The full moon washed everything in ghostly, white light. The ivy shone black with the shadows even darker; the entire glade monochromatic. Penny hugged herself tightly against the early autumn night while keeping her phone out in front of her for some meager light.
She had to wait nearly a week until the full moon. There was no telling if this was the right glade, or if the unicorn colt was still there. The extra light from above was a non-negotiable for her midnight escapade. Not just for searching the glade, but for navigating the yards and smaller streets where the streetlights did not go.
Her breath caught as rustling reached her ears. She spun around, but her phone light was not strong enough to reach the ivy curtains. She took a breath and tucked her phone away, shutting her eyes.
The woods beyond crackled and chirped. There was rustling again, but there was a skittish quality that called to mind rabbits. A larger, more careful swish of the ivy and undergrowth reached her ears. The steps sounded more deliberate, closer to how a deer would move.
The glade looked brighter when she opened her eyes. She could see the ivy swaying as something passed through, but couldn’t see the creature. She crept nearer and an outline started to appear.
It was roughly the size of a pony, but slimmer. It must’ve been grayish. The moonlight would not reflect off it, and it blended into the scenery too much to be either black or white.
She extracted a molasses cookie from her pocket, set it on a rock, and backed off. She waited, and waited. And waited.
Her head snapped up. She blinked drowsily, rubbing her eyes as she staggered up to her feet. She was damp with dew. The moon was not as high and the glade was now washed in soft gray as pre-dawn broke. Cold dread washed over her. The caretakers at the home would’ve noticed she was missing by now.
The cookie was gone. She stared at the spot with disappointment seeping into the pit of her stomach. She had missed it, unicorn or otherwise.
A snort behind her froze her solid.
The colt was the most magnificent animal she had ever seen. True, his knees were still knobbly, more like a horse foal compared to a two-year-old, and his slate gray coat, mane, and tail tuft were frizzy. Even still, his deep brown eyes had an intelligence greater than any animal she’d encountered. His black, spiraled horn was short but looked carved from obsidian. A lion-like tail flicked lazily, and he pawed the grass with cloven hooves.
Penny slowly stretched her hand out, inching nearer and nearer as he continued to stand still.
---
Her caseworker had pink streaks in her hair. Penny could not decide if she liked it or not, and always circled back to herself having dark hair. She would have to bleach it to change colors, and that extra step always put her off hair dying.
“Hmm… I don’t know, Penny, the home does have a good point….”
“It was once,” Penny said blandly.
“Yes, but you really freaked them out. Disappearing in the middle of the night is serious. They had to file a report.” She signed heavily, and fiddled with one of the pink locks in her blonde hair. “If this happened at a placement with a family, then you’d be relocated.”
“It was a full moon,” Penny said. “I wanted to see how my phone would do with night pictures. It won’t happen again. I swear!”
“They want to send you back to New York… That might be too extreme.” She shuffled through Penny’s file. “Your other group home exists, but—.”
“But it’s not the same people in charge,” Penny finished. “It’s even more for problem kids than this one.” She leaned forward. “You can’t send me away! I won’t disappear again.”
“It would suck to move right after starting junior high… You could end up at a really populated middle school, and that could lead to bullying or something….” The caseworker mumbled under her breath, checking different notes. “Your last placement was just a town over. Did you get to reconnect with old elementary friends?”
Penny nodded, her throat now too dry to respond.
She suspected some type of fallout from sleeping outside, but the caretakers at the home had been subdued after screaming at her, and she thought she was in the clear. It didn’t occur to her that they had filed a police report, contacted the caseworker, and started the process of moving her elsewhere.
She had only managed to get back to the glade once between meeting the colt and this meeting, and he had not been around. She left him two molasses cookies and was itching to get back there to see if he would come out of hiding this time.
“There’s no red flags in your file other than the fighting with the other kids, and whatever it was that Lambert family was talking about. Which, to me, sounded like you were stressed because of what was going on with your friend, so I don’t know how much weight that really has.” She hummed, searching the file. “Yeah, nothing that suggests you’re getting into drugs, or self-harm, or sex… Which also means you’ve been safe from abuse according to what I learned in class….” She blinked and looked up quizzically. “You had a request to go to church? Really?”
“I was raised by nuns.”
“Oh. True. …Still, little weird, but if it keeps you grounded….” The caseworker shut the file. “How about I beg the home to keep you until winter break? I can try finding a placement in the same school district.” She shrugged. “Either they’ll decide you can stay, or you’ll get placed. You got to keep in line though, Penny. If you stray, they’ll flip out and I’ll be forced to move you. Got it?”
Penny sputtered her thanks repeatedly, keeping up the stream as she was ushered from the office.
She took the bus towards Colton’s rather than back to the group home. There was still time before dinner, and surely being slightly late could be chalked up to her meeting with the caseworker.
The cookies were gone. There were slight indents around the rock she had left them on, too big to be deer prints. She looked around but saw no other signs of the colt. She sat on the rock and dug out a thin book about horses from her backpack.
Movement caught her attention as the sky started darkening. Her heart blipped as the colt nosed through the curtain of ivy. He raised his head, staring, and silently walked nearer.
Penny carefully put her book away and took out the squashed, plastic-wrapped cookie from the bottom of her bag. She held it out to him, barely daring to breathe. Her face hurt from how wide her smile was when he took the cookie, bobbing his head in approval as he munched.
“I should bring you healthier snacks,” Penny murmured, “but I figured you eat enough grass and stuff.”
She tenderly stroked his nose with her fingertips; his dark, intelligent eyes half closed at her touch. She pet his smooth cheek with her other hand, marveling that he was allowing her to be so close and hold his face.
