A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology

by Gregory D. Little

  I flick past one of those annoying link-bait articles a girl I had dated briefly in high school liked—and being glad I had only dated her briefly—the clack-clack of the subway sounding like the tick-tick of that clock, and I smell her.

  Maybe my nose is just overloaded by the subway. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. But it’s her. I’m sure of it. Perfume in the bottle is not the same as perfume on the skin. A good perfume changes with each person, transforms into something unique.

  This scent is sweet, like roses, with something distinctly sharp, like aged Parmesan cheese, plus something a little sour and lemony. Her scent.

  My heart starts thump-thump-thumping in my chest and prickly sweat forms on the small of my back. I don’t move fast. I am hoping she’s there, but knowing it’s impossible. I want so desperately to see her face, but not wanting the inevitable disappointment.

  The subway slows down for the Fulton Station stop. I look up from my phone and see a woman with long brown hair and a dark coat stepping out of the car. I can’t see her face, but the hair, with its chestnut hue and gentle wave at the tips, is hers. The scent is hers.

  I feel her name form on my tongue. No longer a pronoun, I mumble, “Laura?”

  My hand, still gripping the steel rail, shakes. I let go, reflexively rubbing my sweaty palm on my pants before stepping off the subway car into the cavelike station.

  I can’t see her anymore. She’s lost in the crowd. The train whooshes away behind me and the crowd departs, and I just stand there.

  It smelled like Laura. What I saw of her looked like Laura. But it can’t be her. Laura’s dead.

  O O O

  Some people believe in ghosts, think any little oddity—like the flickering of a light—is their loved one communicating with them. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe that most of us are haunted. Not by some literal, ethereal spirit but by our pasts and our regrets and our guilt.

  She has been haunting me since her death. And it’s no surprise. I’m to blame. How could I not be haunted by it?

  My nose is still full of her as my feet carry me up out of the claustrophobia of the subway into a crisp New York morning. The sounds of the city descend on me. Honking cars, a distant ambulance—its siren bouncing off the high-rises of Broadway—the shuffling of pedestrians, the murmur of conversation.

  I pull my leather jacket tight around me and look for her. But it’s no use. If it had been her—even though it couldn’t have been her—she would be lost in the crowd by now.

  I join the throng and head south towards Rector Street and my job at Larry’s Downtown Deli. I’d gotten off the subway too soon, but I don’t feel like going back down. I breathe deeply of the smell of New York City hoping to get another whiff of her, but all I smell is exhaust, old grease, coffee from a street vendor, and odor de Dumpster. If you live in a big city, you know what I’m talking about. The scent is not pleasant, but familiar. It’s so strong you can actually taste it.

  At work, I tick-tick through my day with a rhythm almost as regular as that redwood clock. Running frozen pizzas through the little oven, stocking the salad bar, checking people out, my feet always moving across the worn linoleum.

  After her death, I quit my job as a claims adjuster. The pressure was too much. I’ve been running one of those little ubiquitous Big Apple delis for the last six months. Not that there isn’t any pressure at the deli, there’s plenty, but because I’m always dealing with customers and I’m always moving, my mind has a harder time wandering back. Back to when Laura became a pronoun in my vocabulary.

  O O O

  There is surprisingly little to the story of her death. A Wednesday night out in the city. Too much to drink—way too much—she more than I. Distraction. Tragedy.

  She was also a claims adjustor and had just received a “stern talking to” from her supervisor over some of the claims she had handled. She was, honestly, too kind for the job.

  It wasn’t much, really. Not in the long view, but that night it was a big deal—thus the excessive drinking after work.

  We had decided to walk home. Thirty blocks didn’t seem that far in our inebriated state. Besides, I think going home right away would have felt like a return to reality, the last thing she wanted.

