If you had asked me yesterday, however, I would have said that unicorns don’t exist.

I took Ed’s silence as an opportunity to ponder the potential of unicorns without grilling him on what it looked like, if he had seen its teeth, those kinds of things. Were they herbivores? Did they solely drink starlight and moonlight? Did it have cloven hooves? Where were the eyes set? Was the horn made of bone, and did it come up from the spine or did it sit further down on the skull? And how could it speak?

The real reason I was able to keep the silence, despite my burning curiousity (and no, there isn’t a cream for that) was that I had recently spoken to an animate pot. Frankly, the existence of a unicorn seemed kind of small potatoes (hashed over or not) compared to the weirdnesses of the last couple of days.

I gave Ed a hearty back-slapping kind of hug and went back into my place, only to find my bed for a few hours. I should have been doing things, like getting the new rental car put together, checking on the status of my previous claim and how much I should be paid for the car Nellie totaled, that sort of responsible adult behaviour. I had already set up automation for the monthly things, as who knew if the thing in Little-land would be something I could handle over night. 

Instead, I slept.  I slept like a baby, should the baby be made of stone while it was sleeping.  Back to the proverbial rock, I guess.  The phrase indicates that I was a nonresponsive thing of stone unaffected by the events near the bed, and, well, I’ve played fun games like that before, but in this case it was pretty apt in a non-kinky fashion.  I was the kind of stone baby that didn’t dream, didn’t move, and was too tired to snore, although I’m just guessing at those.  They say we have just forgotten our dreams when we say we don’t have them, but I think if I dreamt, it was me dreaming of sleeping.

In any case, when I woke up, it was dark again.  I froze for a moment, thinking I had heard something in the kitchen, but there wasn’t any light, and I had been sure to lock my door after I gotten inside.  I had to hit the hardware store for the kind of lock that Rohana had suggested, but I wasn’t expecting her to break in again.  Although as dead to the world as I had been, a Dragon could have come in and I wouldn’t have stirred.  I wonder if I would have woken up before the flames and smoke combined to make that unstirring permanent.  I don’t think “unstirring” is a word.

“Hello?” I said aloud.  I growled at myself mentally for saying it, because if something had responded, I would have been frightened right out of my skin.  Well, as the phrase goes.  I expect the worst frightening I was likely to get would have been more, “Out of my bladder control,” but there wasn’t any, “Hello,” in return or anything.  It was probably my very overactive imagination.

I used the flashlight application on my cellphone to walk the step to my lightswitch, and turned it on, then went back and turned on the lamp next to my bed.  Probably the wrong order to do those things, but I was still feeling pretty muzzy from the disruption in my sleep cycles, and I wanted as much light as possible to banish the suddenly inhospitable darkness.  Well, it was probably still friendly enough to things that liked the dark, but I wasn’t feeling particularly sympathetic to it for the moment.  I’ll rephrase, then: I wanted as much light as possible to banish the darkness to which I was unsympathetic.  It just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

“Darkness doesn’t creep,” I said aloud.  Sound.  Sound was good, too.  I used the remote and turned on the television to some kind of auction show that was playing on my usual network of choice.  I rolled my eyes, but then, I remember when MTV played music videos, so maybe I was just jaded.  “Evil is afoot because evil doesn’t have wings,” I said to the darkness left in the hall.  I turned on the bathroom light, too, just for good measure.  I didn’t feel like playing my usual mental game with the phrase in thinking of what evil things had wings that needed to be rebutted in some fashion to make it fit. 

I went in and started microwaving my dinner.  I was feeling a little more secure in having banished the gloom.   I flipped through channels for a few minutes, and then kept it on the news while they talked weather.  After rolling my eyes (no one in Colorado believes in meteorologists after a while.  The mountains have too much whimsy with weather.  It’s the second most hated profession in the state, the first being coach of a major sports team) at the prediction, I switched the channel to one of the ones at the end of the list that play different music selections and post trivia on the screen, presumably for background at parties or other gatherings.  I was singing along and putting parmesan cheese on top of the glop in my paper tray when everything suddenly popped and I fell back into darkness again.

I didn’t think I had blown a fuse.  I pulled out my cellphone and it beeped, letting me know I needed to charge it, soon.  I swore, and sat the food down on the counter.  I made a bit of a dash to the circuit box thing.  I flipped some things and poked at others, and after a moment, some of the lights came on.  I started re-setting timers on all the things that started blinking noon, and went back to my plate to heat it up again after a moment, ignoring the sweat and fear washing off of me. 

There was a curled-up piece of paper that hadn’t been there when the lights were off.   Of course there was.