UNICORN PRAYERS

Feature Writer: Unknown

Feature Title: UNICORN PRAYERS

Link: Sex Stories Club / 25.09.2020 / Unicorn dreams

Unicorn prayers

When she was little, when her mother was still alive and breathing and her father still told her bedtime stories about little princesses and kissed her goodnight, she often thought about unicorns, and at night, in dreams, she tried to conjure them, but they would always appear misshapen or deformed, with a chicken’s foot instead of a hoof, or with the stripes of a zebra or a horn that was jet black instead of silver.

When she was in kindergarten, she tried to draw one using finger-paints once, but the smudges she made were intolerable to her; she felt as if she’d desecrated something pure and holy and it wasn’t until many years later that she would try again.

After her mother passed away, her father was infuriatingly kind and gentle. He treated her as if she was a princess, and she hated him for it just as she hated herself for living after her mother’s death. In response, her father tried to become even more understanding: he let her wear her mother’s earrings, the ones her mother never let her borrow.

When she put the earrings on and looked into the mirror, she realized for the first time in her life how much she looked like her mother. She took a comb and arranged her hair, applied lipstick and eye shadow. Suddenly she gasped and coughed it was her mother’s face staring back at her through the mirror! She knocked the mirror to the floor and it broke into shards, and she ran out of the house and kept running until she collapsed on the sidewalk, her lungs heaving.

In the mornings, she made her father breakfast. Coffee, decaf only, whole wheat toast with margarine, pancakes, whole-wheat cereal, low-fat milk, no bacon and no eggs. Afterwards, she went to school, where she got straight-A’s, and when she got back she did her homework until dinnertime. In the evenings she and her father went out for walks in the park a few blocks away from their home. She wore her mother’s earrings and a touch of her mother’s perfume under her chin, and they held hands while they walked and pretended to be happy.

It wasn’t long until her father kissed her goodnight and she felt herself responding to him; she wrapped her arms around him and opened her mouth, but her father broke away. “You’re getting too old for bedtime stories,” he said, and he never kissed her again. She felt sick, as if she’d defiled something pure and holy.

The next day, she lost one of her mother’s earrings; it fell off sometime during school. She searched everywhere, getting more and more frantic, but she couldn’t find it and finally she burst into tears and the school nurse sent her home.

“What’s wrong?” her father asked. “Is it some boy?” He tried to sound concerned, but she knew that deep down he was jealous over her, and inwardly she laughed with glee. She imagined her mother’s consternation. You never gave me anything, she said silently to her mother’s memory, and now I’m taking him from you.

“It’s something only mother would’ve understood,” she replied. A muscle inside her chest spasmed and squeezed the breath out of her. She started coughing and couldn’t stop.

And then she started having nightmares.

She often woke in the middle of the night gasping for breath someone was choking her! she thought, but there was nobody in the room but her and the shadows of dreams. She closed her eyes and listened: the sound of cicadas, the beating of her heart. Nothing.

One day, when she couldn’t fall asleep again, she tiptoed naked past her father’s room and out into the garden. She lay down and closed her eyes. The sharp twigs and blades of grass scratched her skin; the cool night air, and her fear, made her nipples ache and she pinched and pulled at them and stroked herself between her legs breathing quickly, panting, but she couldn’t let herself come, she had to wait for something she didn’t understand.

Please let me, she whispered in her frustration, please, her fingers moved faster, but no, not yet, not until I’ll do anything, she whispered, I’ll sacrifice myself to you and then she heard it: the whinny of a unicorn! She came, moaning into the night, her terror dissolving.

You will be my only joy, my only pleasure, she promised, and the cool air felt so good so wonderful just to breathe that she laughed and stroked herself again until she came shrieking and crying with relief. She lay on the dew-moist grass until the first light of dawn, then crept back into her room before her father awoke.

She started drawing unicorns everywhere. On her desk. On her math homework. On the inside of her thigh. Her grades plummeted she couldn’t concentrate but her art teacher said her drawings were getting much better.

A few days later, one of her classmates, a boy named Kip, found her mother’s lost earring. “What’s so special about those earrings?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she replied.

“But what’s the big deal? Why were you so upset?”

