Vernal Equinox
-by Kelly Smith
The bright sun pierced through clouds and shone like an arrow from heaven, pointed directly at Stella's face. Her pale skin illuminated, Henry thought she looked even more angelic than before.
"You didn't think it was possible," she shattered his dreamy gaze the way she always did, reading his mind and breaking down his defenses in a single stroke. Her quiet confidence - not arrogant or haughty, but simply sure of herself, of her beauty, of her power over him - had always been intoxicating to Henry. And now he found himself again rapt in her allure, wondering at the inner strength so innocently hidden behind her soft features, gentle face, smooth skin, with eyes that seemed to retreat, but that met his gaze and penetrated to his core every time he realized that he loved her.
Stella's sense of self-assurance was perplexing to Henry because it left him weak and defenseless. Like the powerful waves of the Pacific that used to knock him brutally from his feeble legs as a child and spin him around under the tide, scraping his limbs against the sandy floor and leaving him prostrate in the surf, her simple beauty and captivating charm rendered Henry powerless. In a way, he accepted his fate, calmly resigning himself to the reality that a life without her would indeed not qualify as life at all, and that he would prefer those strong ocean rip tides and even a gruesome, watery death to the alternative of being without her. He had never felt this way before. Not about previous girlfriends. Not about anyone. He knew that Stella was different. She controlled him in ways no one ever had.
As she looked up at him, in a pensive questioning at first, and then with thorough understanding, she broke the silence of his bewilderment with the simple truth:
"You can't figure me out."
"What do you mean?"
"Henry, you know that I love you, and that I need you as much as you need me."
As he tried to protest, tried to understand how she always knew exactly what he was thinking, Henry's mind was a tempest of uncertainty. After all, he was the one who was supposed to be powerful. He was the one with the physical strength. He was the one with the impenetrable emotions and the unblemished, albeit secretive, past. He was the unicorn.
Just as his thought process arrived at this fateful destination, the clouds shifted to diffract the sunlight, once illuminating his beauty like a mythological goddess, and now sending the rays of light in a full spectrum across the summer sky. As passersby unwittingly slowed their cars to marvel at the full rainbow, arching across the horizon, Henry had a different reaction. Instinct took over, instantaneously changing Stella from his true love to his prey. A horn split through the skin of his nose as his hind legs shredded his trousers, thrusting him upward as he reared toward the marvelous prism of color in the sky, then back to the earth. Henry let out a predatory snort, and bounded forward, determined to consume the flesh he had so recently admired. Stella let out a scream, infusing Henry's obsessed mind with a conflicting array of emotions.
"But I love you," Stella pleaded. And yet despite the urgency of her statement, her confession had a strange resolve, a calmness in the face of her apparent tragedy. Her words drove home to the human remnants of his now wild heart. He paused. Looking her over, then glancing over his shoulder toward the fading colors in the sky, Henry knew that the choice he had been dreading had finally arrived.
Give in to my nature and devour the girl I love, or die myself. There were no other options, he realized as he continued his charge. And just as he gave in to his reckless instinct, surging toward her to fill his monstrous appetite, the unexpected occurred. In a sudden burst of pinkish dust, Stella vanished from before him, leaving a confused unicorn charging directly into a tree. With his horn safely embedded in the tree's trunk, Stella floated gently toward his ear, where her new embodiment as a fairy occupied the same space as one of the many flies that had begun to congregate around him.
And with one decided maneuver, Stella whispered in his unicorn ear, "I love you Henry, but you shouldn't try to kill a crazy fairy princess with magical powers."
Her tiny mouth clenched tightly around his skin, releasing a lethal dose of her venom as he tried helplessly to make sense of the recent turn of events. Before he knew it, Henry's body lay cold and stiff on the forest floor, now morphed back into human form as the dusk had set in.
And with a simultaneous wicked laugh and heartbroken cry, Stella returned to her human form and wandered back to her car, sobbing because she really did love him.
The end.
(Spoiler alert) Kim was worried about me being misunderstood the last time around, so I'll attempt to explain. If you're not familiar with the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, they are young adult novels about a high school girl that falls in love with a vampire. But then she kind of likes a werewolf, but ends up with the vampire after all.
