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Description
I always loved the way the glass captured the light, splashing an array of prisms across the wooden floor. Ever since I was a baby, I would stare, captivated, at the figurine for hours. In fact, it was the only reason I liked visiting my grandparents' house. The house somehow managed to be drafty and stuffy all at once, like an old attic clogged with cobwebs and ancient dust. My grandmother always kept the blinds drawn, explaining that light would fade the upholstery on her couch. But with the layers of dust, you could hardly make out the green and gold curls and spirals haphazardly stitched into the mud red background.

I hated the darkness and dreariness of the house. Occasionally I would bring my grandfather to my side and he would convince my grandmother to let some of the light in. "Only in the afternoon, when the sun isn't so strong," she conceded. Even then, she only pulled the blinds on one of the windows. But she always chose the right window, the one that cast the prisms from the glass. And I would sit there on the dusty wooden floor, not caring that when I stood I would leave a print of my stitched jeans pockets. The impression would be covered with a fresh rug of fine dust within the week.

You couldn't admire the figurine without the sun shining through the windows. Artificial light failed to cast the prisms and give the glass the magical glow that made it so special. Even in the darkness, it seemed to gleam with an eerie ghostly sheen, somehow managing to be the brightest object in the room. It was also the only object my grandmother ever bothered to dust. I remember she would spend hours dusting it with a soft cloth, careful to remove any trace of grey dust that might mar its gleam. Sometimes I thought she kept the house dark and suffocating just so the unicorn would shine even more. My mother dismissed this idea, claiming her mother was just a senile old woman who had long forgotten the good habits of housekeeping.

Once a month my mother would try to clean her parents' house. My grandfather always took off in his truck to the lake, boat in tow, for a day of fishing when that happened. My grandmother protested profusely whenever my mother barged in, rags, mops, and Lysol in hand. But it was my mother who always won. So it had been ever since she was a child. My mother was a stubborn and obsessive woman. She fixated on the most unimportant tasks as though they were worthy of the utmost urgent action. She wasn't always like that, though. She used to be carefree and happy. Her laugh was so magical and my father told me that it always helped our flowers grow in spring. Why else were ours always the most beautiful and vibrant in the neighborhood?

Then, when I was six, my father disappeared. One night he just never came home from the university, where he was tenured as a professor of archeology. He had traveled all over the world and uncovered some wonderful treasures that had been lost in time. Sometimes museums or universities would deem his finds insignificant or unimportant, so he would bring those treasures home to us. He and my mother would fuss over where to display the most recent tablet, ancient weapon, or unreadable book. They always found a special place for each item. I loved to adventure around the house, searching for the lost key to some mysterious kingdom. My father pretended to be the bad guy—the selfish museum curator, the pretentious personal collector, or the ancient guard of some magical ruin. But I always found my treasure, and my father would tell me the history behind it.

The games stopped when he disappeared. My mom locked all of his treasured finds in a trunk that she shoved to the back of the storage room in the basement. She carefully folded his clothes and put them away in his drawers, as though she had just done his laundry and was waiting for him to come home from work. She put the key in the top drawer of his dresser. She never took it out. His suits remained hanging on his side of the closet. Occasionally I would walk in to see her flipping the on/off switch on his tie rack as she dazedly watched them rotate, tears welling in her eyes.

That's also when she started taking me to my grandparents' house every weekend. I never really knew what she did at home alone, but I suspect she stayed in bed, cuddling up to his pillow. She also made weekly calls to the police station and broke into tears when Officer Clark told her that they still didn't have any leads. My father had just disappeared.

The investigation that followed his disappearance failed to turn up any clues as to what might have happened. The officers told us that his office was locked and nothing appeared out of place. My father was a very orderly and particular man. It would have been quite obvious if anything had been disturbed or gone missing. His car was still in the university parking lot, also locked. His briefcase was in the trunk, filled with research articles, manuscripts, and students' tests. They suspected that he had decided to go for a walk around campus that night. It was early spring, and the weather was just beginning to warm up. He loved those evenings. And he loved the campus. His students adored him and all called him Indy, for Indiana Jones. My father was nothing like Indiana Jones though. He was an academic through and through. Sure, he went on "treasure hunts," but they were never as exciting as the kind Indiana Jones took off on. He was also well liked by his colleagues around the world. They all respected him. He was one of the best at his job.

