Julia, We Need To Talk About The Unicorn

My unicorn was too anxious to leave the bedroom, and the vacuum cleaner was only making it worse. Every time I pushed the vacuum in his direction he would rear up onto his back hooves. There were less stained glass animals back here than in the rest of the apartment, but the unicorn had shuffled around and knocked his horn against the few owls that still dangled from the ceiling. They were all arcing on their taut chains, and brown bird-shaped stains scurried along the walls. He reared up so high that his horn punched into the ceiling, which was painted in mashed potato swirls that he had peppered with holes, so I gave up cleaning. I clicked the vacuum cleaner off and caught an owl as it swung near my head. Veins of metal branched through the beer-colored glass. I pulled my hands back slowly to let the owl sway gently in the air. I asked the unicorn, “You happy now?”

He shook his head and snorted. I asked him, “You want to go see Julia?”

He shook his head and snorted and turned into the corner so that I was facing his behind. “Whatever,” I picked up the coke can box from the bed. The only thing inside it were pale blue shards of glass and the metal skeleton of a blue jay the unicorn had impaled. I wore sneakers inside the apartment now because I never felt like I could vacuum up every grain of glass. Julia was barefoot in pajamas, but she didn’t leave the couch much.

The unicorn was technically Julia’s. I thought maybe I’d get Julia to come see the unicorn even if the unicorn wasn’t entirely real. I think it’s important to treat fake things right if they have fake emotions.

In the kitchen I stooped beneath the canopy of glass birds. There were robins, cardinals, and a finch halfway down the beak of a chandelier-sized heron. They refracted the light into a perpetual sunset haze of color. I couldn’t empty out the box because the trashcan had bubbled up and overflowed with crumpled coke cans and wadded tissues. I just set it on top of the pyramid of empty boxes near the trash. There were empty whiskey bottles on the counter beside Julia’s projector. It was small as far as projectors went, but even still we shouldn’t have been able to afford it. Julia found it looking for used dishes downtown. The thing was a homemade deal built inside a wine bottle, and somebody at the thrift store had mislabeled it. I picked it up and watched the light flicker in the bottom of the bottle. It looked like a candle burning, but it never burned down.

If we ever got a bigger projector, then we could take the Unicorn for walks. At the last gala we went to for Julia’s job, there was a projector the size of barn that roared like a bonfire. The wine bottle projector was only strong enough to project the unicorn within our little apartment. The projector could could also crowd the rooms with glass animals, and maybe a little more, but that’s it. Some of the glass animals were real; those were gifts from Julia’s grandmother. Julia had been projecting a lot more of them since the last gala.

I heard a knock and walked into the living room. “It’s open, dude,” Julia mumbled from the couch.

The pizza dude opened the door and Julia said, “Just put it on his antlers.”

The pizza dude was held at bay by a massive, motionless deer. He poked at a cardboard box that was already perched in the steel spikes that branched up from the deer’s head, “Mam, there’s already a pizza in his antlers.”

The deer was so broad, and his antlers spiked out like a thorn bush so that there really wasn’t a way to get into the apartment without crawling between his legs. The pizza guy squatted down, and appeared to be considering it. Julia waved her hand in a little gesture, but never took her eyes off the television, “Dude, just put the old box on the floor or something. Nevermind. Hey Brodie, would you bring that over.”

“I got you, Jules,” I walked over to the pizza guy who did extend the pizza box to me, but did so in a deeply awkward silence that only seemed to lift when he shut the door. I carried the pizza and the projector over to the coffee table. Julia was curled up in the nook between the couch’s arm and the elephant that dominated the couch. The elephant draped Julia in grey twilight and a black web of shadows. I squeezed in on the other side of the elephant, “did I miss the episode where the dwarf talks in reverse?”

Julia flicked open the box and pulled out a slice of pizza, “Yeah, I’m on season three.”

The elephant’s trunk was aimed straight at the television. When I looked at Julia through the elephant it made me feel like she was in an aquarium, so I looked at the television too. There were coke cans and paper plates with pizza crusts on the floor, so I put my sneakers up on the table. Julia said, “I wish I could afford projectors like we had at the lab. Little efficient ones the size of a pack of cigarettes. You could keep one in your bag, but it would cover a whole block.”

I said, “The unicorn is stressed out.”

Julia repeated it as a question, “The unicorn is stressed out?”

I said, “I found birthday cakes in the bedroom. You didn’t project any birthday cakes did you?”

