Up on Fordham Road I saw this horse that had cut loose, walking down the sidewalk. It was cloud-white, grayish, but it had a twisted little horn sticking out of its forehead. I was getting a soda on my break and I watched. I like the way horses move. Smooth and ripply. Like a graceful fat guy, hard to believe their legs can carry their gut, but they do it. People at the bus stop started to rustle and point, and then the other horses went by. Five or six. All with horns. They crossed the street, and cars stopped and knocked into each other. Drivers got out and swore. The gas station owner came out and said, “Anyone got the number for Animal Control?” and nobody did. Most people were laughing. Someone said, “Damn unicorns got loose from up in the country.”
“Or from the racetrack.”
“Those ain’t no unicorns. Unicorns can fly.”
“How they gonna fly with no wings?”
The unicorns kept walking. Like they had somewhere to get to. They swished their tails like a lady who knows she’s fine, wiggling her ass. I wondered if they were boys or girls. They went south and a couple cars followed them.
The news showed them down in Mount Vernon. Eating grass. Stopping and taking a shit. Going through traffic. Kids climbed up on the unicorns’ backs until their moms got them down. One little kid grabbed a horn. “Them horns look sharp,” said my girlfriend.
We went to watch. It was a show, the police and the zoo and the running kids. People had coolers of beer and water, lawn chairs, like they were watching a parade. The unicorns figured out how to walk along with the cars, and they were over in the left lane, loping and sniffing at the air. When they shook their heads everybody screamed.
There was picture in the paper of a baby in a stroller with a unicorn sniffing its stretched-out hand. The baby’s grinning. “Where was its mom and dad?” said my girlfriend.
This teenager climbed up on a unicorn’s back and messed with it, pulled on its horn, and the unicorn kicked him off. Its back legs reared up and the kid flew. The news replayed this in slow motion like they do with the Olympics. I guess the cops shot the unicorn with a tranquilizer, or a stun gun. Then they started shooting the rest of them. When the unicorns went down everybody went apeshit and threw things at the cops. The horses thumped onto parked cars, their legs folded, their horns poked holes in the street. Some fool fired a real gun, and then, well. Nobody died except that kid who got thrown. “Can’t unicorns fly?” said my girlfriend.
“Nah,” I said. “They ain’t got wings.”
White trucks came by, and zoo workers shoveled the unicorns in. They buckled and kicked a little, but mostly just lay there like giant white balloons.
Amy Bergen is currently in the graduate creative writing program at NYU. Before that, she was a science teacher in Ohio. She tutors for 826NYC and America Reads. She lives way, way uptown.
Unicorns are rad.