photo by Carrie Bind
The Unicorn Carver
The unicorn carver stroked her knife through yet another layer of cardboard, slowly stacking each section, layer by layer, carefully lacing each piece together to create her masterpiece, a cardboard unicorn head.
“Why a unicorn?” he asked.
She didn’t answer him. She knew he would grow bored of asking eventually. He would quiet and stroll away to smoke his pipe and glory over his pile of gold. He was a dragon after all, and that is what dragons do, stand about and revel in the beauty of their treasure, all the while trying not to catch it aflame and melt it down to a puddle of meaningless yellow. Dragons know true value isn’t in the gold itself, but the shape it takes. And he was a very smart dragon.
Though he was only really half-dragon, if truth be told. He’d told her so when she first met him and she had believed him with the smoke jetting from his nostrils and fire glinting between his teeth. He had smiled at her, his flame burning in the back of his throat boiling his spit, and told her he could show her true magic. The way only a man who was not wholly a man could.
She had been told not to follow strange men. All children are told this at some point or other, but she hadn’t thought that would apply to half-men like this one. He’d called her princess, the way her parents called her a princess and grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her along insisting that she simply had to see what he had to show her. She’d read the stories, so many stories, but it didn’t occur to her to think that dragons are more likely to steal princesses away than even strange men are. So she followed the dragon into the Enchanted Forest though her parents had also warned her not to enter the forest. She followed in search of magic. He said he had a fairy she could look at, up close and personal. She’d always wanted a fairy of her very own.
The fairy had been beautiful. She had only glimpsed her for a second before the dragon breathed upon it burning away its fluttering wings. Before the dragon crunched its bones between his teeth and sighed in ecstasy at the deliciousness of freshly cooked fairy-meat. He’d said it tasted like a fire-roasted marshmallow. Then he’d smiled at her again and his eyes had glinted ruby red and she had known that she must do as she was told if she wanted to live through this. Plenty of princesses had lived through this. This, after all, was why there were so many stories about princesses being rescued from dragons by princes and knights and brave souls. She waited for rescue for a long time. So long her hair had grown many inches before she began to wonder if anyone was ever coming to find her. So long that the dragon-man grew to trust her enough to give her the knife. So long that she stopped being a princess and became a carver instead.
She carved as quietly as she could, but he always heard the sound of her knife slowly ripping through the layers of paper and his ears were sensitive. He quickly tired of the noise.
“Can’t you be quiet?” he’d eventually ask and she’d nod and try very hard to be quiet, but even the sound of her breathing irritated him after a while.
He would pick her up as she was not so very large and put her in the box that cancelled out all her noise. It cancelled out all the light too from the lamps he kept burning around the small cave he lived in. It cancelled out everything. She hated it. She liked sitting in the light. She liked carving so she tried to carve quietly.
“Why a unicorn?” he asked again, to which she shrugged, pausing her carving long enough to allow his breathing to calm as he turned his back to her once again, distracted by his gold. Only then, did she begin to cut once more, slicing. Sliver after sliver. She turned cardboard into latticework and pieced it together to make unicorns.
Why a unicorn?
She frowned at the finished product, noting how the head seemed too large, as if she had created a horse, not a unicorn, and then slowly placed the horn deep into its skull so that it wouldn’t jostle, but would stand proud. She closed her eyes and wished as hard as she could, hoping though she could not see the stars in the cave the dragon had taken her to, that maybe they would hear her nonetheless and give light and life and love to the cardboard head she had sculpted.
“I am the unicorn sculptor,” she said in a heavy whisper. She placed the unicorn head upon her own and wished for the merge, the change that would tie its sinews to hers. Waited to become half-beast as the dragon was half-beast, but nothing happened and when she looked into the mirror leaned against the rough cave wall, she saw a girl with smudged eyes and drooping lips wearing a silly hat. She snorted a little at her foolhardiness. Why a unicorn? A creature of such pure heart and goodness that tainted water became clean with a single touch of the horn. Why a unicorn? What else could kill a dragon but a unicorn?
“I demand you work,” she said a little bit louder, but the head remained resolutely cardboard and the dragon stirred in his corner, standing up to come and take her back to the darkness where not even he could hear her, much less the stars or the gods or the fairies or whoever else was left to call upon.
“Shut up, girl,” he hissed, grabbing her, knocking the unicorn head off its perch, ripping a few threads of hair out in the process. The horn bent a bit on impact with the ground. He kicked the unicorn head. The horn dislodged, just an angry cone of cardboard, sharpened to a point. His fingers ripped at her and she began to hate him so fiercely she could hardly breathe. Her anger became sharper than the broken horn on the ground, sharper even than the knife, gripped tight.
He’d forgotten that she had the knife in her hand. She took it and traced it down his face, down along his neck, and down his belly, down, down, she carved a line in his skin, ripping it up to reveal the scales hidden beneath. Opening him before he could open her. She was not a gift to be discovered. She had no mysteries lurking beneath her skin. Magic had nothing to do with this.
She was a unicorn carver, she was a princess, and now, she was a dragon slayer. She ripped at his scales, slicing the skin that had made him appear human even for a moment. She dug a small hole into his chest and thrust the point of the unicorn’s horn deep into the hole. She rubbed his blood over her mouth so her lips were stained the same color as her mother’s red lipstick.
They found her when she exited the forest, still clutching the knife. They asked her what had happened. They wiped the blood from her lips, but she could still taste it, lingering. Her parents cradled her. Flashbulbs went off. Everyone wanted to know what had happened and how she had survived. It was simple. She told them she had tired of waiting for a rescue and slain her own damn dragon.
They nodded, but her parents whispered behind her back about the knife and the man and the way she clung to the knife and the way she kept carving. They never called him a dragon, didn’t believe he had ever been a dragon. They told her that was just fairy tale stuff.
“I am not a fairy tale,” she hissed at them. “I am a dragon slayer. I am a princess. I am a carver. Just let me carve.”
They bowed their heads in quiet acquiescence, but locked the doors of her room behind them whenever they left. Locked the doors everywhere she went. In this new prison, she had windows and a perfect view of the stars through a little telescope her mother gave her as a gift.
“Why a unicorn?” her father, the King asked, as he watched her carve one day.
“It’s not a unicorn,” she said taking the horn and stabbing it deep into the skull of her creation driving it rudely into the space where a brain should be. “It’s just a horse with a spike it its head.”
Carrie Bind is a current MFA candidate at Miami University in Ohio. Her work can be found in the Gateway Review: A Journal of Magical Realism and in The Tunnels. In her spare time, she travels as much as possible, getting lost almost everywhere she goes. Her favorite things include trees, desert tortoises, paint, fancy pens, and videos featuring baby elephants. At least 12 people have told her that she is basically the same person as Aubrey Plaza. She hasn’t decided if this is a compliment or not yet.
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