Unicorns & the True Enemy

Actuarial tables, ancestral memories at the cinema, extraterrestrial small talk, and the blindest of the blind spots.

This is an essay about time. But time is hard to write about. So I’ll start with unicorns.

Alicorns and scary movies

When my daughter turned four, Unicorns re-entered my life. They’d always been around - on stickers, Trapper Keepers, weird dream sequences in Blade Runner, in that St. Patrick’s Day song where they’re eradicated from the earth for playing grab-ass while Noah’s trying to load up the station wagon.

My daughter’s unicorns were an upgrade of My Little Pony - small, candy-colored plastic horses with manes you can comb and braid from my childhood. They’d since been given horns, wings, and in sometimes both, a creature I learned was called an alicorn.

She’s almost ten now, and has mostly outgrown unicorns. But she loves horror movies, approaching them with the same bravado as roller coasters, judo, and social situations where she doesn’t know anyone. We’re three for four on grown-up scary movies in the theater - the first 20 minutes of Longlegs was too much for her. One rainy afternoon, I saw that the film Death of a Unicorn was playing nearby.