by Alex Powell
"No, that is not what I meant," Maíra said. "Didn't you see them? They started getting all weird and talking like robots."
"What's a robot?"
"Never mind." Maíra rolled her eyes. "I must have been imagining it."
"I hope you're happy," the unicorn said. "Now we'll never find a wedding dress for you! Dealing with the human world is so tedious."
"If you think that after only an hour, imagine how humans must feel," Maíra grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest defensively.
"I am going to find you a wedding dress! If you are to declare your love, you must do it right!" The unicorn seemed adamant on its course of action.
Maíra sighed and waited for the silly thing to just give up. Dress or no dress, she wasn't going to go and confess her love. After the whole shock of meeting an actual unicorn, she finally considered what the unicorn actually wanted her to do. There was no way she could tell Carol anything at all. In fact, she often forgot how to talk when in Carol's presence.
"Oh! Oh! Is that a wedding dress?" The unicorn danced on the spot in excitement.
Maíra looked through the storefront window, and by some sort of miracle, they were actually in front of a store for wedding dresses. Before she could answer, the unicorn decided she was taking too long and just went through the propped-open door.
"We need a wedding dress!" the unicorn said. "Right away!"
The shop assistant, who had been hanging up a dress to put it away, dropped it in shock. A moment later, she scrambled after it, hurriedly replacing it and turning to glare at them.
"Just look at what you nearly made me do! That wedding dress is expensive." The assistant's mouth went thin and her dark eyes narrowed.
"Expensive! What's all this talk of 'expensive this' and 'expensive that?'" The unicorn almost reared up before it remembered the ceiling.
"Do you know who designed this dress?" the assistant put her hands on her hips and leaned forward, ready for an argument. "Just look at all the material! Of course it's expensive!"
"It's beautiful," the unicorn replied, its voice thoughtful. "But expensive?"
"She means it costs a lot of money," Maíra said. "Don't you know what money is?"
"No," the unicorn said. "Unicorns don't have money. Why do humans have money? It seems completely unnecessary to me!"
"If neither of you have any money, then I suggest you take yourselves out of my shop," the assistant said darkly, moving to stand in between them and the dresses on display.
The unicorn backed out of the store, ears flattening back in dismay. As they left without another word, however, and walked dejectedly out of the store, Maíra thought its hooves jangled less on the pavement than before.
"I wasn't going to confess anyway," Maíra said.
"But you must! We mustn't let this get in the way of our quest! To the Other Side!" the unicorn declared, this time rearing up as it had wanted to earlier.
"The other side of what?" Maíra asked.
The unicorn ignored her question again, and Maíra could hear strange music and discordant sounds rising up all around her. It was as if large out-of-tune bells were ringing, and Maíra's teeth jarred together as she clenched them against the unpleasant noise.
The world around her began to blur together, as if she was seeing it in watercolour, and in front of them, a group of bright points began to coalesce into one ball of light. It slowly widened, and a hole opened up in the middle. At first she thought that the hole was black, but as it opened further, she could see a flurry of green in front of her.
"Wait!" Maíra cried out.
And the unicorn charged into the middle of the green world, bursting into it in a cloud of silver light and exploding stars.
For a few minutes, Maíra couldn't see a thing. It was so bright that she closed her eyes, then because she could still see the light through her eyelids, she covered them with her hands.
"I know just the people to make you a real dress for love declarations."
Maíra opened her eyes and nearly closed them again against the vivid greenness of the world she found them in. Every single living organism around them was brilliantly coloured, and quite a lot of what she saw was some variety of green. The forest around her was simply lush with life.
"What is this place," she asked, looking around nervously. "Where's Vancouver?"
"The Other Side, opposite the Mortal Realm," the unicorn replied. "Ah, I can change here, but I'd better leave that until we find what we're looking for."
"Change?" Maíra shook her head and leaned against the unicorn's neck heavily. "I don't understand."
"The magic here makes it easy, whereas in your realm, devoid of magic, makes it hard to do much of anything."
Maíra just knew she was going to regret asking. "Where are we going now?"
"Oh, to see the elves," the unicorn replied. "They're the best with clothing."
"Elves," Maíra said, but supposed that elves were really nothing to be worried about in comparison to the unicorn. At least they probably wouldn't try and kidnap her.
Eventually, they wandered into a part of the wood where the trunks of the trees were large enough around, Maíra could imagine her house fitting inside of it. They were covered in moss and ivy, almost decorative in their patterns. Maíra thought it was a coincidence until she noticed the little doorway in the bark of one of the trees. She'd only noticed it because it was at her eye-level, but now that she was looking, she could see them all over the place.
"Ah, here we are. The Land of the Woodland Elves," the unicorn said. "Off you get."
By this point, Maíra's legs were beginning to cramp from sitting on horseback for so long, and she slid off gratefully. Her legs were a little wobbly, and she walked around to try and get the feeling back into them. She was grateful for her voluptuous backside that was less sore than she imagined it would be. Certainly less sore than her legs, anyway.
Then, the unicorn shimmered abruptly and changed forms. Maíra blinked in surprise at the unicorn's new appearance. It was still all glowing and white, but it was more human-shaped than it had been. It had long limbs, and seemed to be covered in fine, silvery fur. Its eyes were quite large, and it had a long, equine nose and a flowing white mane. Also, it was naked.
Maíra almost averted her gaze until she realized something: it had no external genitalia.
It was a bit like a doll in that it didn't have any distinctive sex characteristics. It had no breasts, or even nipples to suggest that it nursed its young, nor did it have excess hair besides the thin layer of fur. Maíra realized she was staring, but couldn't bring herself to look away. It was an entirely sexless creature, and although it had noticed she was staring, didn't seem to be concerned with modesty.
"You don't have..." Maíra wasn't sure how to put her statement. She didn't know if unicorns had a basis for gender, or if they would become offended if asked. And certainly, Maíra knew very well how it felt to have her own genitalia discussed as if people had a right to know all about them because she was a bit different.
"Unicorns are genderless," the unicorn said, shrugging. "Oh, that's an interesting movement. You humans have some interesting ideas after all." It shrugged again. "We don't need to reproduce. We are created every single time someone falls in love."
"You're actually created by love?" Maíra asked, eyes wide.
"Oh, yes. There's a lot of us, you know. Lots of people fall in love," the unicorn closed its eyes with a pleased look. "We're genderless, because that is no barrier to the ways that people love one another."
So that's why the unicorn didn't understand why Carol might not love her.
"That's not really how it works with humans," Maíra said. "Without even getting into the mess that is human reproduction, we also have these important things called sexual and gender orientation, and if those things don't match up in some way––"
The unicorn looked at her blankly and then said, "Regardless, you need a dress. How is your Carol to know how y
ou feel if you don't tell her?"
"She wasn't meant to know," Maíra said, sighing and shaking her head. "I wasn't going to tell her. I was going to watch from afar and hope that eventually my feelings for her would fade."
The unicorn looked at her with wide, horrified eyes. "There's nothing that terrifies a unicorn more than being wished out of existence."
"You're not saying that you think I should cultivate my unrequited feelings for her?" Maíra said.
"You don't know if they're unrequited yet!" the unicorn snorted and then stamped its foot in frustration, sending up a tinkling noise and a spray of tiny silver stars.
"But I can't just tell her!" Maíra argued, hands on her hips. "She doesn't even know anything about me! There are some pretty important things that might not be immediately obvious, but would cause a big rift in our communications if I didn't tell her. I'm not sure if I'm really ready to tell her about it."
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, sh
e 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."
