The Love of Gentle Creatures

A Fantasy

Photo by Kyaw Tun on Unsplash

1.

The topiary arrived, crated and swathed in burlap, in the rain-slick bed of a Dark’s Nursery pickup truck. It was tall enough to rake the overhanging branches of the woodland trees as the truck crept up the gravel drive. Two burly men in flannel shirts and coveralls filled the cab of the truck, the driver’s meaty hands dwarfing the steering wheel.

Del stood in the April drizzle beside the clean, raked spot where the topiary was to be established. The giants from the nursery rolled creaking from the truck, nodded at Del, and began the back-straining labor of lowering the crate to the ground. The thick rope handles groaned, and the men puffed with exertion, their faces red and the brawn of their arms and shoulders threatening to burst their shirt seams. With stoic and stately calm, they eased the crate up to the designated spot and began to dismantle it.

“Ms. Dark said plant it for ya. Sure that’s where you want it?” The giant with the shaved head cocked an eyebrow toward the cleared space in the azalea border, just to the right of the front door.

Del, feeling superfluous and somehow irritated by the nurserymen’s bovine complacency, said, “Yes. That’s fine. Can I help?”

Baldy studied him for a moment, the light rain running over his stubbly scalp and down the narrow gullies behind his little pit-bull ears.

“Can if you want. Ms. Dark said we was to do it, though.” With that, he lost interest in Del and turned to help his partner pull apart the crate.

Once freed of its wrappings and rough pine cage, the four-foot-tall unicorn reared on its delicate cloven feet and pawed the air with spirit. It was clipped from box, its roots carefully wrapped in more burlap. A deft hand had trained it. The unicorn was perfectly formed, showing lines as sleek and dainty as those of a deer. It held its proud head on an arched neck, and its tail – fashioned after the long, tufted whip of a lion – curled up and around like the handle of a teapot. Del thought he could see the tense and quiver of its muscles, the expressive flash of its eye.

The shorn giant stepped back and took it all in. “Now that’s a pretty thing,” he breathed.

Giant Number Two, who sported a greasy black ponytail, made a noncommittal grunt and hove to with a spade in the azalea bed. Soon the two of them were babying the topiary into the earth, handling it as if it were their grandmother’s good china. They fussed over and primped the topiary like nervous mothers. Finally, it was done. Ponytail tossed the tools into the back of the truck and climbed into the cab. Baldy turned once more to Del, who was beginning to shiver in his damp sweatshirt.

“That suit ya, Mr. Penny?”

Before Del could reply, the man pulled a sheaf of paper from his coverall pocket and offered it up.

“That there’s the information on how to care for your topiary, and Ms. Dark’s bill. She said if you have questions, just give her a call.” He turned to go and then seemed to remember an important point. “Oh, yeah. She said if you think you can’t live with it, she’ll buy it back. She said give it some time to make itself at home.”

The man favored Del with a gold-toothed leer before striding to the truck.

2.

Del wasn’t really a gardener. After his wife’s death, he’d needed something to burn up all the empty time and something that used him up, too. Sleep had not come easy at first. One day Del had looked out at his small yard hemmed about by woods and had gone out to the garage and gotten a shovel.

He had dug all day, removing the sod and stacking it by the wood line, and that night he had fallen into bed in his muddy clothes and slept the sleep of oblivion. The next morning, aching in every joint and muscle fiber, he had driven to Dark’s Nursery and told Nicola Dark what he had done. She had looked at him for several minutes and uttered the word that had changed Del’s life.

“Shrubs.”

It was sound advice. He was a novice at growing things, but shrubbery was tough and forgiving. It filled the space quickly, and Nicola helped him choose a nice variety. He had blooms of one kind or another almost all year, and evergreens in winter. Five years after the demolition of his lawn, his shrub garden was a favorite on the Wickeford Mills garden tour. Best of all, he slept deeply and almost dreamlessly.

Loneliness settled on Del like a heavy coat, difficult and comforting by turns. He had few social outlets, preferring to potter in his garden or tramp the Johns Woods with his camera, hunting for subjects to sketch and paint. His canvases stacked up in his attic bedroom, unseen by anyone and forgotten by Del after he finished with them.

