On a Phantom Tide
I was standing on the rich Iowa turf by a highway in the middle of nowhere. All night, I had shivered in the back of a pickup truck in a thunderstorm, huddled in a heavy canvas tarp. Now, in the earliest hint of dawn, I was cold and dizzy with exhaustion.
The keilin had been here, though—the Chinese unicorn. I had only seen a flash of it, as always, but that was enough. With horses’ hooves, a fleshy horn, and all different colors on its back, it was hard to mistake for anything else.
I started to walk.
The sky was clear now and I hiked, soaked and shivering, into a little town. It was the kind with a main drag on six blocks of highway and a four-way blinking red light in the center. I could hear rainwater running in the sewers. The residential area was big, though, an
