At last Will woke up and walked to the kitchen.
The room had just finished filling with sunlight, the coffee was already on, and the kitchen was empty, except for the sunshine. Will whistled while he sloshed the morning brew into his favourite rainbow-coloured mug, and watched the white-washed horses neigh and whinny at one another in the pasture past the apple trees, which sat damp and dappled in the backyard. Of course the fence is white-washed, he thought, and not the horses.
Shuffling his feet across the linoleum, he sat down at the kitchen table and whistled three final bars while he blew across his warm coffee. He set his mug to one side, and began to write a letter:
Dear My Dear Friend Francis F. Fowler,
After several weeks of careful observation, I've confirmed a most startling fact: a unicorn is habitually grazing on the apple trees in our backyard.
When I first found a few donut-shaped apples scattered across the wet morning grass, I suspected that Horace, the chocolate coloured stallion with the comical overbite, had been making midnight raids on my Jonathan Apples.
Further inspection, however, yielded a great number more things to be considered (as is so often the case!).
Later that same week, I snuck up into the biggest tree in the yard, just before Kathryn came home. My plan, as you might imagine, was to hide among the pomaceous boughs and fire fruit into her wicker basket from the sky. On my way up the trunk, my hands slipped on a piece of loose bark and I fell back onto the grass, landing on a rather unfortunately placed apple. Where the bark had slipped away, nearly two yards up the tree trunk, I noticed a score of scratch marks. The exact sort of marks one might expect to find if an abnormally large and white horse with a horn had been looking to sharpen it by rubbing it against our tree.
Coupling these observations with the daily hoove-marks in the grass and an enormously long and light silver hair found by the water-bucket (which Kathryn now wears wrapped around her wrist), I am left with no doubt whatsoever. There is most certainly a unicorn visiting our trees at night.
Having stood for you at your wedding and taught each of your children to throw, I consider you an expert on Near-Mythical Creatures of Incredible Beauty. What should I leave out on the porch - and should I mash it, mince it, or chop it? And will it stay, Frank?
Yes, I heard about the Gnome in the Tool Shed at the Christiansen's a couple of years ago, but figured a unicorn was a more delicate issue and needed the approach of a doctor like yourself.
Why don't you stop over for dinner this week? I'll pick green beans.
Yours,
William Y. Saide
Will sealed the letter in an envelope, and walked to the closet. Pulling down his leather knapsack, Will took out his "Lives of the Saints," and placed the letter about a quarter of the way through the book. Firmly closing the pages on Saint John Boscoe around the note, he put the book back into his bag and swung it deftly around his shoulder, in a single motion.
Walking down the lane towards the Fowler's, Will listened closely to the birds flying above and around him and watched his horses graze quietly, their eyes fixed on the apple trees.
