The Unicorn Who Hated Glitter

Petal shook her mane against the fence post, trying to knock loose the glitter that clung there no matter what she did. It came down in a fine gold cloud, coating her hooves, her eyelashes, the grass at her feet. She sneezed. It never worked. The glitter always came back, shimmering out of nowhere the moment anyone was watching.

"There she is!" called a band of young rabbits from the meadow path. "Sparkle for us, Petal! Do the shiny thing!"

She did the shiny thing. She always did. She tossed her head and the gold caught the sun, and the rabbits gasped and clapped their small paws, and the whole time Petal wished they would look at something, anything, else.

Afterward she walked to the quietest part of the forest, where the moss grew thick and the light fell in soft coins through the leaves. No one followed her there, because no one wanted quiet. They wanted the trail of gold that meant unicorn to them. She lay down and let out a long breath, and the glitter drifted off her and settled, dull and ordinary with no one there to watch it shine.

That was when she noticed the moss itself, cool and springy under her weight. A beetle crossed a fallen leaf with tremendous seriousness, antennae testing the air. The light moved when the wind moved, asking no one to clap for it. None of it shone. All of it was real, and she stayed among it a long while, not sparkling, not trying.

The next morning, when the rabbits called for her, Petal did not toss her mane. She stood in the grass and kept it still, and not one grain of gold rose off her.

"Where's the sparkle?" one asked.

"Come and feel this instead." She folded her legs and lay down low, so a single rabbit could lean a paw against her side, where her heart beat slow and steady under the warm coat. The rabbit went very still. "Oh," it whispered. "It's like a little drum."

But the others were already drifting off. A unicorn who would not shine was nothing to watch from across a meadow, and one by one they went to look for something that glittered instead. By the time the sun stood high, only the one small rabbit remained, its ear pressed to her side, listening to the drum.

Word went around the forest that Petal had stopped sparkling, and for a while fewer creatures came to her at all, because what she offered now could not be caught from a distance. It had to be come close for. But the ones who came close stayed. A fox kit crept up one frozen morning and watched her breath bloom silver in the cold, and forgot it had come hoping for gold. And later a fawn, trembling and new, folded its legs against her warm flank and slept there, and Petal stood over it without moving, and no one anywhere asked her to shine.

That evening Petal shook out her mane from old habit, the same shake that once loosed a whole cloud of gold. Nothing rose. Not a shimmer, not one grain. Only the green dark coming down soft through the leaves, and a unicorn standing easy in it, shining nowhere at all.