  It was the end of summer, an almost full moon throwing silvery light down the high-rise canyons as we walked, a little unsteadily, and talked. She smiled a lot, widely and with her teeth showing, but her eyes never did that upside-down crescent moon thing, so even in my altered state I knew it wasn’t a real smile.

  We held hands. I kept squeezing hers, trying to let her know it was okay, that I loved her. I wore a gray suit, she a brown skirt with heels and a sweater. It was our work clothing; we had decided to drink our dinner as soon as we got off work.

  “Oh,” she said, her speech less slurred than it had been. “This is why you wanted to walk.”

  I didn’t recall being the one wanting to walk. “What?”

  We were on Columbus Circle, almost to Time Warner Center. She let go of my hand and pointed. A Tesla Model S was parked in front of the towering, glass-walled entrance. It was Batmobile-black and beautifully lit, looking like Bruce Wayne was about to step out wearing a tux with a supermodel in a red evening dress on his arm.

  I’m not from New York. I grew up in California where everyone drives all the time, and truth be told, I miss owning a car and driving.

  I stared, gape jawed. I smelled the city, dirt and exhaust and rotting trash. I heard the cars honking, tires humming, brakes squealing. I felt the warmth that had once been her hand in mine. But none of that mattered. It was just me and the beautifully designed electric car.

  “I’m tired of … of …” she said, moving away from me, but I didn’t turn. “Walking!” she added with a laugh once she had finally pulled the word out of her sodden consciousness.

  I heard her heels scraping over the sidewalk. “Cabby!” she yelled.

  Then horns blared, brakes screeched, and there was a sickening crunch, a scream, and a thud.

  O O O

  Dead is dead. The dead stay dead, except in my dreams.

  I often dream of that night in front of Time Warner Center, the broken body of my Laura in my arms. After her last rattling breath and the last beat of her heart, she suddenly seemed light, somehow insubstantial. It was no longer Laura, just a body that looked like Laura. The demarcation was so sudden, so final.

  In my dreams it’s worse.

  Sometimes she struggles to get up, but her broken limbs won’t support her and she collapses with a wet thump. Other times I pull her into my arms and her blue eyes open, except they’re not blue, they’re all bloody and she says, “You did this,” as coagulating blood pours out her mouth.

  I did do wrong by her in the past. A brief moment of drunken infidelity cost us most of six months. The time I forgot her birthday. When she opened up to me about problems she was having with a coworker and I accidentally laughed.

  Each time we would talk it out—much longer than I ever wanted—with the tick-tick of her clock in the background. I just wanted to apologize and move on, but she needed to talk about things. A lot.

  But this we can’t talk out. I can’t tell her how sorry I am for getting so drunk. It was her bad day; I should have been taking care of her. I can’t tell her how awful I feel for letting go of her hand. How horrified I am that a stupid car distracted me at the single moment in our history together when she needed me the most. If only I could apologize.

  After the funeral, I quit my job and started working at the deli. I almost left New York, but it’s all I have left of her. She is New York to me. We met the day I got to the city, after all, and we spent nearly every day after that together.

  O O O

  She is on the subway with me again today. That sweet, sharp, sour smell again alerts me to her presence. I glimpse a woman from behind that could be her. Long brown hair with a bit of curl at the bottom. Tall and willowy. A purposeful st
ride.

  I get out a stop early and try to follow her. I push through the crowd as fast as I can, but when I come up into the bright sunlight of an April day, I can’t find her. People everywhere, but not her.

  My heart thumps in my chest the whole time, my mouth sour from the adrenaline playing in my veins. My head doesn’t believe it can be her, but my body does.

  The Fulton Station subway stop comes out near Zuccotti Park. It’s not very big, just a paved area with cement benches and lots of trees. I find myself standing on the Broadway side, my legs shaky, watching, hoping, praying.

  I feel like I’m a boy again, the time I broke the delicate porcelain vase my mother had loved. I held the sharp shards in my hands wishing I could take it back, praying that it hadn’t really happened. But I couldn’t do anything about the broken vase, just like I couldn’t do anything about my broken Laura.

