Because the unicorn is supposed to solve all of her problems, give her the answers to life’s greatest questions. When will Antarctica’s last glacier melt away? What will bring purpose to her life? Can she pull off blonde hair?
Helga is twenty-seven. She is not beautiful. Her mother likes to remind her of this, weekly.
“There’s not a particular flaw with your face,” she tells Helga over breakfast between mouthfuls of granola. “There’s just something unpleasant about looking at you.”
Her mother is technically a step-mother, but she’s all Helga’s known. Her actual mother died during childbirth, so she assumes a step-mother is close enough to the real thing. Besides, not all mothers can find their daughters beautiful, can they? When she finds the unicorn, she will ask.
“Goodbye,” Helga says to her step-mother, as she does each morning before she leaves for work. She likes to pretend it’s her last goodbye, and not just goodbye for the day.
“Mm,” her step-mother mumbles. She doesn’t look up from her bowl of granola.
But Helga doesn’t care. This won’t be her life forever. Just for now, Helga lives with her step-mother. Just while she figures out her life. Just until she finds the unicorn. At least she doesn’t have to pay rent, though technically she owns half the house with her step-mother according to her father’s will. Her father died in the war a few years ago.
“Everyone knows someone who died in the war,” Helga’s coworker, Tricia, a forty-something woman with a gap between her two front teeth, told her once. “It’s been going on for decades.”
What Tricia meant was, losing her father in the war didn’t make Helga special or anything.
*
Helga drags her body through the threshold of the office, the next eight hours of her day a unit of labor to be measured and timed and monitored. She works as a receptionist in a therapist’s office. This offers her a kind of second-hand success. Her job duties entail answering the phone and scheduling appointments, aiding everyone other than herself in seeking a better life. She is the first act; the threshold through which to cross for a better life.
Helga and Tricia each work for different therapists. Helga works for a stern brunette named Kim Donna, who spends most of her time hiding in her office with the door closed, even when she doesn’t have any patients. For much of the day, Helga sits in a square, windowless reception room as the hum of a Parisian jazz playlist competes with Tricia’s aggressive typing. Tricia stabs at each key like it’s the Jeopardy buzzer as she composes brusque follow-up emails. This is a reminder that you canceled AFTER the twenty-four period and, therefore, will be CHARGED a cancellation fee of $100.
Helga has worked in this office for three years now. It was supposed to be temporary until she discovered her real purpose in life, and yet here she remains. The job is fine enough, even if the pay is minimal and the benefits nonexistent.
“What are you, a socialist?” Kim said when Helga asked about the possibility of health insurance a few months ago. “Do you know how expensive that is? It’d be cheaper for me to fly you to Canada.”
Since then, Kim eyes Helga suspiciously, as if at any moment she might catch Helga stealing office supplies or leaving anonymous reviews on her Yelp page to get back at her for the no-insurance thing.
Today, she demands Helga account for a missing ink cartridge for the printer.
“I don’t think we placed an order yet for a replacement,” Helga says, but she can tell Kim doesn’t believe her by her raised eyebrows. She wishes she could tell Kim there are better things to steal here than a cartridge. The potted Ficus, for one.
When Helga complains to Tricia about Kim, Tricia only rolls her eyes.
“You’re too sensitive. Not everything is so terrible,” Tricia says, shoving a handful of salted almonds in her mouth.
“At least you work for the nice therapist,” Helga counters. Tricia works for a therapist named Michael Hewitt, who wears sweater vests year-round and whistles when he makes his coffee in the morning.
“At least you have a boyfriend,” Tricia says. She spits it out like an accusation, as if Helga has stolen something from Tricia.
“I do,” Helga says, because it’s true, even if she feels pretty indifferent about the whole thing.
Helga met her boyfriend, Adam, in college at a party. They’ve been dating for seven years, which is long enough to accept as a necessary albeit boring part of life, like filing taxes or going to the dentist. At one point, they seemed to love each other, but Helga’s not so sure anymore.
Adam works as a data engineer for Amazon, which he insists isn’t as evil a monopoly as Helga says it is. Before she met him, she didn’t know there were engineers who didn’t build anything physical at all. For a field so rooted in logic, there seemed to be a lot of faith in the intangible.