When he disappeared, I didn't really know how to react. I don't think I even really knew what was going on. I felt his absence, but I was six years old and had not yet developed an understanding for these kinds of things. For a few months I believed my mother's story that he had gone off suddenly in search of some historic artifact and would be back as soon as he found what he was looking for. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone for a few weeks at a time, but never months. I don't remember him ever being gone for more than a month. But I believed my mother's story anyway. He had left on sudden trips before. But the lack of communication and my mother's tears finally convinced me of her lies and I knew he wasn't coming back. I wasn't angry with her though. I know she was just trying to convince herself that he would be home soon.

As the years passed, I continued to go to my grandparents' house every weekend. But the calls to the police station began to decrease in their frequency. I noticed that my mother's eyes weren't always red and puffy when she picked me up on Sunday evenings. By the time I was eleven, the searching stopped all together. His clothes, the key, and the trunk remained in place. Even though she had begun to heal, she still couldn't bring herself to face the fact that he was gone for good. She still clung to some hope that he would return home one day.

When I was thirteen, my grandfather passed away and my grandmother moved in with us. My grandmother left most of their belongings at their house except for a few of her personal treasures and my grandfather's butterfly collection, which she insisted my mother hang up in the kitchen. Strangely, I was the one who rescued the unicorn. I set it on the bookshelf in my room and rearranged all of my furniture so I could position it in the best place to catch the light. My room was always showered in prisms. At night, the unicorn glowed with its ghostly light, which I found rather comforting. Ever since my father's disappearance, I had been plagued with nightmares of the worst sort. The first night I spent with the unicorn watching over me, they disappeared.

On nights when I couldn't sleep, I would rest my eyes on the unicorn's graceful curves. My eyes traced the spirals of the horn that finished in a definite point. I would try to solve the maze of curls in its mane and tail. In my mind, I would imagine the unicorn dancing across my shelves, prancing proudly among my books pictures.

I had never been a big collector. I preferred books to toys. But after I rescued the unicorn, I started collecting other figurines: dragons, gryphons, sphinxes, Pegasus, unicorns, and other fantastical creatures. Eventually I'd acquired such a collection that I could spend hours polishing and rearranging them. But none were so special as the glass unicorn. The way he shone in the darkness was unlike any other glass figurine. When I imagined him dancing, the way he glimmered seemed almost too real. It wasn't long before I realized that there was more to this figure than I had imagined.

Like my father, I loved reading about history, especially histories about the lost and ancient worlds. I started focusing on folklore about unicorns, searching earnestly for any mention of them. I had been familiar with the medieval tales of the unicorn and the maiden for as long as I can remember. But something about the way this glass unicorn gleamed created in me an unshakeable belief that there was more to these beasts than virgins and questionable sightings across the globe.

My research took me to all of the libraries in the city. I read through all of my father's journals and essays, which I found in his desk drawers, but his focus always rested more in the realms of lost knowledge and information, not so much magical beasts. Occasionally I would come across some mention of paintings of unicorns found in an ancient temple somewhere in South America or Asia or a description in an ancient manuscript, but never anything more substantial.

I became so devoted to my research that I became a self-declared recluse. When I entered high school, my mother tried to put all of the books, articles, and drawings that I had collected over the past couple of years away. She claimed that I needed to make friends, go out on dates, go to dances, be social. I shouldn't spend all of my time at the library or in my room with my head buried in my assortment of books. After a year of our relentless arguing where neither of us refused to back down, she realized that she'd passed her stubbornness on to me and relented. My grandmother comforted her by telling her that at least it was research I was holed up doing, not drugs. My mother agreed with an eye-roll.

Sometimes I tried to engage my mother in the research by asking her about my father's trips. I hoped she might remember some details that I might have forgotten over the years, or that I was too young to even remember in the first place. She provided a list of all the places he had been and all of the items he had uncovered over the years. I was familiar with most of the places and treasures on the list, but there were some from the years before I was born that caught my attention. She refused to offer me any more help, despite my pestering.

The list my mother provided seemed promising at first, but ultimately led to more dead ends. I revisited some of his more recent research, thinking maybe I had missed something when I first began my research. I even went back to my grandparents' old house where I knew my grandmother had left some of his old research papers. I don't know why I thought outdated essays written by a lepidopterist would be helpful. Somewhere in my mind I made the connection between butterflies and unicorns—probably from some childhood fairytale—but I had found nothing so far, so I figured it was worth the chance.