  Broken is broken. Dead is dead.

  The rhythmic honking on Broadway, for a moment, sounds like the tick-tick of the unicorn clock.

  “Are you okay?” a woman asks.

  I’m slumped against a streetlight, my head in my hands.

  The woman’s voice sounds young and sweet. It has a melodic lilt to it and a trace of a New England accent. My heart starts pounding again. She had a voice like that.

  I look up but can’t see much, the morning sun haloed behind her hair.

  “Do you need me to call somebody?”

  I blink against the sunlight, her name dancing on my lips, when I see the woman clearly—a ragged homeless lady with a grocery cart full of junk behind her.

  She thinks I needed help. All the people in this park and she thinks I’m so bad off that she can help me.

  “No. No, thank you,” I mumble, getting up and walking toward the deli.

  O O O

  Laura and I never got married, officially. She had issues with her family and couldn’t bear the thought of them all coming together—and the drama that would ensue—for her wedding.

  I remember the night I asked her. We sat on the floor of our little apartment playing Scrabble.

  “We should get married, you know,” I said as I tried to figure out a word with two Ts, an S, and an I that wasn’t a dirty word.

  I wasn’t looking at her, but I heard her suck in air through her nose and hold it. I could feel her eyes on me, the tick-tick of that unicorn clock in our bedroom counting down the seconds.

  Tick-tick. No answer yet.

  Tick-tick. I couldn’t look at her. What if she hated the idea? What if she was just staying with me until she found someone better? Although, after five years, I should have given up that irrational insecurity.

  Tick-tick. Did she just sniff?

  I finally looked up, and she was crying, but there was a smile on her face and her blue eyes were squished into those upside-down crescent moons. The tears freaked me out. Asking her freaked me out. I had thought about it for a long time, but didn’t plan the asking.

  “Are you okay?” I finally asked.

  She nodded, swept the Scrabble board out of the way, the tiles clattering everywhere, and then she was in my arms. I tasted the salt of her tears and the perfumed waxiness of her lipstick. She was warm and so alive that night.

  Later, after we made love, she told me she couldn’t stand inviting her family to her wedding, and she couldn’t get married without inviting her family. I mean, Vegas would have been fine with me, but she couldn’t do it. She was caught in this familial paradox.

  Hours later we were still on the floor, our backs up against the couch, drinking wine. I was frustrated that I couldn’t figure out a way to meet her needs. Excited that she had said yes—although not directly in words. And tired from the glorious physical expression of her “yes.”

  I shrugged and smiled. “What do we do?”

  She was quiet for a long time. The tick-tick of the clock and the honking of horns twenty floors below the only sounds. “I got it!” she said, her smile wide. She pulled a blanket around her nude body and sat right in front of me. “We don’t need a priest, and we certainly don’t need my family. Right here, right now, we are married. I am your wife, and you are my husband.”

  I studied her face, her beautiful face. High cheekbones, sparkling blue eyes, lovely full lips. She was always too good for me. Not just in terms of beauty, but the kind of person she was. She would carry granola bars in her purse and give them to homeless people. “They’ll just drink any money,” she told me once. “This way they can at least eat something.” She always thought of others more than herself.

  The declaration wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I wanted her even more. “Umm … I do,” I said.

  She was on me again, her lips brushing at my ear. “I do, too. And I expect a ring.”

  O O O

  I hate the salad bar most of all. People slop food all over, and I have to clean it up. Constantly. Bacon bits in the beets, hard-boiled eggs in the carrots, lettuce absolutely everywhere. It’s disgusting.

  It feels a little bit like of my own version of hell. A menial task that I keep doing—wiping, picking, refilling from the bins in the back. It goes on and on. It never ends. It seems like I can never catch up. Sometimes, though, I consider it my penance for what happened to her. Then I don’t really mind it.

