oona—the tiny ceramic unicorn—stood on his desk. oona loved the kitschy pink hearts machine-kissed into her barrel and flank. and she loved the plastic green succulent wedged into her withers, its "sand bed" held fast by an industrial-grade thermoset epoxy which left her backside rough as sandpaper. her eyes—forever battering—were just tiny acrylic u’s from which three delicate lashes hung like tears.

oona dreamt of the man writing a story about her. he’d written about everything else in their little studio: the hot water boiler, the pencil collection, the porcelain pygmalion with his galatea, bought on kensington high street over twenty years ago. oona hated the statuesque couple. pygmalion’s chiseled arms enveloped his creation, her fingers wrapped within the curls of his hair. yet galatea never moved, had nothing of interest to say, and would never be anything other than her perfectly predictable proportions.

oona had no perch. so no one noticed how pleasant the shape of her horn or how her ears vanished into the ridges of her pink braids. how clever the fact of me, she thought, feeling herself. how dare he not see.

but the truth was he had seen, had in fact noticed her charms and her wit and her infinite self-regard. only he’d not thought of a place to put her yet. unicorns were creatures of myth, emblems of sexual awakening. harappan scribes stamped their likeness into seals, marking their bearers with status and wealth. poets sang their mysteries in lemnos, in caria, and in kush.

so imagine his frustration, his confusion, his slight underwhelmedness, to find a member of this most ancient race so casually dashed off and plopped without thought on his desk, her spine hollowed out to make way for fake shrubbery. he’d dreamt better things for her, hoped to find her on a pedestal, been biding his time till inspiration came.

yet when it did, it found her only as she was. nothing to be done about it. he wrote oona as she stood.