The Ones Who Live Inbetween

9

When a unicorn hungers, it is a terrible thing. When a unicorn slakes that thirst for blood on its dreaded horn, then, that is when you know that the world truly is ending. The unicorn is a nightmare creature. Beautiful, powerful, much beloved yet...utterly deadly. It consumes with pleasure. All that is around it, and no-one knows. No-one suspects because it is just so beautiful. It is almost radiant. Surely the closest thing to a God you'll find here on earth. But does a God hunger? Does a God hunger for death? For blood? Does a God hunger for the blood of men? Of women? Does a God hunger for the blood of children? And yet, the Gods must have created the unicorn. So perhaps they do. In battle, the unicorn has no parallel. In beauty, the unicorn has no parallel. In cruelty, the unicorn is Queen. The unicorn -Try again- the unicornus –no- the alicorno- you really are a fool- the jednorozec, the ikkakujuu, the vienradzis, the, the ...Inorog. Finally. Time to wake up darling. Who are you? Who are you that constantly plagues my thoughts? I won't wake up. I will never wake up again. I don't want to remember the-The place before here? There was no place before here. Here is where I have always been. Always.

I wake, as if breaking through the surface of some deep well. Not in the way she wants me to awaken. No, I wake from the depths of my mind. All that remains of her voice in my head is a children's lullaby, reverberating through the darkest recesses of my brain. My brain, yes that is good. What else? I have... hands. Shaking pale hands with long slender fingers and curving fingernails. Fingernails that never seem to grow. I look down and see my body. My body which never seems to need nourishment. I seem beyond time. Yet my hair, which has never been consistent in colour or type, has always appeared to be slowly stretching further down my back. I hate it. If I could cut it, I would. Its growth speaks of life. Life, of which I am not. I am not life. I am not alive.

This place which has been my home forever, is constantly changing. Sometimes there are trees, though no sunlight. Sometimes rivers, rocks, buildings even. Yet before now there were never other people. It was just me. Me and sometimes my reflection, everchanging as it is. Here there is no war. Here there is no slaughter. No lies, no cruel words, no hate. No hate except that which I harbour for myself. The one thing other than my isolation that remained constant, was my confinement. There has always been a roof and walls. No matter how large it becomes, there have always been walls. And never sky. This day, though time is inconstant here, has been different in many ways. Today I saw the sky. I saw it twice. Once as a bloodied cloth through which a dead sun leered. And again as a twinkling darkness seeming illuminated by round globes of fruit.

Here...Where is here? Why did they put me here? Why am I forced to relive those times which I've tried so very hard to erase from the canvas of my mind? Would the act of knowing really make any difference? Because nonetheless, here I am. Nonetheless, I am being made to watch the events I wish never to see. This world is a dream. One place simply melts into another and time doesn't work how it should. And all of it is utterly strange yet echoing with familiarity. It feels at once safe and a place of terror. Safe because I know that it is not true. Anything that happens can be undone and redone and undone again. Terrifying because I have no control over my fate here. Though, have I ever really had control? Even before I was here I lived as others demanded. There was only ever one person who never seemed to demand anything of me. Though it's not as if she could make any sort of demands. She was a slave and nothing more. So she had her tongue removed. Removed so that she could never speak of the atrocities she may have witnessed within my home. No, not my home. Merely the place that I lived. She looked after the two of us well. She was the only one who would.

The ant always took his anger out on them, on the girl, because he was too weak to do anything against the unicorn. And he hated it. Or, maybe it was himself that he truly hated. But the ant was weak and so he hurt his children because it made him feel powerful. An ant is truly no match for a unicorn. The unicorn, like the ant, was supposed to care for the children. But the unicorn is a creature that doesn't think or act as humans do. The unicorn lacks empathy and contained a strange hunger that could never be satiated. Perhaps the only thing the unicorn ever did for the children for which they could truly be grateful, was that she never turned her hunger upon them.

I know these things. I know that I have known them for a long time though I'm sure I only learned them this very day. I know, as she constantly tried to tell me, that these are the events that occurred. But there is so much more that I still don't know. I don't know how I know. Was I one of those people? Did I know them? All I can remember is as if observed from outside. It doesn't feel real, like looking through a spyglass into another world. What is my name? How old am I? Who did I love? Who loved me? What happened to me? To them? And the eternal question, the question humans have asked since the advent of time; why?

I am tired. I am very tired. I wish it would all just stop for a moment. The lily twisted up inside me tears me apart from within. I feel that were I to cough, blood flecked petals would fall from my lips.

I am tired.

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