Christmas Thoughts

--an excerpt from The Black Unicorn, by Terry Brooks

Southside Chicago was chill and dreary, the snowfall of the previous night turned gray and mushy on the walks and streets, the squarish highrise projects and tenements vague shadows in a haze of smoke and mist. Steam rose out of sewer grates in sudden clouds as sleet pelted down. Not much of anythign was moving. Cars crawled by like prehistoric beetles, headlights shinging their luminous yellow eyes. Pedestrians ducked their heads against the cold, their chins buried in scarves and collars, their hands jammed into coat pockets.

Late afternoon watched an early evening's approach in glooomy silence.

The corner of Division and Elm was almost deserted. Two boys with leather jackets, a commuting businessman, and a carefully dressed woman, headed home from shopping, stepped from a bus, and started walking in different directions.

A shop owner paused to check the locks on the front door of his plumbing business as he prepared to close up for the day.

A factory worker on the seven to three shift ducked out of Barney's pub after two beers and an hour of unwinding to begin the trudge two blocks home to his ailing mother.

An old man carrying a load of groceries shuffled along a path left in the snow by a trail of icy footprints. a small child engulfed in a snowsuit played with a sled by the steps of her apartment home.

They ignored each other with casual indifference, lost in their own private thoughts.

The white unicorn flew past them like a bit of strayed light. It sped by as if its whole purpose in being was to circle the whole of the world in a single day. It never seemed to touch the ground, its graceful, delicate body gathering and extending in a single fluid motion as it passed.

All the beauty in the world -- all that was or could ever be -- was captured in its movement. It was there and gone in an instant.

The watches caught their breath, blinked once, and the unicorn had disappeared.

There followed a moment of uncertainty. The old man's mouth dropped open. The child put down her sled and stared. The two boys ducked their heads down and muttered urgently.

The businessman looked at the shop owner and the shop owner looked back. The carefully dressed woman remembered all those magical storied of fairies she still enjoyed reading. The factory worker thought of christmas as a child.

Then the moment passed, and they all moved on. Some walked more quickly, some more slowly. They glanced over at the misted empty street. What was it they had seen?

Had it really been a Unicorn? No, it couldn't have been. Unicorns lived in forests. But they had seen something. Hadn't they?

They walked on, silent, and there was a warmth within each of them at the memory of what they had experienced.

there was a feeling of having been a part of something magical.

They took that feeling home with them. Some of them kept it for a time.

Some of them passed it on.

--Terry Brooks, epilogue to The Black Unicorn

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