He did not get a dog or a cat, as his sister had suggested, because he could not face the prospect of its dying someday. He most definitely did not date. It seemed his wife had taken with her all the deep and comfortable love of which he’d been capable, all the shy passion that had been allotted him. Yet, the wistful desire for companionship, for some gentle undemanding kind of love, gnawed at him.  

Nicola Dark, who treated him with the easy warmth of a sister and sometimes shared coffee with him, had offered him an unorthodox solution.

“Look, Del,” she had said, “wouldn’t you like something for your front entry? Something special to … greet guests?”

Del rarely used his front entrance and seldom had visitors, but Nicola had turned her glowing, cognac-colored eyes on him, the eyes of a wild thing, and he had shivered. With sudden certainty, he knew he needed whatever thing she suggested.

“I’ve got a nice big topiary at the nursery,” she said. “It’s the very thing you need. A little bit of magic.”

And so, the enchanting boxwood unicorn had come to live with him.

3.

He was amused now to find himself going out of his way to use his front door, all so that he might stop for a few moments and view the topiary that had come to seem like a companion to him.

He marveled at its expressive face and ran his fingertips over a slender foreleg, a small heart-shaped hoof cloven like a deer’s foot. He touched the bare fibrous spiral of its horn, and for breathless seconds the topiary ceased to be a thing of twigs and leaves and became a creature of magic. On more than one occasion he found himself talking to it, and though he felt a bit foolish, it was delightful, too. A harmless game.

“You are a handsome little beast,” he told it after several weeks of giddy admiration. “I hope I can do you justice when it’s time to prune you.”

Del ran his hand over the curves of its neck and the careful waves of its mane. He was afraid to use the shears on such an exquisite specimen, but the box had begun to look the tiniest bit shaggy – as though the unicorn were growing a winter coat instead of shedding it. He resolved to ask Nicola to do the first clipping, and he would watch and learn. He fidgeted with its neat little ears that seemed so alert to his every word, unaware that he was scratching them as though the topiary were a friendly dog.

That night, an enormous moon shone down in a silver deluge. It poured its cool luminosity across Del where he lay sleeping in the overstuffed chair by his bedroom window, his book from earlier splayed across his knee. The light coaxed him to consciousness, and he turned a bleary eye toward the red dial of the alarm clock and saw that midnight had flown.

Heavy with sleep, he contemplated the merits of shambling to his bed but was revived by a strange sound coming from the parking area below him. He listened with waking auditory senses to the distinct sound of footsteps on the crushed stone. It sounded like several feet, too, and amid the subtle crunch and scuffle he heard soft, rhythmic thuds.

Del rolled to his feet and peeked around the frame of the curtainless window. The parking area was lit like a stage by the blazing moon, and he could discern movement. Shadows shivered over the ground, and a new sound came to his ears. Crunch, crunch, snuffle, snort. The sounds were gentle and leisurely, not at all like the sounds of a would-be housebreaker. Del pressed his forehead to the glass and peered down the front of the house. In the bright moonlight, he saw the sleek rumps and flickering tails of three deer. Surely, they weren’t chewing on the azaleas. A sizzle of panic burst like a camera flash in Del’s mind as he thought of the topiary. How long had they been out there?

Galvanized, Del flew from the room and down the stairs, his bare feet pounding the wooden treads like war drums. He fumbled at the lock on the front door, cursing his clumsiness, and threw it open with a mighty heave. The moon showed three white tails, like incandescent flags of truce, fleeing into the forest. He staggered onto his front stoop and fell to his knees beside the topiary. He knew the devastation deer could wreak on shrubbery, and as he raised his eyes to the unicorn his heart was in his mouth.

The topiary sparkled in the hazy moon glow, its shadow looming up the brick wall behind it. It appeared uninjured, and Del’s eyes went to the azalea bushes beside it. All was as it should be. Puzzled and relieved, he climbed to his feet and inspected the shrubs further. The mulch had been kicked about a bit and the deep impression of hooves showed here and there.

If anything had changed, it was that the topiary no longer looked shaggy. It was as sleek as if Nicola had come to clip it. Del passed his hands over the unicorn, and then turned to gaze into the woods. He could hardly credit it, but it seemed the deer had trimmed the topiary with their nibbling and had done a job that would have made any master gardener proud.

4.