While their relationship isn’t exciting or particularly enjoyable, it provides Helga a sense of accomplishment; it’s a reminder that one can survive uncomfortable things. Besides, all of this is temporary, she reminds herself. If she ever figures it out. If she finds the unicorn.
*
There are multiple news channels and blogs and livestreams dedicated to unicorn sightings. Even CNN reserves an hour of its daily broadcast time to unicorn coverage. The channels and blogs all feature interviews with people who say they’ve glimpsed the unicorn. Shaky cam footage of a blurry white figure in the distance. Vox pops with passersby who reveal their questions for the unicorn.
How do we save the remaining two elephants from extinction?
What are next week’s winning lottery numbers?
Is my wife cheating on me?
No one exactly knows where the unicorn lives. A Reddit thread says the unicorn appears in everyone’s dreams any night there’s a full moon. The unicorn hides under beds, in closets, in the crevice of a landscape just out of reach. It’s up to the dreamer to find the unicorn, lucidly swimming through oceans, climbing mountains, rustling through broom closets. A YouTuber—a balding man wearing a sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF YOUR MOM embroidered across the chest—says the unicorn stalks public parks at sunrise and gallops across soccer fields.
But most of the believers think the unicorn lives in a field of flowers, desiring the shaded coverage of willow trees and the quiet calm of a fresh stream. Helga envisions the unicorn from the Middle Ages tapestry, The Unicorn Rests in a Garden. She had a print of the piece hanging in her dorm room years ago, back when she was the Medieval Studies department’s most promising student; back when opportunities dangled in front of her, ripe for plucking like fruit from a tree; back when she envisioned a life much larger than the one that she has now.
If anyone is primed to spot a unicorn, it’s Helga. She even wrote her honor’s thesis on the unicorn as a feminist symbol in medieval art and literature. While, traditionally, critics interpreted the unicorn as an allegory for the death of Christ, Helga argued the unicorn represented man’s need to conquer women, to defile their purity while simultaneously placing their virginity on a pedestal. Like the unicorn, the pure yet easily conquerable woman was a myth robed in white, though that didn’t stop men from continuing their hunt.
She won the department prize for the essay, though that ended up meaning less than she thought it would when it came time to get a job. By then, much of the country’s museums had closed, their artifacts sold to wealthy Europeans in exchange for ammunition and soldiers and money to recruit more soldiers when the previous soldiers died. It was more important to know how email marketing worked or how to build a bomb or how to mine cryptocurrency.
“Are you really so surprised,” her step-mother asked her when she graduated summa cum laude with the department’s thesis prize and zero job offers, “that museums have lost funding? That there’s no demand for a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses? We need wind farm engineers. We need soldiers. We need astronauts to rescue us from this damned planet.”
Helga didn’t know what was worse: the ugliness of the statement or its honesty.
Along with Medieval Studies and supportive parenting, Helga’s step-mother doesn’t believe in the unicorn.
“If there was a unicorn, the war would have ended years ago. If there was a unicorn, we wouldn’t have lost that spaceship traveling to Mars. If there was a unicorn–”
*
After work, Helga spends most evenings at Adam’s apartment. He picks her up in his car and everything, like a gentleman or prince or Uber driver. Tonight, they make s’mores on Adam’s stovetop, impaling marshmallows with splintered chopsticks.
“Someone on the news says they saw a unicorn by the Salton Sea. That’s not too far from here,” Helga says.
“Everyone thinks they see things, but they’ve found nothing,” Adam says, shaking his head as she stacks the s’mores on a plate.
Like Helga’s step-mother, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in the unicorn. For every claim of a sighting, there’s evidence of a nefarious deepfake. Botched Photoshop jobs. AI-generated masterpieces. Adam is one of the non-believers, insisting the unicorn went extinct centuries ago. Like Jesus, he said. Like miracles with loaves and fishes.
“We would know if someone found the unicorn,” he tells her, his index finger punching his kitchen counter. “They’d be famous. They’d be the world poker champion.”
He hands Helga a plate of s’mores and then licks a sticky pillow of marshmallow clinging to his thumb.
“Oh! They’d invent a better toaster, one that cooks the inside of a Pop Tart without burning the top glaze.” He grins, pleased with his suggestion.