My grandparents' house had been set to be demolished, but my grandmother had forgotten to sign the papers. So the ramshackle one-story still stood, teetering on its foundation. Strangely, the place didn't seem any dustier or more suffocating than it had when my grandparents had lived there. I fumbled my way through the darkness to my grandfather's chest, where my grandfather had stored all of his old research. He had once been renowned in his field, having been at the forefront of lepidopterology research in his day. I dragged the chest into the living room where I raised the blinds to let the light in. Taking my old position by the window, I lowered myself to the floor.

Most of his research concerned North American butterflies and their migration patterns. He had traveled to China once on a grant he received from the university where he earned his Ph.D., and once to Japan, following some crazy idea about migration and breeding habits that no honorable institution wanted to fund. I smiled at the memory of the story he always told about the garden in Japan. The butterflies were the most vibrantly colored of any he had ever seen. They fluttered like fairies while their wings glistened like gemstones in the sun. These butterflies, he had said, were the most beautiful and wondrous to take wing. They were so majestic that even he, an avid collector of butterfly specimens, couldn't bring himself to put them under pin and class.

As I sifted through the contents of the chest, I found, buried beneath all of the papers and sketches, the journal he had kept while in Japan. I let out a small gasp as I brushed the thin film of dust off the book's leather cover. It was engraved with a Kirin. The gold leaf had flaked away over the years, but the scales of the Kirin still gleamed with the dim sheen of golden sparkle. There were also butterflies, once an array of colors, dancing around the beast. Carefully, I lifted the cover. I found my grandfather's full name, along with the date of his travels, inscribed on the first page.

As I perused the first pages of the journal, I began coughing. The dust was beginning to affect me. I gently closed the book and set it aside. I piled the rest of my grandfather's research into the chest and returned it to its place in the master bedroom. Walking back to retrieve the book and draw the blinds, I smiled as I saw the imprint of my jean's pockets in the dust. I walked over to the shelf where the unicorn once stood to survey his kingdom, rearing to challenge any who dared to trespass. Dust had filled in the spaces were other objects photos had once rested, but the void where the unicorn used to rest was as clean as though someone had carefully dusted and polished three mahogany spots on the shelf.

Never quick to dismiss something magical or miraculous, this was one phenomenon I could not puzzle out. I continued to mull over what I had seen as I walked home, but I could arrive at no explanation.

I set the journal on the small table next to my bed and walked over to the glass unicorn. I cleared all of the figurines and books off the shelf, stacking the books on the floor and arranging the figurines on my dresser. I held the unicorn up to the light, letting the rainbows cascade across my face. I surveyed my room and placed him carefully on the wide window ledge between the lavender I was growing. He would be safe there.

My mom trusted me to keep my room clean, so I knew I wouldn't have to worry about her interfering with my little experiment. The shelf would remain undusted for a month. I was curious to see if the dust failed to collect in the spots where the unicorn's hind hooves and tail rested on the dark wood.

Keeping myself from checking on the shelf daily proved to be a challenge. So I started spending time outside, hiking in the woods near our house bringing treats to the horses that lived on the other side. I start spending whole days sitting on the fence watching the horses interact with each other, studying their movements, and sketching them. I checked out some books on equine anatomy at the library. As I studied, I wondered how the Kirin's anatomy would differ from that of the horses I so admired out in the field.

The journal remained where I had set it on my bedside table. As intrigued as I was with the book and the contents it might hold, I felt no rush to read it through. I was enjoying my preoccupation with the horses while I let the glass unicorn rest in the scent of lavender.

As I had hoped, the distraction of hiking and studying the horses kept my mind off the shelf. In some ways, I was worried about what I might find at that shelf. I was worried that the unicorn's place would be covered in dust and that what I had seen at my grandparents' house was just some fluke or trick of the shadows. I was even more worried, however, that there would be no dust.

Six weeks passed and I was about to start my second week of high school. Finally, I allowed myself to look at the shelf. I instinctively cringed when I saw the thick coat of dust that had gathered. I focused on where the glass unicorn had stood. Three dark spots stood out in stark contrast to the pale dust. My breath caught in my lungs as I stared. I could explain away this occurrence once as a trick of the light and shadows, but how could I find an explanation for this twice?

Slowly I turned my head to look at the glass unicorn rearing majestically on the window ledge. He gleamed brightly in the late afternoon sun, sending an array of color across my bedroom floor. I focused my attention on his face. His glassy eye glimmered and twinkled, as though he was winking at me.