“I’ll try coming back tomorrow,” she told him. “It’s the weekend. I can spend all day here without anyone caring.”
It took several minutes for Penny to tear herself from him. The sky was now fully deep red with no hint of the sun left. She couldn’t risk angering the home further. She couldn’t risk them sending her far from this unicorn colt, especially with the knowledge that he would be all alone.
It was a relatable feeling punctuated by lapses with companions. Unlike her friends–with the expectation of Brooke–this colt also lacked a family to provide some feeling of comfort or safety, same as her.
Penny stared at the ceiling listening to the easy breathing of her roommates. Her eyelids were heavy. She smiled as a name flitted through her mind right before she fell asleep.
---
The leaves were starting to turn. It was cool and sunny, perfect for one of Penny’s favorite Goodwill sweaters (red and orange maple leaves falling across a sage green sweater). She sat on her usual rock in the now browning ivy glade, a book with different horse braids open on her knees. A red, plastic bucket was placed nearby. It had three different types of horse brushes and a large, metal comb for manes and tails.
“Hodge,” Penny called. She repeatedly clicked her tongue until the colt raised his head. “Come over here.”
She stroked his nose as he greeted her. She went to work gently using the metal curry comb and slicker on his slate gray body. He stood still, rotating between munching strands of grass and nodding sleepily.
This had been her ritual every Saturday for the last month and a half. She had slowly purchased the bucket and combs from the meager allowance the home let her have from the stipend they were paid. It took ridiculously long for her to convince the administrators to allow her a library card, citing the homeless and drug addicts that typically hung around the area, but they eventually caved to her pleas. She put on a show of having her nose in an age appropriate chapter book whenever one of the adults was around. She kept her actual borrows–history, folklore, horse and horse related books–under her bed.
Hodge’s mane and tail tuft were beginning to smooth the colder the weather became, but they were still too short for Penny to do much more than fuss over. She was noticing lighter grays and whites starting to appear, some being wavy. He was also growing silky, wavy hair on his lower legs above his hooves, which Penny knew from her books was referred to as feathers.
“I wish I’d gotten to see your mother,” Penny said. “I’ve only seen pictures of old tapestries. I don’t really know what to expect with you.” She searched her backpack for the molasses cookie stashed inside. “I bet you still miss your mother. Even if only a little. …I think I miss mine, and I never really met her. Here you go, handsome boy.”
Penny found her mind wandering often to Keena Fox since meeting Hodge. It may have been the knowledge that his mother was gone, or just because he was a stronger connection to the Realm than random gnomes and fairies. It may have also been that her hopes of Aisling finding her had started to wane considerably, partly because of time and partly because she didn't want to leave Hodge.
She had no one she could ask about her mother now. Even as reluctant as Aisling had been at times, she would still try to answer any questions about Keena.
The group home smelt of overcooked hamburger when she slipped through the front. She tiptoed up the steps but was blocked from the landing by a bulky boy at least four years older. He snatched the bucket from her hand.
“Give it back, Nick!”
He searched through the bucket, and then dumped it before tossing it aside. He grabbed at her backpack, but she was ready and tightened her grip. She was yanked onto the landing, one hand pressed against her face while he kept pulling with the other.
She lost her balance with one good yank. She released the backpack to grab the railing to avoid falling backwards down the stairs.
Nick ripped apart her backpack, dumping out books, pens, and some loose homework worksheets she did on the bus rides. He finally held up her wallet with a wicked smirk, and took out the few dollars tucked inside before throwing it down the stairs.
“You don’t mind, d'you, Penny? You're due for allowance on Monday.”
He knocked into her, causing her to fall another step down, on his way down the stairs.
Penny grabbed the heavy, rubber curry comb and aimed it at the back of Nick’s head. Her short nails bit into it, her arm shaking the longer she stayed frozen, ready to throw. Hot, angry tears fell from her eyes as she lowered her arm, growling out a sigh. She went up and down the stairs, and around the landing, repacking her bucket and bag, completely ignored by the other kids hurrying to and from dinner.
----------------------------
This one is pretty short too. Penny's story starts with early years like this, but then will go beyond Nellie's, so I'm getting to the point where some time skips are happening more.
I thought molasses cookies would be an approriate unicorn snack. Sugar cubes are kind of unusal to have in a house, same with hard peppermints/spearmints, and I figured Penny would gravitate to something sweeter for a mythical animal with unicorns accosiated with sparkles and sugar. (Come to think of it, we only had sugar cubes, peppermints, and spearmints when I had a horse.)
The combs I have in mind for the bucket are two curry combs, one rubber and one metal (metal works better but you always buy the rubber on first, lol, the metal is sharp and throws you off a bit if it's the first time grooming) and a slicker which is also metal. The good ones you can unhook the handle to turn into one long strip of metal with short teeth to clear out all the fur and dirt loosened by the curry.
I also fugured that unicorns would age a little differently than horses since they're not really horses. Hodge's mother was probably in her 70s, so Hodge being 2 is closer to under a year minus all the drawbacks of actually being under a year (needing mother). He's probably slightly stunted too since he's the last foal; it'd take him a bit longer to mature with his mother's lifeforce not anywhere near peak. He probably would've hung around his mother until she died both because she would be too werry to be stern and send him off, and because as he grew he would've offered her some protection.
The Castle of the Sunbird, September 2005
Where the Fault Lies, Part II, 2006
Mioko Del Mar, 2007?
Mioko, Sept 2002
Fire & Steel, 2005
