The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

One side of his face cuddled too hard into the sand, and one leg kicked the air three times before it stopped.

I am not doing Peter S. Beagle justice by quoting that line out of The Last Unicorn. I think I might not be doing him justice by quoting any line out of The Last Unicorn; they all build into each other and the one carries you along to the next and what starts in a lilac wood ends so very far away.

But at the same time, I remember very many of the lines from that book, and the one I have quoted remains, to my mind, one of the most affecting death scenes in fiction.

It’s The Last Unicorn. If you haven’t read it, do.

Glee!

I got a story accepted by Alliteration Ink today!

Details to follow, but since it’s my first acceptance this year and the fifth ever, I wanted to mention. After a couple of weird and stressful days, it’s lovely to have unadulterated good news.

“Gardenias”, Ian McDonald

There is death in the Barry-O tonight but still they come down from the neon and lasershine of Hy Brazyl, the five of them. They have given themselves names, as the ones who come down will, names like Zed and Lolo and Cassaday and the Shrike and Yani. Noble they are, comely, their fathers are Company men, bound by blood and contract, their mothers are Company women; they are born to live lives of lofty altitude among the crystal pinnacles of Hy Brazyl. So: why have they exchanged their Projects and corporadas for the tar-paper and plastic favelas of the Barry-O, where the faces have no contracts and no consequence and the rain washes the names from the streets?

This is how Ian McDonald’s “Gardenias” begins; I am very sorry to see that according to ISFDB it hasn’t been printed in twenty-three years. It was one of the first times I’d met what I thought of as fantasy language in a science fiction setting, and I have hung onto the aging paperback anthology that contains it through three moves and at least one decade. The language flows.

It doesn’t seem to be currently available in either paper or electronic format, but I’ve had some luck picking up old paperbacks secondhand, lately, and someone looking for the novelette could do worse than try AbeBooks.

Image is found here, by Juan Davila, used under the CC0 1.0 license