Susie’s Unicorn
By: Chris Drew
Tags: Short Story, Colors, Healing, Magical Realism, Flash Fiction

Photo by Yoni Kozminsi on Unsplash

Shortly after my brother died, I pulled a chair over to the kitchen counter, climbed up on it, and grabbed a jar of Sue Bee honey from the cupboard. My legs shook from standing on my tiptoes while holding the glass jar, but I made it down a-okay.

That’s what he called me until his last day on earth, Sue Bee, although sometimes he also called me Susie Q, especially when he was tickling me to death. He got to name me because Dad wanted to name me Ariel and Mom said it sounded like a tv antenna.

Mom mostly kept to her room after Kenny died, and I didn’t want to bother her, so I carried the jar of honey through the living room, careful not to slam the screen door behind me. I sat in the front yard, full of ugly dead grass, which poked the backs of my legs and felt like scratchy pins and needles running up my calves, all the way to the bottom of my shorts.

He used to lie in our dead grass and let insects crawl on him, so I decided to do the same. I wanted to feel them tickle my skin and pretend he wasn’t dead. The honey felt soft and gooey as I spread it up my legs, over my stomach and arms, and the smell of sweet clover overpowered my senses when I poured the rest over the top of my head.

It didn’t take long to attract the bees, bugs, and flies, and I fell asleep luxuriating in the hot Fresno summer, dreaming of my beloved Kenny. I don’t know whether it was Mom or Dad who found me covered with red ants. I only know I woke up in excruciating pain in a hospital bed. I didn’t know I’d fallen asleep on an ant hill.

A bit at a time, I came back from that dark place of tunnel-visioned healing, but Mom and Dad didn’t weather the pain. At least not together. I stayed with Mom, her quiet, obedient daughter, never far from her reach, lost in a world without color. Yellow, orange and red departed with Kenny. Blue, green and purple went with my father, who left to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.

I got to keep the color of grass burnt from the draining heat of desert, which resembled the tumbleweeds I loved to chase whenever they blew into town.

My relentless colorless world became filled with green when Mom was passed over for a promotion by her long-time boss for the new guy. We left for Oregon, where I learned to identify the myriad colors of green in the emerald firs that inhabit the northwest. Out of them all — forest, fern, and pine — my favorite was octarine. I found it one day while chasing a rainbow, after a rainstorm when the sun shone particularly bright. Mom trusted me to run off alone because we were backed up against the woods, where I could climb trees and explore nature without the threat of fire ants.

I found the blue of the rainbow that day in a creek that ran through our property. I enjoyed dipping my feet in the cool wetness and my brother would have loved catching the crawdads that lived in Johnson Creek. Purple grew closer to the ground, bellflowers and lavender, which smelled good, too. They seemed exotic to me, and I imagined Dad off on some island painting lush gardens in his bold hues of breen and glue. That’s how Mom had always described his artwork because she said he was colorblind.

The other colors of the rainbow were more difficult to find. I thought if I saw the reds, golds and pumpkins of the world again, I’d forget about my Kenny.

One day as I sat in a field, he came to visit with a handful of wildflowers.

“Make me a daisy chain, like you used to, Susie Q, and I’ll give you a present.”

After I placed it around his neck, he stuck a buttercup under his chin and showed me the color of sunglow. We chuckled and giggled for at least an hour, blowing dandelion spores into the wind. Then he said he had to go.

I sat in an old oak and watched him fly away on Pegasus. At least I thought it was Pegasus. We’d been studying Greek mythology in school, so when I saw my brother gather the gilded reins of the white winged stallion, I knew when I looked towards the constellations that night, his bright glory would shine back the infinite colors of the galaxy which I’d been terrified to see.

And so it was the first Halloween and Thanksgiving without Kenny that I completely enjoyed, with the full spectrum of autumn around me. As I traipsed through the fallen leaves, looking for the colors of Christmas red to share with my dad, who had promised to visit, I found a horn, unlike a horn of plenty. That’s when I realized my brother had flown away on the last unicorn and left the magic of the coiled alicorn with me for safe keeping until we met again.