Recorded by the author at The Mark Twain House & Museum, July 22, 2025
They told us the unicorn was a dream.
A silvered creature too holy for touch,
too rare for this world,
summoned only by the pure.
But girls learn young that purity is not a condition of the soul.
It is a scent. A silence.
A softness that makes you easy to pierce.
The horn was never for magic.
It was a weapon.
I first saw one when I was nine.
Not the horned horse from storybooks, no.
This one wore a tailored suit and cologne like chloroform.
He smiled like sunlight filtered through stained glass–
a trick of purity and power all at once.
He called me “special.”
Told me the unicorn only appears to girls like me.
Clean.
Good.
Untouched.
They say unicorns bow to virgin maidens,
but they don’t say what happens after they kneel.
They don’t say what the horn is for.
They say they are gentle,
but only in the way a trap is gentle when it waits.
We think the myth is over.
We think we killed the unicorn
when we stopped believing in it.
But it never needed belief.
It needed girls.
Young, afraid, soft-voiced girls
who have been taught that
saying yes is kindness and
saying no is sin.
Girls whose knees bend too easily,
not in prayer, but in performance.
The unicorn isn’t extinct.
It wears different skins now.
Sometimes he’s a teacher.
Sometimes he’s a boss.
Sometimes he’s the man who says, “I thought you liked it.”
Sometimes he’s the silence afterward.
Sometimes he’s the voice in your head that says you asked for it.
Sometimes, he’s the mirror that makes you doubt your own reflection.
They carved the first unicorns into tapestries–
creatures speared and bound
watched by nobles who mistook suffering for sanctity.
And girls still hang themselves in frames for others to study,
calling it a myth when they are devoured.
They don’t tell you that the horn grows back.
That even after you escape one,
another will sniff out your bruised bones and ask if you are still pure.
As if survival stains.
The truth is, the unicorn was never a myth.
Girlhood was.
And we are the ones being hunted–
But we are not prey.
We are not flowers waiting to be sniffed, skirted, gathered.
We are forests now.
Full of thorns. Full of teeth. Full of myths that bite back.
We have learned that purity is not protection.
That silence does not save.
That the unicorn does not come to admire–
he comes to consume.
And so we teach our daughters not to wait in the clearing.
We tell them the unicorn does exist.
We tell them he is beautiful.
And we tell them:
Shoot him anyway.