottom where she would probably miss it.

And she did. Somehow, despite every odd against me, she missed it. When she left for the evening, she only did a quick check for anything that could have fallen, packed her boxes under her arm, and left with a cheerful wave. I couldn’t even feel remorse as I watched her go; in my mind, it was justified. In my mind, I was playing tit-for-tat. If she was willing to throw her little cousin under the bus, then maybe little cousin had every right to dish it right back at her.

I slept very soundly that night, and the night after that, and the night after that. A miracle, my mother called it, though I knew the truth. I still know the truth.

And I think Rebecca does, too.

I visit her sometimes, out at the ward. She’s not very responsive and more than a little prone to falling asleep mid-visit, but sometimes when she looks at me, there’s a glint of hate and fear and disgust that I can catch in her eye, and envy and spite hidden deep in her voice. It’s like she wants to tell me that I should be in her place, that it should have been me whose childhood was robbed from her.

She wants to tell me, but she can’t. She won’t. She’ll never admit what she did, because she wants me to feel like she is the victim in all of this, that she never once tried to sacrifice me to whatever the fuck that unicorn really is. She doesn’t want to admit that I won.

Or maybe, just maybe, she’s guilty. She knows what she did and I’m a constant reminder of it, the only family member who ever visits and the only one who stays to talk. Maybe she hates me because I remind her of what a monster she is, perhaps even worse than the unicorn ever could be.

And maybe? Maybe that’s the worst nightmare of all.

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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