Love Rampage (3 page)

The unicorn was silent for several, long moments.

"But you love her," it finally said.

"Yes."

Maíra watched the unicorn as it looked miserably at the ground, shuffling its hooves. She wondered why it had come to her in the first place if it met with such disappointment upon meeting her.

"Will a unicorn die if I don't tell Carol I love her?" Maíra watched as the unicorn avoided her eyes.

"We are not meant to be coercive beings," the unicorn said uncomfortably. "But we cannot lie because love is a truth so pure, a lie would cause us unimaginable pain. Yes, a unicorn will sicken the longer you leave your love undeclared and will cease to exist once your feelings pass."

"But that happens all the time!" Maíra exclaimed. "People are always too scared to admit their feelings."

"Fear is one of our greatest enemies," the unicorn said, but didn't offer anything further.

"So," Maíra looked around. "How am I meant to get a dress here in the forest?"

The unicorn perked right up, depression forgotten. "Oh, the elves have their ways."

"Where are they, then?" Maíra eyed one of the little doors with trepidation.

The door opened at her words, and a little, nut-brown face popped its head around the door. It was the sort of creature she imagined from fairy tales rather than the Tolkien-esque elves she'd been expecting. Soon, they had a small crowd gathered around her feet, and they were all chattering excitedly in small voices.

"They can make a wedding dress?" Maíra asked skeptically.

"Elves are the very best clothing-makers in all the realms," the unicorn said. "They can make you a dress fit for a princess."

Now that she looked at them, she could see that their clothing
did
look well-made. But it did have a more sturdy-looking appearance than beautiful––practical rather than aesthetic.

Not that Maíra really
needed
a princess dress or even wanted one. She didn't need a dress. Maíra was perfectly capable of making a fool of herself in ordinary denim. Or––she looked down––her plaid pyjamas.

Okay, so there was a
very
small part of her that wanted to have a princess dress. That was a dream too extravagant for words, however, not when she had things to save up for.

"How much would a dress be?" she asked the unicorn.

The unicorn frowned, making the expression look far more complicated than it needed to be. "The elves do not need compensation."

"But if they're going to make something for me, I would like to give them something in return." Maíra didn't have a lot of money to spare, but surely there was something else that she could give the elves in exchange.

"Elves are made from goodwill to one's fellow creatures," the unicorn explained. "And goodwill is completely free. I think they live off the feeling of contentment that someone gets whenever they do a good deed."

"So no one owes them anything?" Maíra knelt down to look closer at them.

"A true good deed does not expect to be repaid," the unicorn said with another awkward-looking shrug.

"Are all the creatures in this place created by emotion?" Maíra asked, frowning. "You're made of love, and these elves are made of goodwill? Are there other creatures that are made of different emotions?"

"Oh, yes, lots," the unicorn said, nodding. "Dragons are made every time there's a large gathering of people and their emotional state is the same."

"Crowd mentality. Dragons are crowd mentality?" Maíra considered this. "There are a lot of angry, violent riots out there, in the world."

"There are a lot of angry, violent dragons, too."

Maíra turned her attention back to the elves. "Hello?"

The elves' voices raised in excitement, and she could make out words if she listened closely enough.

"She's like us! She looks like us! Just big."

Maíra looked down at herself and saw that yes, she and the little elves did share some physical characteristics in skin tone and hair colour.

"Olá," she said, wondering if they would understand.

"Olá!" they all repeated enthusiastically, although Maíra didn't know if they were just repeating what she'd said or if they could understand Portuguese.

They swarmed around her feet, chattering too quickly for her to catch their words. Maíra watched them curiously and waited for them to do something.

"They want you to take your clothes off," the unicorn commented from where it had settled down on a moss-covered rock to watch.

Maíra froze.

"I can't," she said.

The unicorn tilted its head to the side. "Why not?"

Maíra glared and crossed her arms. "You wouldn't understand. You don't have any genitalia at all!"

"Why would that concern you?" the unicorn asked. "Your kind have genitals. So what?"