Del’s job in the registration office of the university across the river suited his need for quiet employment and made use of his tidy habits. Del liked organization. His desk was always neat, his forms always properly filed. His office was a small corner nest with a window that looked out on the groomed maintenance lane between Mallory Hall and the campus library. It was a little-used thoroughfare, bosky with dogwoods and mountain laurel, and he often ate his lunch there in solitude.

One day, Del arrived to an unwelcome change in his tranquil routine. He was to have an assistant, a woman named Marla Rance, who proved to be loud and boisterous in volume, dress, and the application of perfume. Her lacquered face with its aggressively red lips shattered the calm décor of his office like a neon bar sign. Del edged around her as she introduced herself with wide sweeps of her bangled arms. He opened the window and, giving Marla a pained smile, rolled his chair as close to the fresh air as possible.

Things did not improve as Marla became a fixture in the reception area. Her every phone call was a shouted skirmish often interspersed with braying laughter. Her desk was a parti-colored explosion of bobble head dolls and gimcracks studded with sequins, feathers, and fluttering reflective streamers. It sailed on the industrial mauve carpet like a festive cruise ship amid a wake of overflowing files. The worst of it was that Marla seemed oblivious to Del’s cringing avoidance of her space, and to the emphatic boundary of his closed door.

At any moment, she might erupt across the threshold bearing a mare’s nest of dog-eared papers, or a glittery greeting card requiring Del’s signature for an unknown secretary in another department, or a gooey mash of cake from an office party, replete with the puddled remains of a birthday candle. Marla had taken an interest in Del, and the force of her notice exhausted and weighed on him.

After two weeks of this onslaught upon his peace of mind, Del made two terrible mistakes. The first happened one morning as he passed Marla’s magpie trove, determined to barricade himself in his office. He saw, on the corner of her desk, a new bobble-headed creature. It was a white unicorn with a rainbow mane and tail. It wore a little gold bell around its neck, and its head wagged gently at him.

Marla was nowhere to be seen. Del glanced about him, and then reached out a finger and gave the toy a gentle tap. It nodded and gyrated, and Del smiled, thinking of his own unicorn. That was how he was caught when Marla arrived, her cloying vanilla musk preceding her. She was delighted to find Del standing in her domain rather than creeping past it like a shadow.

“You like my little unicorn? I just got it.”

She moved to stand beside Del, much too close for his comfort. She radiated the heat of a furnace, and he was stifled inside her sweet cloud of scent. She picked up the unicorn and pressed her cheek to it, then held it up to Del as though for a kiss. He took a stumbling step backward, but Marla was not about to let him escape. She tickled his nose with the thing’s fluffy mane.

“I think it likes you,” she cooed. “Do men like unicorns as much as we girls do?”

She batted her eyes flirtatiously.

Del’s head reeled. He wanted only to flee the monstrous woman and, as he eyed the distance to his door, he spoke without thinking.

“Sure Marla. I have a unicorn topiary.”

“Ooooh,” she squealed. “I just love those! You’ll have to let me come see it sometime.”

Panic gave him wings, and Del mumbled an excuse and vaulted for his office, closing the door on the rainbow unicorn whose comical bobbing had become the wild frenzy of possession. Outside his door, Marla chuckled indulgently and went humming to her work.

That night, Del fell asleep on the couch and into a nightmare in which Marla was outside his French doors, dancing the flamenco on the tile patio. Tap, taptaptap, went her heels as she whirled toward the doors. She thrust her garish face against the panes and whispered his name. Del woke with a start, his gaze going to the glass doors. For a moment, he thought he saw dark eyes looking in at him and he bolted upright in alarm.

Something tapped speedily away, a grey form in the moonless gloom, perhaps a small deer. Whatever it was bounded off through the garden and vanished into the woods. Del slumped back on the couch, already drifting toward sleep again. He didn’t recall until morning that the creature’s tail had been long and tufted.

Del’s second mistake was thinking himself unobserved as he slipped away for lunch on his quiet bench. It was a warm day, and the lulling purr of honeybees in the laurel blossoms filled the air. He had brought a sketchpad with him, and putting aside his sandwich and apple, he began to draw the bees and flowers in soft pencil, using his thumb to smudge in the shadows. So intent on this study was he that he failed to notice Marla’s approach until her figure blocked the light. He looked up blinking and saw her tilting her head this way and that as she stared down at the drawing.

