When I woke up in the morning, the unicorn was still there. I tried not to think about it, but when I didn't that's when it would grate on my nerves the most. I thought once or twice about calling the humane society, but that wouldn't work out very well. "Hello, there is a unicorn on my lawn. Yeah that's right..no..no drugs..not that I can remember." Not that I can remember, but that's the point, kinda.

"Ben..hey, Ben.." I shoved my husband awake..sometimes it even takes a couple ice cubes to wake him up..real heavy sleeper. "Hey, when was the last time you remember me doing anything that might make me have hallucinations?"

"Errrrhuh....I don't know, you woke me up for that?"

He sat up, big red blotches all over his eyes. I felt bad for bothering him in the first place..but there's no changing what happened twenty years ago. "Um..that time when you started spinning in circles in the kitchen for no apparent reason?"

"No that was when I was mopping the floor. That was for your sister's visit, you know."

"Oh, yeah sorry. Something wrong?"

"No, not really," I said, and got up to shut the curtains. Best to let sleeping dogs lie..and sleeping guys.

Now I went to the window again and there it was, kicking up the grass and eating the geraniums. That made me really angry. I threw on my purple bathrobe and slipped into my bunny slippers and stepped out into the blinding sunlight. The door slammed behind me; the unicorn raised its head and looked over..it was pearly white shiny with a red horn. But mostly it looked just like a white horse after a bath with a red party hat stuck on its head. A little disappointing from the nice pictures in books.

"What do you think you're doing?" I scolded in my best scolding voice, whilst attempting to salvage the remaining geraniums from the ravenous creature. "I spent a lot of sweat planting these and you're eating them." Maybe I was expecting more, but all it did was stare and chew in my face. Then I wondered if maybe my mother had been right all along, and I was going to pay for all the times I'd tried to dig to China in her garden as a little kid. Like I knew better.

"I'll send for the police to come pick you up, you know." I had a feeling things weren't going anywhere. "Okay, so there's a little communication problem here." It had moved onto the lilacs. "Those taste good?" I wondered what the neighbors would think if any of them came outside. Hmm, that peculiar woman in a purple bathrobe in her garden talking to a unicorn. But there was nothing I could do. I thought it was pretty neat anyway, and even if I was just going crazy and having hallucinations it was pretty neat I had to admit. Still it wasn't really doing anything. Just causing death and destruction to my flower bed which I had worked pretty hard on, even put in a dandelion patch for good measure.

"I thought you were supposed to have wings." Oh well, real life is always a little bit of a letdown, like when you buy real estate somewhere and when you go see it, it's not there and you find out the seller was playing a little joke on you.

My watch bleeped out nine o'clock and in a few minutes the newspaper kid would come by and throw the paper at me. I thought about going to the grocery store, coming back and seeing what had happened, so I put on a jacket and a hat, drove to the store for a carton of milk and chocolate chip cookies..when I got in the driveway I saw the newspaper boy standing in the dandelion garden, examining the unicorn close up.

"Wow Mrs. Hatley, what pet shop d'ya buy this from?"

"It got on the plane home with me from Guatemala," I told him. "Pretty nice huh? Need a pet?"

Nope, I've got a turtle at home already." Turtles can get boring. They like rocks, they're slimy, they like to swim and they walk funny. Peter was looking it right in the face and I hoped it didn't kick or spit on him or anything. I'm not a horse handler.

"Peter don't you have a paper route to finish? You can come visit me on your way home." He nodded yes, got back on his bike and rode off. I wondered if maybe this was just a real horse after all or something. Maybe it had escaped from the zoo. I've heard of that happenning before. I ws glad it was just a unicorn and not a tiger or polar bear or something scary like that. Maybe I'd have to put up signs on telephone poles like people do with lost dogs and cats. Now that would be bizarre. Or sell it to a pet shop, or on the black market, because there sure wasn't any room at my house; our backyard was barely big enough for a kiddie swimming pool..you know, the little plastic things from Toys 'r' Us with Smurfs on them. But now it was ten and I was starting to worry. I had to go to work at 11 and I still smelled like the roasted marshmallows we'd had after dinner. I needed Scope.

So what I did was, I went back in the house, went into my computer and changed the whole story..made it a normal horse, no horn or wings or anything at all like that. I couldn't help it; the realist in me could see that the thing wasn't getting anywhere. I could have had it go through a time warp or a black hole or something like that but that would be more like the Twilight Zone and that's not really what I was going for. Too ordinary, been done before, you know. The only problem was, I still had a horse on my front lawn. So I switched the time I had to get to work to 7:30 at night, right after dinner. Then I rode the horse down the street, dropped it off and got a wad of money for returning it. Then, just because I felt like it, I wrote off going into work entirely, took a bath and went to bed early.

Still, I had a queer feeling of deja vu the next morning, when I opened up the curtains and found a crowd of children admiring a unicorn eating the lilacs in my garden.