………………

Description
I always loved the way the glass captured the light, splashing an array of prisms across the wooden floor. Ever since I was a baby, I would stare, captivated, at the figurine for hours. In fact, it was the only reason I liked visiting my grandparents' house. The house somehow managed to be drafty and stuffy all at once, like an old attic clogged with cobwebs and ancient dust. My grandmother always kept the blinds drawn, explaining that light would fade the upholstery on her couch. But with the layers of dust, you could hardly make out the green and gold curls and spirals haphazardly stitched into the mud red background.

I hated the darkness and dreariness of the house. Occasionally I would bring my grandfather to my side and he would convince my grandmother to let some of the light in. "Only in the afternoon, when the sun isn't so strong," she conceded. Even then, she only pulled the blinds on one of the windows. But she always chose the right window, the one that cast the prisms from the glass. And I would sit there on the dusty wooden floor, not caring that when I stood I would leave a print of my stitched jeans pockets. The impression would be covered with a fresh rug of fine dust within the week.

You couldn't admire the figurine without the sun shining through the windows. Artificial light failed to cast the prisms and give the glass the magical glow that made it so special. Even in the darkness, it seemed to gleam with an eerie ghostly sheen, somehow managing to be the brightest object in the room. It was also the only object my grandmother ever bothered to dust. I remember she would spend hours dusting it with a soft cloth, careful to remove any trace of grey dust that might mar its gleam. Sometimes I thought she kept the house dark and suffocating just so the unicorn would shine even more. My mother dismissed this idea, claiming her mother was just a senile old woman who had long forgotten the good habits of housekeeping.

Once a month my mother would try to clean her parents' house. My grandfather always took off in his truck to the lake, boat in tow, for a day of fishing when that happened. My grandmother protested profusely whenever my mother barged in, rags, mops, and Lysol in hand. But it was my mother who always won. So it had been ever since she was a child. My mother was a stubborn and obsessive woman. She fixated on the most unimportant tasks as though they were worthy of the utmost urgent action. She wasn't always like that, though. She used to be carefree and happy. Her laugh was so magical and my father told me that it always helped our flowers grow in spring. Why else were ours always the most beautiful and vibrant in the neighborhood?

Then, when I was six, my father disappeared. One night he just never came home from the university, where he was tenured as a professor of archeology. He had traveled all over the world and uncovered some wonderful treasures that had been lost in time. Sometimes museums or universities would deem his finds insignificant or unimportant, so he would bring those treasures home to us. He and my mother would fuss over where to display the most recent tablet, ancient weapon, or unreadable book. They always found a special place for each item. I loved to adventure around the house, searching for the lost key to some mysterious kingdom. My father pretended to be the bad guy—the selfish museum curator, the pretentious personal collector, or the ancient guard of some magical ruin. But I always found my treasure, and my father would tell me the history behind it.

The games stopped when he disappeared. My mom locked all of his treasured finds in a trunk that she shoved to the back of the storage room in the basement. She carefully folded his clothes and put them away in his drawers, as though she had just done his laundry and was waiting for him to come home from work. She put the key in the top drawer of his dresser. She never took it out. His suits remained hanging on his side of the closet. Occasionally I would walk in to see her flipping the on/off switch on his tie rack as she dazedly watched them rotate, tears welling in her eyes.

That's also when she started taking me to my grandparents' house every weekend. I never really knew what she did at home alone, but I suspect she stayed in bed, cuddling up to his pillow. She also made weekly calls to the police station and broke into tears when Officer Clark told her that they still didn't have any leads. My father had just disappeared.

The investigation that followed his disappearance failed to turn up any clues as to what might have happened. The officers told us that his office was locked and nothing appeared out of place. My father was a very orderly and particular man. It would have been quite obvious if anything had been disturbed or gone missing. His car was still in the university parking lot, also locked. His briefcase was in the trunk, filled with research articles, manuscripts, and students' tests. They suspected that he had decided to go for a walk around campus that night. It was early spring, and the weather was just beginning to warm up. He loved those evenings. And he loved the campus. His students adored him and all called him Indy, for Indiana Jones. My father was nothing like Indiana Jones though. He was an academic through and through. Sure, he went on "treasure hunts," but they were never as exciting as the kind Indiana Jones took off on. He was also well liked by his colleagues around the world. They all respected him. He was one of the best at his job.

