Her father shook his head, smiling. Teeth oversized and thick. “Afraid not,” he said.

He lunged for her and she screamed, dashed for the door. But he was too fast, too strong. Fingers closed around her arm and she looked down, saw fingernails like chips of black coal, sharpened to pinpoint tips.

From the ceiling, she heard the plucking of strings. A wild rumpus of a thousand violins being sprung, broken, tugged and pecked. A mad, broken pizzicato.

Then she was flying.

She slammed into the wall with a great crash of cymbals, dropped face-down on her bed. Her arm hurt bad and she wondered if it was broken. He came for her again.

Panicked, she leapt from the bed, grabbed the statuette, began to spin toward him, hoping to defend herself, when something impossibly hard slammed into the side of her head. She dropped, senseless and limp, to the floor. She moaned. The room swung out of focus, sideways.

Her ears rang, and all else was muted. She stared dumbly across the great expanse of her carpeted world. She recalled a pink doll house that used to stand in the far corner, where she would play for hours and hours. She thought of her mother telling her stories; remembered a small easel her father had given her on her 6th birthday. She’d painted watercolor flowers on sheets of thick, rough paper from the art store. The day her mother died she’d burned all the flower paintings. Made a bonfire in the backyard and turned them into sheets of ash. Later, she exiled the easel and dollhouse to the dark of the closet.

She had only a few moments left in her life to wonder why she’d let her childhood go without more of a fight. Why had she let it go so easily if this was growing up?

Her father’s feet filled her vision. His brown work boots had split apart and she saw rough hooves behind torn leather, pushing through the stretched, shredded fabric of wool socks. One foot kicked her over, and she could only stare, arms sprawled to the sides, at the towering beast. He offered a grotesque smile, raised his arms like a bird taking flight and lifted a giant hoof high off the ground. With a grunt, he stomped onto the middle of her chest, like a mule kicking a rusted bucket. She felt something snap inside her and she spasmed, then spilled tears and groaned, her body sliding into shock.

He bent over her, long fingers coiled around her neck. She heard knuckles clicking as fingers twined around her throat like snakes, the point of each fingernail digging into flesh. She was lifted off the ground like a doll. Despite her body’s shock, her fingers tightened their grip on the cool statuette and held on as her feet hung limp in the air. She found herself looking directly into her father’s deranged, alien face. His liquid black eyes stared back at her coldly. The hole in his forehead swirled and gaped like the mouth of a hooked fish, pulsing with excitement and pleasure.

“Almost done here,” he said, his voice deep and ancient.

A million miles away, she heard rumbling thunder. The strumming of cello strings that pranced through the room had been joined by bursts of a baritone horn, a thumping, bumping orchestra that might accompany a jaunty dance, a Strauss waltz.

She swung the statuette at her father’s head. The long spiral horn went in through his left temple, sunk three inches deep, smoothly, as it might slide through butter. She gritted her teeth and pulled it free, blood spitting from the wound, then rammed it in again, this time just above the ear. She felt a snap as the horn broke free from the rest of the figurine, and when she dropped her arm there was only a nub on the unicorn’s head where the long spiraling horn had once protruded.

Her father blinked, but no sound came from his clenched throat. His fingers opened and she fell to the ground, cried out in pain, felt a dagger punch into her chest. He stumbled backward clumsily, a horrid dance that fell sickly in time to the waning melody, then dropped against the far wall, head lolled to one side.

Esther waited, panting, fisted hands clutched to her pained chest.

Her father’s head elongated, skin breaking with black bristles, teeth reaching, eyes bulging. A stunted shard extended from the hole in the black forehead – the broken base of a unicorn’s horn.

She crawled to him, cradled the enormous, sagging head in her arms. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said, over and over. She wept as she held him—wept for her mother, herself, her father. For Hobbes. For all that had been lost.

A sound came from the dying creature. She resisted her cries and leaned close to its mouth. “One more thing,” it said, its voice a scratched whisper, brittle as a winter leaf.

She listened, and nodded. When he stopped breathing, she laid him down gently on the patch of floor that once housed her childhood, in the room that once cradled her innocence. She stood slowly and staggered to the window, still open wide, and pushed herself into the night.

She didn’t look back.

Outside she could smell a brewing storm. The sky was the color of plum, the wind calm but charged. The jagged music played on behind her, but drifts also now came from the air, from the earth. The wild bleat of a horn, the rumble of a bass drum. But not symphonic, not whole.

She saw a flash of lightning in the distance but heard no thunder, felt no rain. She ran awkwardly for the trees, her chest broken, stabbing her with every step. The remains of the figurine still clutched tight in one small hand.

The tunnel of trees swayed, arms lifted. Melodic voices came from behind their trunks, a sad chorus paving her way deeper, deeper into the wood, toward the Devil’s Elbow.