  The deli is on the ground floor of old high-rise on Rector, just off Broadway. The walls are white and the fluorescent lights whiter. It isn’t very big, just enough room for the little salad bar, the deli case, the baked goods, a small pizza oven, and the checkout area. One long counter with tables on the other side.

  I’m on the night shift and actually making progress on the damn salad bar. I don’t usually work nights—I’m the manager, after all—but some recent personnel turnover has me working doubles. During the day we’ve got at least two people. At night it’s just one person from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

  And then I smell her. Sweet like a flower, sharp like cheese, sour like citrus. That smell is in my soul. All our years together she used the same perfume. No one else ever smells that way.

  I’m wiping between the round containers of the salad bar, my heart suddenly thumping in my head like a two-year-old with his first drum. I don’t look up. I don’t want to look up. What if I don’t see anything? What if it is a woman walking away from me again or a homeless lady?

  I read once that the sense of smell is hardwired directly into the brain. It’s not like the eyes and the ears where you can see and hear things that aren’t real. If you are smelling something, it’s because those nerves are stimulated. There is a cause. There has to be.

  I freeze, gripping the white rag as hard as I can. That smell doesn’t go away. It gets stronger. It’s coming from the person standing on the other side of the salad bar. I stare at the sliced cucumbers, but out of my peripheral vision I can see a dark skirt and a white blouse. The same thing she wore that night I failed her, the night she died.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper as I close my eyes tight against the tears. “I’m so sorry.”

  That night came back, like it always did. I let go of her hand, just for a moment. The squeal of tires. A sickening crash. A scream. Holding her in my arms, the metallic smell of blood mixing with her normal flowery scent. Feeling her life ebb away.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I slide down to the floor, sitting among discarded bacon bits and shredded carrots.

  I hear the clicking of high heels on linoleum, reminding me of the tick-tick of the clock in my bedroom. My arms around my knees, I rock back and forth chanting, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Mister, are you okay?”

  I hear her voice, but it’s distant. That smell, sweet and sharp and sour, fills my nose. Images of that night fill my eyes as tears leak out.

  I don’t look. I can’t look. It can’t be her. But while my eyes are closed there is still the tiniest chance that it is.

  The beeps of a dialing p
hone. “Yes, I’m at Larry’s Downtown Deli on Rector, right off Broadway. Send an ambulance. Someone here needs help.”

  I feel a hand on my shoulder as I continue to rock. “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  I don’t believe her. I can’t believe her. I keep my eyes closed.

  O O O

  Laura was smart, much smarter than me. I was a little better with numbers, but she was a lot better with people. She understood people in a way that always baffled me. She quickly seemed to “get” them and could say just the right thing.

  That woman in the deli seems more and more like Laura.

  “I’m right here,” she says after I’ve been loaded into the ambulance. My eyes are still shut tight. She slips her warm hand into mine and squeezes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  It’s the kind of thing Laura would do.

  Who is she, this late-night salad bar patron? She smells like Laura. Her voice is a lot like Laura’s. She acts like Laura.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, probably for the hundredth time. The ambulance is on the move, the siren loud, the rumble of tires on pavement and the ever-present honking of cars making it hard to hear. I don’t expect her to hear me.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers back, her face close to mine, her Laura-smell filling my senses. “I forgive you.”

  There’s a paramedic in the ambulance with us. I can smell his sweat and hear him move, but I don’t care. It’s like it’s just me and Laura and no one else.

  I hold my breath. Did she say that she forgave me? “You do?”

  “Of course,” she says with the smallest of chuckles. “You didn’t mean to.”

  I squeeze her hand, and she squeezes back. It’s her. It has to be her. Somehow she has come back to me. Somehow she is here. I think about the redwood unicorn clock and the gypsy spell. Can it be?

  “I was so careless,” I say. “I shouldn’t have let go.”

  She gently squeezes my hand again. “It’s okay, really it is.”