She tried to speak she wanted to tell him everything: that the earrings belonged to her mother, and if she could she’d bring her mother back to life, even though she hated her, yes, hated her and wished her dead every day of her life; but she could not open her lips. She could not speak. Instead, she kissed him, partly to thank him, and partly to shut him up. He asked if she wanted to take a walk in the park with him after school, and she said yes.

She was tongue-tied the entire time. Something prevented her from talking freely and she stuttered. She knew that Kip felt her discomfort, and she didn’t want to lose him, and so after they found a secluded spot in the park, hidden away behind the evergreen trees and hemlock shrubbery, she kissed him, and then kissed him again fiercely and forced her tongue into his mouth.

“I’ll do anything,” she whispered. He unzipped. She knelt, took him into her mouth and closed her eyes. His buttocks were hard beneath her fingers and he filled her mouth again and again as he thrust into her, groaning and clutching at her hair.

Her mind began to drift away from her body and she imagined she was far away from that park and the boy she barely knew, kneeling on soft green moss in a magical forest, near a castle by the foaming sea that lapped gently against the shores. I sacrifice myself to you, she called out silently into the open woods, you are my only joy, my only pleasure. For the first time in her life, a unicorn appeared for just an instant, a perfectly formed creature that she could never imagine before, and then the entire illusion disappeared.

Her hand reached under her skirt and stroked herself as she sucked the boy. Her pleasure made her moan, and that brought him over the edge. She swallowed, and swallowed again. You will always be part of me, she thought. You are my first and only love. She imagined she heard the unicorn whinny in reply.

Kip never spoke to her again, but he told his everybody about her.

“I’ll do anything,” he mimicked.

Her female friends abandoned her, sometimes one-at-a- time, but usually in pairs or groups. The boys hit on her often, especially the ones who despised her the most, the ones she slept with. She wanted to sacrifice herself, and they all obliged.

She lay naked on the cold basement tiles and masturbated while James watched, incredulous, and then he couldn’t wait any longer and he pushed his jeans down and entered her. She cried out as her hymen tore, bit her lip, but her eyes shone. I sacrifice myself to you, she whispered. James heard her and he started thrusting wildly and mashed his mouth against hers. He came, spurting into her oh, my love, my love, she repeated, still crying, trembling from the enormity of what she’d done.

The stress took its toll. She was always tired and she hardly slept or ate. “You’ve lost almost twenty pounds,” the nutritionist said in alarm. Her father was angry and afraid he was losing her, and that pleased her, but the thought made her cough uncontrollably.

Her drawings improved rapidly. It was as if everything that was good and strong within her fled out through her fingertips and into her drawings.

Her health and her relationships deteriorated.

“My only pleasure, my only joy,” she whispered into the night. Paul held her wrists down, but she rolled her hips and used him for her own pleasure, arched her back and scraped her nipples against his chest. He bit the skin on her neck until she gasped and writhed, and came.

“There’s real passion in your drawings,” her art teacher said. She coughed, blushed, but didn’t say why: she masturbated while drawing.

On the nights she was alone, she lay on her stomach on top of her quilted bed covers and drew on her sketch pad the unicorns and the serpents, the dragons and the gryphons, the severed head of Medusa that haunted her dreams and now her days as well. She always drew the head of Medusa without the eyes; she could never draw the eyes her hand trembled and cramped whenever she tried, and she left the eye sockets blank but the thin red lips excited her and angered her at the same time.

It seemed to her that those lips mocked her, dared her to be sexual and seductive. She squeezed her legs together with each frenzied stroke of her pencil, waited until the drawing was finished, then bit her pillow and orgasmed silently so her father couldn’t hear her come, again and again, drawing after drawing, late into the night until she fell unconscious from exhaustion. And then one day she disappeared nobody knew where and after a long time the police gave up, though her father kept trying.

The day she left, an intricate mural was discovered on the wall of the boy’s restroom. Someone had broken in the previous night and painted a unicorn, resting its head on the lap of a pregnant young woman. The unicorn was beautifully drawn with a shining silver horn, a pure-white mane, wise eyes and gentle hooves. But the young woman’s face was taut and etched with lines and her lips were pressed together as if to hold back some unspoken anguish; her hair was in tangles and one of her earrings lay on the ground.

The mural remains there to this day, untouched by graffiti. The boys and men still look at it in wonder and awe.

THE END