“Hey, you’re pretty good.”

She was eating a hotdog, and as she bent closer a glob of ketchup fell onto the corner of his page. Marla pulled a crumpled napkin from her pocket and swiped at it.

“Sorry, hon. I didn’t know you could draw. Maybe you could do my portrait.”

She sat beside him on the bench, chewing with vigor. Del thought he might be in shock, numb and unable to think of a single cohesive sentence. He closed the sketchpad and put it aside. He shoved his sandwich and apple back into the brown paper bag in which he’d brought them and pushed the whole thing into the adjacent trash receptacle. He tried to move as far from Marla on the bench as possible, but she turned toward him, and their knees touched.

“Hey Del, you know what? I could come over this weekend and you could draw me. I could see your topiary, too. It’ll be fun.”

Del was separating from his body. “Come over?”

“Yeah, to your place. I know where it is. I drove past last weekend, but I guess you weren’t home. Anyway, I could come over and bring a bottle of wine. It’ll do you good to have some company.”

Marla made a sympathetic face, as though he were a recent widower still in the throes of new grief.

“No.” Del shot to his feet. He looked around for help and saw no one.

“You’ve probably got an art studio or something, huh? I can’t wait to see that. People say I’m artistic, you know.”

Marla glanced at the rhinestone encrusted face of her watch and made a little screech of alarm.

“Cripes! I’ve got a dentist appointment in twenty minutes.” She bared her teeth at Del. “Do I have anything stuck in my teeth? Never mind, I’ve got to run.”

She stood and poked Del playfully in the ribs. “See ya Saturday, hon.”

Del watched her dash from sight, casting aside the ketchup smeared napkin as she went, and thought that he really didn’t feel very well. He trudged over to Marla’s litter and delivered it to the trash receptacle on his way back inside Mallory Hall. In his office, he tossed a few files into his briefcase and turned out the light. For only the second time in his ten years at the university, Del Penny left early.

5.

He arrived home with thoughts of the leftover meatloaf in his refrigerator keeping companionable company with his rumbling stomach. The sickening paralysis caused by Marla’s assault had ebbed away as he crossed the river into Wickeford Mills and left him entirely as he followed Route 9 through the Johns Woods. As he eased the little coupe down his gravel lane, he began to feel like a kid on holiday. He would have the rest of the day to himself, and he was making plans of how to spend it when he saw that the topiary was gone.

The breath rushed from his lungs. His stomach rolled into a fist. He roared into the garage, carving a fan in the smooth crushed stone, and fell over his own feet getting out of the car. Regaining momentum, he sprinted to the front door and confirmed that his eyes had not deceived him.

The spot where the unicorn had stood was neat and unmolested. It had not been dug from the earth, nor had it been sawed down. Del slapped his forehead and raked a shaking hand through his hair. It couldn’t be, and yet it was; the topiary had vanished like a rabbit from a hat.

The snap of a twig and a soft rustle drew his attention to the woods. Something was moving through the laurels there with furtive intent. Still clinging to the thought of a thief, Del ran toward the woods and plunged through the thick understory. Branches clutched and whipped at him, and the stealthy watcher bolted from cover and raced before him. Swiping foliage from his face, Del crashed after it until he saw that it was a deer. It had stopped several yards ahead of him, looking back with wide chocolate eyes, and then it huffed and stepped lightly into the shadows and was gone.

Del walked back to his front door with dragging steps, his clean white shirt soiled and torn, and one loafer missing. His hair hung in his eyes. He could barely bring himself to look at the empty spot where the topiary had stood. He forced his gaze there and shock unhinged his jaw.

The spry little unicorn was back, prancing on its tiny feet, arching its neck, and lashing its tufted tail just as before. If Del hadn’t known better, he would have said that it was looking at him with pert humor. For several minutes, he could do nothing but stare, and then he dropped to his knees in the soft fragrant mulch and hugged the topiary.

6.

The next morning, a Thursday, Del strode into Mallory Hall bristling with purpose. He would tell Marla that he found her attentions inappropriate and unwelcome. In fact, he would attempt to rid himself of the assistant he had never wanted nor needed. Student Aid needed people. He would work out a transfer for Ms. Rance.