Julia asked, “Why would I project a birthday cake?”

I shrugged, “I think he poops birthday cakes. He hasn’t done that before though. I think he’s stress pooping. Also he’s stabbing holes in the ceiling. Also he smashed the last blue jay.”

“Really? My grandmother made that one. Unicorns,” Julia took a bite of pizza.

“Are you going to project a replacement bird?” I asked her.

We both watched the television, but not in silence. Kyle MacLachlan was onscreen laughing and flirting with a waitress. I was still thinking about the last gala. Julia was a researcher, but her job had felt like mostly politics and bureaucracy to me. For the gala, she had put on a dress that I thought looked like a tablecloth, and she had demanded that I wear my leather shoes, which seemed silly because the projector at the gala had filled the air with fireflies and lit almost everyone up like photoshopped supermodels anyway. Julia had gotten irritated with me because I kept turning into whatever popped into my mind like a caped superhero when I told a good joke or a menacing scarecrow when Julia’s coworkers got passive aggressive.

“Julia,” I said.

“Yeah, Brodie?”

I slid all the way onto the coffee table and limboed under the elephant’s trunk. I rotated to face Julia, but she watched the television over my shoulder. I picked the projector up and held it between us.

“Put it down,” she patted the air between us.

“Does this make you happy? Like, does it still make you happy?” I asked her.

She frowned, but she didn’t look at me. There was a single button on the projector where a cork would be. I pointed it at Julia, “I think you should turn it off. Julia, I miss your freckles. And the way you snort when you laugh too hard. This thing makes you laugh like a laugh track. It sounds sarcastic every time you laugh now.”

She smiled, but her eyes were sad, “I sound like a pig when I laugh.”

I shook my head, “You think I only fell for you because I saw you at the lab. Because the first time I saw you it was that fake model face the projectors give you. Julia, you want to look like that. I like your freckles. You remember that night at the gala when I shut the projector down because you said everybody there were bitches? And then we got wasted until they kicked us out? I’m going to love you even if we’re so poor we never go near another projector.”

Julia nodded, “I didn’t even tell you I got fired; I just said that they were bitches. Then you took a freaking fire axe to their projector. You were just a black shape against the projector’s glow. A solid ink Ambrose bordered in fire, then the inky Zeus I know you can be, then like a big scarecrow or something. It was like a plague. Everyone started growing jowels and wrinkles. Their pores opened up and their veins turned blue. We laughed until we cried on the way home, until I crashed our car. You’re lucky to be alive. Brodie, I just fuck everything up. I just do and I’m so sorry.”

I said, “Wait, you got fired? Julia I don’t remember what happened to the car, but you can get back up. You just gotta take that first step. Right now it probably seems hard because the floor is obscured by pizza crusts and coke cans, but I’ll be here for you.”

Julia was still smiling, but her eyes trembled when she looked into mine, “Brodie I’m so god damn sorry,” and she pushed the button.

The wine bottle went dark. The television faded to black. The dark webs of metal that held the glass animals together began to soften. The antlers thrusting off the deer slumped down into limp nets hanging from his head. His legs grew wobbly and he seemed collapse. His chin rested on the floor and his soft antlers melted into a puddle around him.

The elephant rested his trunk against his geodesic belly and slouched forward. Then he fell face first against the table and it disfigured him into abstract geometries. The panels of his stomach began to slip out and thud onto the floor. It sounded like dishes were raining in the kitchen. There was a splintering crash, and I was certain the heron had dove through the kitchen table.

The television began to melt. It pooled thick like chocolate and drizzled down to cover the furniture before it drained away into the carpet. All that was left of the elephant were brittle panes of glass that crumbled to sand when Julia picked them up. The unicorn stormed into the living room neighing, and Julia stretched a hand out to touch him, but her fingers ran through white mist that dispersed around her.

When Julia took the projector from me the dark bottle quivered in her shaking hands. I said, “It’s gonna be alright, Jules. Okay,” and I had more to say, but my voice caught in my throat.

Julia said, “I’m sorry, Brodie. It just got so hard without you. I’m so fucking sorry.”

I tried to speak, but the only things that came out were silent puffs of fog like breath on a winter morning. I watched the impossible, little clouds drift away from my mouth and waved my fingers through the mist. While the vapor trailed around my fingertips I noticed how faint and pale my skin was. I reached out a ghostly hand to Julia and she tried to grab it, but white smoke just curled through her clenched fingers.