On dragons, and unicorns too

A novel excerpt

This is an excerpt from my in-progress novel, LIMERENCE. I am very scared to put this here for a multitude of reasons but I feel it might be wise to help me find people who like it. Catherynne M. Valente is the spiritual egg donor of this particular section.

♥︎

Eons ago, there were dragons here. The dragons were mafiosos; they sat upon great heaves of treacly gold and silver coins and various gem orchards of what’s made in the deep and dark. They excreted plenty of young with eggs the size of outhouses, shiny and heavy like porcelain, all with different painted shells of Russian cocks, Shinto forests, and sweet, quiet floral concentrics, which would often correspond to the mood and brawn of the young at hand. The young would pop out after a couple weeks, their egg basked in the glow of the gold that would refract all the way from the entrance of the cavern in which they kept their famiglie, forming a yellow ravine that faded as one got deeper and deeper, closer to the head of the reptilian business practices; the young would pop out and crack their necks from left to right and round again, flap their claggy wings, and ask for instructions. The little ones could burrow through windows and hatches, writhe away with inherited jewels or designer pokers for aristocratic chimneys or prayer books not-so-surreptitiously inlaid with something subterranean. An elder sibling operated as a helicopter for those who couldn’t yet pinionize, holding a thick robe between highly serrated teeth that the smaller offspring could clutch onto with its own little limbs and teeth and climb and flap upwards until it could sit on its superior’s back with the moola around its neck or in the crook of its babyarm. As one aged, one could operate as a basher, threatening those who didn’t pay protection, carrying away human young lured outside by the sight of something pretty on-site to be used as hostages; these children either lost their skulls despondently in the grottos or came back much richer than before (dragons having a poor conception of pockets and boot-space). The dragons lived in the fashion of the moon. They waxed and waned, they were indeed finite, and yet they didn’t require something in the mouth, they lived off of pure glow and the heaviness of that glow; it was evolutionary; their lack of dietary reality was similar to how jellyfishes don’t have brains; just because something is not accounted for doesn’t mean it can’t be true. The people did not like the dragons. They did not like: their hornless unicorns, their empty marriage rings, their shrineless temples, their wooden swords, or otherwise metal swords’ sheen blackened with coal, their light bookends, their knick-knack less hovels teetering on the edge of something that happens millennia ahead and not for our sake. The dragons did, to some extent, “protect”; they protected against foreigners that came from mountainless steppes and plains that had never seen viscid green beasts before, and they did not harm the children in their keep, only let them fester and fend for themselves (if they got out by themselves, they got out). But the people, the humans, it wasn’t great to not be read as apex. So one of these hovels, newer victims, set traps in the nearby forest, told the dragons their shiny things were all there, hidden in the dirt between the roots of the old ash trees, and the dragons went there, shoving humus dust to and fro with their snouts until great, thick costly nets made from sheep gut and bone (the sheep had been all hoosed up and uneatable) fell upon their virescent backs. There they writhed like cats under sheets in a shineless place until they had no more to give, finally losing their heartbeat under the pitiless new moon. The man who invented these nets, he drew it all down and had the net plan copied by his beautiful, scheming amanuensis, who sold these sheets by too-much-ducat-per-scroll to every hovel’s big-dog man, the man with a plan. Every hovel had and has one of those who try to be this man. The men with plans went to it and every little-less-than-a-month, more and more creatures were cast into the dirt. It is said that some went away inside the stone, and are just waiting to resurface under a different dominant human epistemology, in which they could engage fairly with shine without being sold short. But that’s just a rumor.

In similar eons, there were unicorns, too, that served the people with the kind of concord that could only mean doom. Any wild unicorn that saw a human that was beautiful, they would walk towards and follow around til the end of life (either of the human or of the horse). Other than this subservient penchant they were just regular horses, only with horns that came in different sizes and curvatures, almost in the sense that human male vectors of generation do, although people don’t tend to collect those. Or do they. It was a trend amongst old men, to collect the horns, and indeed they would sell for much. In lands that were merely fistfuls of hovels there was no Anti-De-Hornation Act that could ward off these pecky geezers, and so many of the unicorns, once brought into the anthropomorphic gaze by some dainty gallant or fine bride, were often caught by a soily highwayman when its young rider went off to piss amidst a forest crossing or left it outside the taverna when looking for the whelm of drink. Generally leaving it outside on a rope, even if guarded by another man, was fatuous in the face of someone with a knife and a will. In recent years remnants of unicorn horns have been studied by the Biomaterial sect of Godcorp (they are always looking at new cross-applications for Communion) and lo and behold it appears to have the capacity to turn materials clear that were previously not, as if neutralizing all of the pigments and acting as some sort of self-sufficient prism. When 5 grams of ground unicorn horn were added to 5 grams of melted bronze and melded together into a spoon, the spoon flickered in and out of visibility, similar to how if you can see something from only one eye’s perspective or the eyes have drastically far perspectives on it, looking at it with both makes it appear “see through” or to apparate in and out of being. The people of the hovels didn’t know this, of course, it was merely collective, like the Candidate-Cards that ran for a few years recently, or perhaps superstitious. Some of these old boy hovel senexes claimed to be, rather, haruspex-es of the external, reading the future of the one who chopped off the horn – it usually came off as clean as cake – with its dimensions and luster, or creating luck for their future, depending on who you ask. One of these old boys happened to have the horse standing inside his cottage while he was doing a reading. Unbeknownst to him or the naughty brigand that had summoned it and rid it of its horn thus, trying to dispel the continuation of his alewife’s string of miscarriages when she was already a rusty twenty nine, the horse was deeply uncomfortable standing and staring at the sticks that had belonged to its friends and ancestors. The old man had all these horns lined up in glass cabinets as if they were teapots or family portraits, but spare horns littered the floor, some of them mounted or in the process of being mounted on obsidian stands labeled with origin. The horse saw the thin, speckled cudgel of 72940238, whom he had bred with in the time of the fairies and megaflora, cooing and neighing behind a magnolia tree; the black baton of 120398120, whose horn ended in a small circular bump like a ballpoint pen, with whom he remembered holding an apple (between their mouths) at a mutual horse’s Hornening; the looped, dynamic, lilac-pink of his… mate, 9102810, oh, 9102810 whose hooves were as diamond as the day, who neighed at everyone’s jokes, who could find the way to apply a thing’s beauty to every part of his clop and neigh through life, who was this horse’s mate before he had seen the abdominal magnificence of the fine chap (a local brew-model whose job was to stand outside the entrance of the tavern with a specially engraved glass of ale and drink expressively and shirtlessly) whose negligence had brought him hither. The appearance of 9102810 in his memory coupled with the mere visual weight of this loser geezer’s abode gave the horse an asthmatic attack that ended in it fainting directly onto the spindly, weapon-ish horn of 023423947, which had sat upright on the floor. The horse heaved and bled and the two men (they had already removed its horn) weren’t sure what to do. The horse lost lots of blood fast and died. Then the peculiarity: all of its blood turned to soft gold, inside and out. It was something to do with the compounds in the horn and how they react with organic material as the Godcorp ™ biological board now recognizes. But in a time in which dragons were still plundering with unstoppable extroversion, this was obviously fatal feedback for the unicorns. After all, humans are dragons too.

♥︎

If you liked this, you can get in touch at:

esterfreider@gmail.com

I need a publisher and also I can write you anything from art reviews to surrealist porn.