Unicorn in the Garden
The Fool — in moments so bitterly, ferociously guarded that they are a secret still, after all the long years in the tower — paints. Things gone, that she will not see again; forests and flowers and mountains and waterfalls. Crowds. Children.
She knows — because she can, and has, looked back through her work to see — exactly how long it took to start painting unicorns. That, too, she will never share. She paints them stepping between the trees of her forests, grazing her flower meadows, specking the flanks of her mountains, bathing in her waterfall pools, shying from her crowds and playing with her children.
Unicorns. Painted, her teeth bared. An idiot metaphor from an idiot mind.
She struts and snarls and needles, teases out the princess's attention when she wander too far within her own head; flexes claws at her when, like a cat, she needs to fight. Flits into (and back out of) her bed when the princess feels as though she'll freeze over like a winter pond from lack of contact. Churlishly acquiesces, even, to being held, her head on the royal shoulder, when it nourishes the princess to feel nurturing. And the fucking knight is always there, even when not in the room, a presence. An outline in the air. A sword and a shield and an unbreakable duty, an earnest lie told to small children about the nobility of sacrifice and unshakeable faith in service, made unironic flesh.
The unicorn — as an idiot symbol from an idiot mind — is a thing of purity, and cannot be captured except by corresponding purity.
The Fool's unclean hands itch and itch and can only be laid upon the unicorn through the medium of hideous, revealing, mortifying, mawkish, metaphoric paint.
(One day, she promises, she'll burn the lot. But she never has, yet.)