When he disappeared, I didn't really know how to react. I don't think I even really knew what was going on. I felt his absence, but I was six years old and had not yet developed an understanding for these kinds of things. For a few months I believed my mother's story that he had gone off suddenly in search of some historic artifact and would be back as soon as he found what he was looking for. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone for a few weeks at a time, but never months. I don't remember him ever being gone for more than a month. But I believed my mother's story anyway. He had left on sudden trips before. But the lack of communication and my mother's tears finally convinced me of her lies and I knew he wasn't coming back. I wasn't angry with her though. I know she was just trying to convince herself that he would be home soon.

As the years passed, I continued to go to my grandparents' house every weekend. But the calls to the police station began to decrease in their frequency. I noticed that my mother's eyes weren't always red and puffy when she picked me up on Sunday evenings. By the time I was eleven, the searching stopped all together. His clothes, the key, and the trunk remained in place. Even though she had begun to heal, she still couldn't bring herself to face the fact that he was gone for good. She still clung to some hope that he would return home one day.

When I was thirteen, my grandfather passed away and my grandmother moved in with us. My grandmother left most of their belongings at their house except for a few of her personal treasures and my grandfather's butterfly collection, which she insisted my mother hang up in the kitchen. Strangely, I was the one who rescued the unicorn. I set it on the bookshelf in my room and rearranged all of my furniture so I could position it in the best place to catch the light. My room was always showered in prisms. At night, the unicorn glowed with its ghostly light, which I found rather comforting. Ever since my father's disappearance, I had been plagued with nightmares of the worst sort. The first night I spent with the unicorn watching over me, they disappeared.

On nights when I couldn't sleep, I would rest my eyes on the unicorn's graceful curves. My eyes traced the spirals of the horn that finished in a definite point. I would try to solve the maze of curls in its mane and tail. In my mind, I would imagine the unicorn dancing across my shelves, prancing proudly among my books pictures.

I had never been a big collector. I preferred books to toys. But after I rescued the unicorn, I started collecting other figurines: dragons, gryphons, sphinxes, Pegasus, unicorns, and other fantastical creatures. Eventually I'd acquired such a collection that I could spend hours polishing and rearranging them. But none were so special as the glass unicorn. The way he shone in the darkness was unlike any other glass figurine. When I imagined him dancing, the way he glimmered seemed almost too real. It wasn't long before I realized that there was more to this figure than I had imagined.

Like my father, I loved reading about history, especially histories about the lost and ancient worlds. I started focusing on folklore about unicorns, searching earnestly for any mention of them. I had been familiar with the medieval tales of the unicorn and the maiden for as long as I can remember. But something about the way this glass unicorn gleamed created in me an unshakeable belief that there was more to these beasts than virgins and questionable sightings across the globe.

My research took me to all of the libraries in the city. I read through all of my father's journals and essays, which I found in his desk drawers, but his focus always rested more in the realms of lost knowledge and information, not so much magical beasts. Occasionally I would come across some mention of paintings of unicorns found in an ancient temple somewhere in South America or Asia or a description in an ancient manuscript, but never anything more substantial.

I became so devoted to my research that I became a self-declared recluse. When I entered high school, my mother tried to put all of the books, articles, and drawings that I had collected over the past couple of years away. She claimed that I needed to make friends, go out on dates, go to dances, be social. I shouldn't spend all of my time at the library or in my room with my head buried in my assortment of books. After a year of our relentless arguing where neither of us refused to back down, she realized that she'd passed her stubbornness on to me and relented. My grandmother comforted her by telling her that at least it was research I was holed up doing, not drugs. My mother agreed with an eye-roll.

Sometimes I tried to engage my mother in the research by asking her about my father's trips. I hoped she might remember some details that I might have forgotten over the years, or that I was too young to even remember in the first place. She provided a list of all the places he had been and all of the items he had uncovered over the years. I was familiar with most of the places and treasures on the list, but there were some from the years before I was born that caught my attention. She refused to offer me any more help, despite my pestering.

The list my mother provided seemed promising at first, but ultimately led to more dead ends. I revisited some of his more recent research, thinking maybe I had missed something when I first began my research. I even went back to my grandparents' old house where I knew my grandmother had left some of his old research papers. I don't know why I thought outdated essays written by a lepidopterist would be helpful. Somewhere in my mind I made the connection between butterflies and unicorns—probably from some childhood fairytale—but I had found nothing so far, so I figured it was worth the chance.