She went on as best she could, breath hitching, head pounding. Finally she reached the hole where she had found the statuette, and returned the thing to it. She coughed, a flood of bile and blood pushed into the back of her throat. She gagged, then coughed again. Even in the dark she could see the splash of liquid splatter against the moon-tinged glimmer of the object.

She looked around, desperate. A few feet away she saw the protuberance of a smooth stone. She crawled to it and began to dig, relieved there was more of it hidden beneath the earth. It would serve.

Free of the dirt, the rock was the size of an oblong baseball, and she gripped it easily in her hand as she crawled back to the hole where the statuette lay. She saw it there, at the bottom, already broken but still alive, still throbbing with power. She sensed the rustle of the trees around her. The chorus grew, rose like a high tide, warning her. The beating of bass drums came from the heavens, and the soft mumbling of horns, carried by a soft breeze, drifted through her, slid into her ears, nuzzled against her slowing mind like a ghostly feline.

She gritted her teeth and brought the rock down on the statuette, felt the satisfying crack as something inside it separated. She raised the rock again, slammed it down again. The chorus was rhythmic, a rising tremolo. Jagged horns surged, beating against her like shadowy fists. Jolting percussion vibrated her bones. The mad swipe of a thunderbolt bow against sky-wide strings, angry and frightened, pitched through the trees, filled the breadth of the tunnel with thick, crackling air.

Esther shrieked, the last of her strength pouring from her, and brought the rock down again, and again, and again.

Spent, she released the stone, stared down at the splintered fragments; the once beautiful figurine now a jumble of dead shards. She felt weak. A surge of fresh blood shot up from deep within her, spilled into her mouth, coated her tongue and teeth. She gagged and spat, and when the dark blood splattered onto the smashed idol, the music stopped. The strings, the drums, the horns… all of it… stopped.

There was silence.

She swayed on her hands and knees, but could still push the earth she had dug free back into the hole, filling it. When finished, she fell to her side, stared upward. The trees looked down at her, impassive as the moon and stars and gods beyond.

A sharp, splintering sound, like a massive sheet of ice slowly cracking into fragments. She turned her head, which felt heavy, so heavy, and saw the trees twisting and bending unnaturally, as if they had joints being broken by an invisible force. They splintered in snapping blasts of bark. The leaves upon their branches browned as one, dried up, and crinkled into small flutes that fell around her softly, a rain of feathery death. Slowly, each tree tipped, and fell. There was a splashing crash that she felt as much as heard. All around her they pulled free of the earth, disjointed and misshapen, and tumbled, collapsed to the ground, lifeless.

She rolled her heavy head the other way, far as she was able. Her breath came slowly, each intake hurting worse, each gasp shorter, her lungs slowly shrinking, filling with blood where rib had punctured lung.

All the trees had fallen, blackened as if by fire, and she could now see the entire ceiling of night sky, unbroken by their withered trunks. A meteor shot across the firmament of her wide, staring eye, captured a final frozen image of the stars and planets shimmering like fireflies on bruised parchment, the moon a quiet mother.

Esther lay in the open field, surrounded by a woven circle of deadwood that enclosed her like a witch’s funeral wreath. She had time only for a prayer: No more dreams. Her eyelids closed like curtains on a play, and darkness flooded her.

LIGHT.

Bright enough to turn the skin of her closed eyelids to pink. She flickered them open, stared at a clear blue sky. A nimble, warm wind swept the earth, fingered her hair, tickled her skin. She sat up, the pain in her chest gone.

She looked about, confused and sleepy. The day seemed to sing a sweet silent coda to her of its perfection, its absolute beauty.

She stood on wobbly legs, but felt good, felt strong. She took a few deep breaths, let the analeptic oxygen clear her head, feed her heart.

“Esther!”

The voice came from beyond the line of trees stretching before her, a line that would become a tunnel leading home.

“Esther!”

She knew that voice, and with a gasp, she ran.

She cut through brush to the path, hopped over a fallen trunk, landed on her heels and pumped her legs around the bend. The tunnel appeared before her, and in the distance, the familiar meadow, and her house. She could see her bedroom window, closed now. At the front of the house she saw a woman looking toward the trees, hand shielding her eyes, blonde hair whispering out from the sides of her neck. A man came and stood next to the woman. He wrapped an arm lovingly around her shoulders.

He waved at her, and Esther, smiling and sprinting, waved wildly back. She ran across the vast plane of meadow, thrown wide in all dimensions, covered in brilliant green and dotted with flowers, the colors of which she’d never seen.

Bells chimed where her feet crushed grass, and the trees lining either side of her bent, creaking, as she ran past; long trunks curving to point her way home. The wind pushed at her back, lifting her.

Earth and sky melted away as she leapt through electric silence.