"They're taboo in our culture!" Maíra hugged her body even tighter. "We don't like looking at them, because they're sexual."

"Sexual?" The unicorn stared at her harder. "I have no concern for sex. Neither do these elves, no matter how similar in appearance they are to you. We don't have sex. It's nothing to worry about. You humans and your sexual distress."

Maíra looked down at the little faces watching her and wondered if they had a concept of what it meant to have a gender and sex disparity. Did they know enough to hate someone for it? It didn't really matter, because Maíra wasn't going to take anything off anyway. It made her really uncomfortably aware of her body when other people watched her change.

"It's not that," Maíra said, starting to feel a bit sick with so many people looking at her.

The unicorn watched her for a few seconds and then shrugged again. "It's obviously causing you discomfort. We'll have to find a different way."

Maíra was dizzy with relief. She hadn't taken off her clothes in front of someone since she'd figured out she was trans and come out to her family. They'd even let her change in a different room at school.

The elves were all over the place, taking pieces of woven fabric to measure her height and other dimensions by stringing it between trees. By the time they were done, Maíra was standing in the middle of a maze of strings. It obviously meant something to the elves, because they climbed over the strings to point at marks on the fabric and wrote it all down on a little piece of what looked like some sort parchment.

"It's made of pond reeds," the unicorn said when she asked about the paper.

"It's... papyrus?" Maíra asked, making her way out of the tangle of strings to sit next to the unicorn.

"I suppose." The unicorn hummed, and its voice sounded like a flute. "Look, they're starting on your dress now."

The dress was starting to take shape, and it was a wispy, sort of feathery material. At first, Maíra thought it looked pure white, but the more she looked at it, the more it changed. Now it looked silver, but if she turned her head it was celadon, a colour that reminded her of the glaze on Chinese vases. Sometimes the edges of it caught the light, as if it were covered in little drops of dew.

She was so absorbed in watching the dress taking shape in front of her, she didn't notice that some of the elves had come over to see her.

"They want to braid your hair," the unicorn said, bringing them to her attention.

Maíra was rather proud of her hair. Once, a friend had described the colour as "dark, like a winter ale," and that had sounded so whimsical to her that she'd secretly begun to think of it that way in her head. It was long, thick and wavy, and Maíra would sometimes throw it over her shoulder just for the delight she got from watching it spin and settle. The sun made it shine and turned it a burnished gold, just a shade darker than her skin.

"Okay," she said.

Her hair was hers, and always had been, regardless of gender.

Immediately, there were a hundred tiny pricks as little hands went to work. It seemed strange in the beginning, but soon it just became soothing. Maíra was soon lulled into a vague sense of sleepy contentment. This must be how cats felt when people stroked behind their ears.

Maíra lost track of how long this went on for, but eventually she was brought back to reality by the unicorn nudging her arm.

"You're ready," the unicorn said, gesturing for her to stand up.

While she hadn't been paying attention, the elves had not only finished the dress, they'd finished her hair and rigged up a screen for her to change behind. Maíra went behind the screen and looked at the dress in awe. She was a tad frightened that she might somehow damage it if she wasn't gentle with it.

"How do I put it on?" she called out to the unicorn.

"Just step into it. The dress will do the rest."

That didn't make any sense at all, but Maíra shed her pyjamas and stepped into the circle of the dress. It rose up around her and settled onto her frame, clinging to her lightly and swishing along with her every movement. Maíra wished she had a mirror.

"It's as light as air!" Maíra said, poking her head out from behind the screen.

"It's made of dreams and strands of hope and threads of courage."

"It can't be made of that. Those aren't real," Maíra said, emerging slowly and spinning on the spot. "What do you think?"

"Perfect," the unicorn said, and shimmered back into its other form. "Come on! We have a love declaration to make."

The unicorn knelt down like last time, and Maíra carefully climbed back on, sitting side-saddle to try and keep the skirts from getting tangled.

"You know, just because something isn't tangible doesn't make it not real," the unicorn said as it stood.