My grandparents' house had been set to be demolished, but my grandmother had forgotten to sign the papers. So the ramshackle one-story still stood, teetering on its foundation. Strangely, the place didn't seem any dustier or more suffocating than it had when my grandparents had lived there. I fumbled my way through the darkness to my grandfather's chest, where my grandfather had stored all of his old research. He had once been renowned in his field, having been at the forefront of lepidopterology research in his day. I dragged the chest into the living room where I raised the blinds to let the light in. Taking my old position by the window, I lowered myself to the floor.

Most of his research concerned North American butterflies and their migration patterns. He had traveled to China once on a grant he received from the university where he earned his Ph.D., and once to Japan, following some crazy idea about migration and breeding habits that no honorable institution wanted to fund. I smiled at the memory of the story he always told about the garden in Japan. The butterflies were the most vibrantly colored of any he had ever seen. They fluttered like fairies while their wings glistened like gemstones in the sun. These butterflies, he had said, were the most beautiful and wondrous to take wing. They were so majestic that even he, an avid collector of butterfly specimens, couldn't bring himself to put them under pin and class.

As I sifted through the contents of the chest, I found, buried beneath all of the papers and sketches, the journal he had kept while in Japan. I let out a small gasp as I brushed the thin film of dust off the book's leather cover. It was engraved with a Kirin. The gold leaf had flaked away over the years, but the scales of the Kirin still gleamed with the dim sheen of golden sparkle. There were also butterflies, once an array of colors, dancing around the beast. Carefully, I lifted the cover. I found my grandfather's full name, along with the date of his travels, inscribed on the first page.

As I perused the first pages of the journal, I began coughing. The dust was beginning to affect me. I gently closed the book and set it aside. I piled the rest of my grandfather's research into the chest and returned it to its place in the master bedroom. Walking back to retrieve the book and draw the blinds, I smiled as I saw the imprint of my jean's pockets in the dust. I walked over to the shelf where the unicorn once stood to survey his kingdom, rearing to challenge any who dared to trespass. Dust had filled in the spaces were other objects photos had once rested, but the void where the unicorn used to rest was as clean as though someone had carefully dusted and polished three mahogany spots on the shelf.

Never quick to dismiss something magical or miraculous, this was one phenomenon I could not puzzle out. I continued to mull over what I had seen as I walked home, but I could arrive at no explanation.

I set the journal on the small table next to my bed and walked over to the glass unicorn. I cleared all of the figurines and books off the shelf, stacking the books on the floor and arranging the figurines on my dresser. I held the unicorn up to the light, letting the rainbows cascade across my face. I surveyed my room and placed him carefully on the wide window ledge between the lavender I was growing. He would be safe there.

My mom trusted me to keep my room clean, so I knew I wouldn't have to worry about her interfering with my little experiment. The shelf would remain undusted for a month. I was curious to see if the dust failed to collect in the spots where the unicorn's hind hooves and tail rested on the dark wood.

Keeping myself from checking on the shelf daily proved to be a challenge. So I started spending time outside, hiking in the woods near our house bringing treats to the horses that lived on the other side. I start spending whole days sitting on the fence watching the horses interact with each other, studying their movements, and sketching them. I checked out some books on equine anatomy at the library. As I studied, I wondered how the Kirin's anatomy would differ from that of the horses I so admired out in the field.

The journal remained where I had set it on my bedside table. As intrigued as I was with the book and the contents it might hold, I felt no rush to read it through. I was enjoying my preoccupation with the horses while I let the glass unicorn rest in the scent of lavender.

As I had hoped, the distraction of hiking and studying the horses kept my mind off the shelf. In some ways, I was worried about what I might find at that shelf. I was worried that the unicorn's place would be covered in dust and that what I had seen at my grandparents' house was just some fluke or trick of the shadows. I was even more worried, however, that there would be no dust.

Six weeks passed and I was about to start my second week of high school. Finally, I allowed myself to look at the shelf. I instinctively cringed when I saw the thick coat of dust that had gathered. I focused on where the glass unicorn had stood. Three dark spots stood out in stark contrast to the pale dust. My breath caught in my lungs as I stared. I could explain away this occurrence once as a trick of the light and shadows, but how could I find an explanation for this twice?

Slowly I turned my head to look at the glass unicorn rearing majestically on the window ledge. He gleamed brightly in the late afternoon sun, sending an array of color across my bedroom floor. I focused my attention on his face. His glassy eye glimmered and twinkled, as though he was winking at me.

………………