Ready with his speech, he opened the door to Registration but found the reception area dim and quiet. Marla’s desk sat in the shadowy serenity like a heap of forgotten party favors. Del approached it with the caution of a savvy child winding a jack-in-the-box. Marla was not hiding behind either the desk or the bank of file cabinets. She was not lurking in his office. He began to relax, but as he flipped on his light, he saw it.

In the center of his tidy desk was a greeting card sugared with the vile type of glitter that snows all over everything and clings to the hands for days. Beneath it lay a form, creased and coffee-stained and staple torn. Del grasped the form by one bent corner and eased it from beneath the card. A sticky bit of candy adhered to its back, and it exuded an aroma of vanilla musk and stale tobacco.

 It was a request for medical leave, dated two weeks prior and jostled about in the bottom of Marla’s immense handbag ever since. It informed Del that Marla was having oral surgery and would not be back to work until Monday. This was a bit of welcome news, but it was overshadowed by the dread induced by the glitzy card. Del sat at his desk and opened the card with the tip of his letter opener. A shower of glitter fell on the blotter.

“Dear Del,” it read, “You’ll have to get along without me for a couple of days but try not to miss me too much. Ha Ha. Can’t wait to see you Saturday. I’ll bring a picnic lunch and the wine. We can make a day of it. See you then! Marla”.

The message was punctuated by smiley face stickers and flower doodles. Del fell back in his chair a spun in slow motion toward the window. The letter opener was in his hand, and briefly he thought of plunging it into his heart. Once again, Marla had sapped the life force from him, this time by written curse. The lights fluttered on in the reception area as the staff filtered in, chattering. Del stood. He had to get Marla’s phone number. He had to avert the catastrophe of her visit.

7.

By the time Del left the university that night, the moon was rising. Exhausted, he had not been able to concentrate on his work or the meetings that had kept him so late. All his thoughts had been turned toward the imminent destruction of the weekend. Though he had asked everywhere, Marla’s contact information could not be found. She had become a juggernaut of evil, bearing down upon him with relentless purpose.

He rubbed his red eyes as he approached the steel truss bridge that spanned the Wicke River. Halfway across, he drove into a fog, thick but ragged, that filled up the little village of Wickeford Mills and clotted in the Johns Woods. Moonlight poured through the patches in the fog and lit it with an eerie glow. The edges of things disappeared, and Del found his tires on the soft berm of the road more than once.

He wrestled the little car back onto the hardtop. In the hazy beams of his headlights, the trees loomed and vanished, and the road was a meager square like a doormat before him. Tired and daunted, he soon felt the disorienting power of the fog. It muffled all sound, and the car seemed to float in a fairy tale forest of infinite depth – an older, even wilder, incarnation of the Johns Woods.

As he coasted around a wide curve, half dreaming, Del saw a figure detach from the gauzy woods and slip onto the road. It froze in the glare of his lights, and he saw a brief glint of moonlight on its spiraled horn. With a cry of alarm, he twisted the wheel, and the car left the hardtop with a squeal. The roadside ditch swallowed it with a shuddering crunch, and Del closed his eyes as the rear tires chewed at the air.

8.

Someone was swabbing his face with a piece of velvet. Del looked up through the open driver’s side window and saw stars in the liquid night. No. They were eyes he was looking into, dark and luminous. The velvet cloth was a muzzle, now pressed to his forehead in silent acknowledgement of his awareness. A soft puff of warm breath tickled over his face, and then the unicorn was gone.

Del released himself from his seatbelt and climbed out through the window into the soothing damp of the fog. The car lay on its side, its grill tilted down, in the ditch. The headlights illuminated the sluggish water at its bottom. Del sat on the canted car for a moment, then hopped onto the berm of the road.

Soft tapping footfalls came toward him. The unicorn stood quivering in the forest hush. A little further down the road, Del saw two deer tiptoeing into the trees. The unicorn pranced in place, then turned to follow them. Del took a few tottering steps after it, one hand extended in supplication.

“Please.” He hitched a sobbing breath.

At the tree line, the unicorn hesitated. It pawed at the short grass and shook its mane. It’s lion’s tail lashed the fog. Finally, it looked back and whickered tenderly. Without a second thought, Del kicked off his shoes and followed barefooted into the endless forest.