"You can't make a dress out of dreams and courage," Maíra replied.

"Yes you can."

"How?"

"Magic."

The unicorn took off running through the forest, and soon, the strange tinkling and jangling started up again as the door between their worlds opened. Maíra was worried the wind would ruin her hair, but the unicorn touched down lightly on the quay, and they somehow remained untouched by the sea breeze.

Finally, Maíra was able to see herself, reflected in a storefront window.

The fabric of the dress curled up over one shoulder and then wrapped around the rest of her torso down to her waist. After that, it flowed out from behind her in wisps and curls, as if it were made of clouds. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, and it was left loose in some places and braided up in others. Somehow, the elves had layered her hair so intricately that she had no idea how they'd managed. It looked as if they'd made her a netted cap made of her own hair, but even under that there were little braids and spun curls.

"See? You're a princess," the unicorn sounded so pleased with itself that Maíra had to hold back a giggle.

"That I am," Maíra said. "But now that I'm here, how am I supposed to know where Carol is?"

"Oh, that's easy," the unicorn said with assurance. "You have to think of her with love. You'll lead us to her yourself."

"With love?" Maíra said skeptically. "That sounds very cliché to me."

"Cliché is just a word that the doubtful made up to reassure themselves." The unicorn tossed its head. "They didn't want to have to show their feelings freely. Disparaging romance is just a way to hide their emotional selves away. It's a very sad way to live, don't you think?"

"Unicorn, did you say that this dress has courage woven into it?" Maíra asked.

"Yes," the unicorn said. "Why?"

"I'm going to need it."

And Maíra loved.

A dazzling spray of colourful light burst forth from the centre of Maíra's chest and, twining together into a rope, shot off down the quay, emitting bright sparks. The sparks didn't extinguish, leaving little glowing stars to mark the way.

The unicorn immediately dashed after it, and Maíra hung on, determined to finish this mad venture now that it had come this far.

"Keep thinking of her!" the unicorn said. "You can't let the sparks die out, or we won't find her!"

Maíra had an inkling she knew where Carol was anyway, but did as she was bid.

Carol.

Carol wrinkled the bridge of her nose when she was thinking, and when she laughed, it was full-hearted and unfeigned. She liked wearing T-shirts from sci-fi shows and quoting them at every opportunity, even if no one understood what she was referencing. Once, someone's phone ringtone was an odd, wheezing noise, and Carol had gone in search of it until she'd found another person on the other end. She'd made a friend that day. Carol had a lot of friends.

Carol had red hair, and for some reason, a lot of her friends would sometimes say, "Come along, Pond," and laugh. Maíra had checked, but Carol's last name was McFarlane.

Carol was at least a head shorter than Maíra, and Maíra imagined that she would fit nicely under her chin if they hugged. She wore gold-rimmed glasses, and they would slide down to the tip of her nose, so she was always pushing them back up.

She'd met Carol because Carol said to her one day: "I like your shoelaces."

Maíra hadn't been wearing shoes at the time, but she'd known to reply, "Thanks, I stole them from the president."

Maíra ran a blog that mostly featured pictures of unicorns by various artists and occasional gifsets from the animated movie edition of "The Last Unicorn." She'd scribbled down her URL at Carol's request, and to Maíra's surprise, Carol had followed her. Sometimes, if Carol found something unicorn-related, she would reblog it and tag it with Maíra's alias.

Maíra had exactly twenty-three followers and very few messages. She didn't have an "About Me" page or anything personal up on her blog. She didn't even have a picture up––her avatar was a generic picture of a crescent moon. Carol had a huge number of followers, and the number would fluctuate wildly depending on her most recent meta analysis of a popular show and how often she would reblog social justice posts.

Carol told people her real name on the site along with everything from her sexual orientation (lesbian) to what her favourite episodes of Doctor Who were (there was a list). People were always messaging her, and Carol would reply to them. Maíra knew Carol would be friendly to her if she messaged her too, but her finger would hover over the 'send' button and eventually click on 'cancel' instead.