Sarah Long Writes

So I found the most perfect costume ever imagined by human ingenuity: the Alien Unicorn- my favorite creature 🙂
In celebration of this epic purchase, I’ve decided to write a short short story about an alien unicorn. One disclosure though- I won’t have time to edit it or try to actually make it anything artistic. You have been warned. 🙂

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This silence hurt my ears. Nobody flew by; the dim stars continued blinking their S.O.S’s into the unforgiving galaxy.

Two weeks can be a long time in this place. It was around day four that I started counting the minutes, seconds and milliseconds I’d been traveling. At approximately 101 hours, 27 minutes, 8.2 seconds I began to doubt my decision to take this journey.

Home was now a long-lost hope by this point. I’d forsaken my people; left them to crumble with the dying planet. My friends, family, everyone, all were long dead by now. Centuries would have passed had I chosen to return.

Our lives were so pure and simple once. I vaguely remember the clear purple skies and shimmering crystals that floated down from pink, puffy clouds. We knew nothing of anything then, and it was perfect.

I passed an asteroid at 149 hours, 59 minutes and 2.7 seconds. It was going so fast I nearly broke my neck trying to look at it before it disappeared behind me. This was the closest thing I’d been to since leaving. I wished it had stayed around longer.

Things began changing at home. A strange creature arrived at our capital. He had a long, slender body and five legs. Nobody had ever seen anything with five legs before, so we were all quite intrigued. He said he was from our biggest moon, the one that rose just as the sun set and made the sky a velvety violet. The creature told us we knew too little; he would give us all the knowledge we needed to become the greatest civilization ever imagined.

A thin fracture began to appear on the bottom of my traveling bubble at 178 hours, 48 minutes and 10.9 seconds. It was the width of a thin wisp of hair, but it was lethal. I estimated I’d only have another hundred hours before the bubble would collapse on itself. There was no telling if that would be enough time to get to my destination.

The creature had a strange object around his neck. It looked like a shiny, perfectly square rock. He told us that this thing would give us the knowledge of the universe and our lives would be perfect forever. We were all very excited to hear this and pushed and shoved each other to get to the thing. Soon enough, we all had the knowledge he had. We were born into the great, wide universe. It was the beginning of our ruin.

Sitting in nothingness can lead to strange delusions. At 187 hours, 14 minutes and 26.8 seconds, I thought I saw my blessed destination. I began bucking in excitement; hope and happiness refueled me. But the thing I’d thought I’d seen was really only the destination’s star. It had grown a little bigger in the past few hours, but I knew I was still much too far away.

We were greedy with our new knowledge and built over all the gentle blue grass that we’d cherished in the past. Everything became metal and concrete very quickly. There were no trees and the other creatures on our planet perished within just a few years. We had grown intelligent in a day, but wisdom had escaped us completely. The air became so polluted we had to escape into our buildings that pumped in purified air. Nobody saw crystals float from the sky anymore.

The fracture grew larger at 215 hours, 17 minutes and 55.8 seconds. It sucked out a great deal of my precious air supply. I took slow, deep breathes to protect what I had left and stared straight ahead, at the now-visible destination. Only a few more hours, I promised myself. I just needed a few more hours.

Our planet began to punish us for hurting it so. It shook and broke quite a few of our buildings; something it had never done before. Many of us perished, when before the knowledge our lives were endless- we knew nothing of death. Some of us began speaking out, warning that we must return to our old ways if we wanted to survive. Nobody listened to them until it was too late. I began working on my traveling bubble; it could theoretically take me to the closest inhabitable planet, but I’d only have enough energy available for myself. I greedily kept my secret from the others.

My head was growing light at 218 hours, 10 minutes and… was it 5 seconds? I tried to fight tears as I thought of my friends and family. I should have stayed with them, died with them. I shouldn’t have abandoned them, and now this was my punishment.

The sky was dark gray with smog the day I left. Everyone was panicking, air supply was now at lethally low levels; we’d only have a few days left of it. There was nothing anyone could do. I had just finished my escape bubble. For some reason, I didn’t think of the pain of leaving my friends and family, I never second-guessed my decision. I just simply went.

Countless hours in nothingness make you atone for your sins over and over and over. I shouldn’t have left. It was wrong. At somewhere around 219 hours, I fell asleep. In my dreams I remember thinking that I’d never wake.

And then a sound hit my seemingly deaf ears. A rushing, colliding, growling. I was falling. The escape bubble began doing its job when I entered the atmosphere. It slowed and floated gently down to the planet, like the extinct crystals at home.

This planet was green, with a foreign blue sky and matching blue oceans. I was thrown off by it. I landed in a forest of green trees with brown trunks. The welcoming sensation of grass on my hooves made me want to cry. I was at my new home.

A strange sound came from the East. A running sound; something was coming for me. It was on two legs and had strange fabrics on its furless body. Its head was small and its mouth was flat against its face. I’d never seen anything like it.

It began making noises from that mouth. Was it trying to communicate? I bowed my head and touched my horn to its nose- our traditional greeting at home. The creature touched my face. I decided I liked this thing. It led me through the forest and to a similar creature, albeit this one was much taller. That creature began communicating with my new friend. It waved its hands around and made loud noises. The small creature began crying. Something was terribly wrong; I didn’t like the way the large creature looked at me. I backed up and ran away.

I realized as I galloped through the unfamiliar forest that I would forever be alone.