Adam doesn’t understand that these are the exact kinds of people who will never find the unicorn. The unicorn cannot change the trajectory of the world; it can only offer truth.
When Helga was in college, she would have begged the unicorn for beauty, for mermaid-length hair and pillowy lips and lashes as long as spider legs. She would have demanded world peace, a job at The Met, a vacation home in Tuscany. She wanted everything everyone else wanted—beauty, fame, fortune.
Now, she sees the silly simplicity of those wishes. Now, she only wants the unicorn to reveal her fate because she no longer believes she knows the answers to anything. Unless she finds the unicorn, she worries she will forever live at home with her step-mother; forever answer the phone in a eucalyptus-scented office; forever spend Saturday nights eating day-old supermarket sushi with Adam, pretending this is contentment.
With their s’mores stacked on a plate, Adam plays Call of Duty while Helga sits next to him on the couch, reading an article about a unicorn sighting in Kentucky. The photograph of the unicorn is blurry (they always are), and it looks more like the white of a finger smudge than a mythical creature.
“Fuck you,” Adam spits. His fingers smash the buttons of his PlayStation controller.
Helga doesn’t understand why Adam wants to play a war game when there’s a war going on in real life. He could just turn on the news and see the same thing.
When Helga leaves Adam’s apartment, he doesn’t walk her to the door. He’s mid-game and pausing would be too stressful.
“Just stay another ten minutes?” he says, his eyes trained on the television.
“I can’t,” she says, and slips out the door before he can say anything else.
Her step-mother expects her home by midnight. Not because she’s worried about Helga; she’s a light sleeper and the front door squeaks whenever someone opens or closes it.
When Helga gets home, she tip-toes through the sleeping house, swallowed in darkness, blindly feeling her way to her room. She washes her face, brushes her teeth, and writes in her journal—tomorrow will be a better day, she concludes. Something is bound to happen—before falling asleep. Tomorrow, she will do it all again.
*
Helga walks to work each day. Her car engine died last year, and now everywhere only sells Teslas that cost three times her annual salary. But even though it takes forty minutes to get to work, she doesn’t mind. It gives her time to think about everything she will ask the unicorn.
When will the rest of California crumble into ash?
Is she supposed to marry Adam?
Is the growing, festering mole on her wrist cancerous, or just going through puberty?
After years of reading the lore and searching for the unicorn, Helga has accepted she will do whatever the unicorn tells her to do. Break up with Adam. Quit her job. Move to Amsterdam. Hand to heart, she wouldn’t even hesitate. That’s how much she trusts the unicorn.
With each block she passes on her walk to work, Helga looks right and left, down alleys and across abandoned lots. Of all the theories, Helga believes the ones that say there are portals to the unicorn’s forest in every city. No Cerberus guarding the entrance, no Sphinx’s riddle to solve. The portals are open to those who are observant enough to find it; those who are ready to know their destiny. Maybe this is the unicorn’s test, to see who is worthy of the answers to life. Helga will ask the unicorn.
Helga arrives at work without spotting a single portal along the way. No flash of white or the echo of whinnying. She stands before the gray office building and checks one more time for a portal. It’s become a habit, looking at the parking lot to her left, then the stretch of lawn to her right. She imagines the portal will appear one day when she least expects it. A rabbit hole floating like an upright mirror. The sound of chimes, the scent of white jasmine, a gust of wind that wakes the trees from their slumber. Maybe the portal had always been there; she just hadn’t been ready for it.
Today, like all the days before, nothing.
Sometimes, she’s disappointed. She imagines walking through the portal and seeing the unicorn standing in a field of tulips, its white coat shimmering like a thousand diamonds in the sun. The unicorn will look at her, and Helga will know exactly what to do.
But most times, Helga’s relieved when she doesn’t find a portal. It delays the possibility of disappointment; that she will learn everything she needs to know and still feel the jaw of dissatisfaction gnawing at her stomach. That her life is exactly as intended.
For now, Helga can imagine what may happen one day. If she’s good enough. If she believes. If she’s worthy. She likes the promise of something better on the horizon without knowing yet what it will offer. A white carriage approaching. A blazing star crashing towards earth. The hum of a melody, the lyrics not yet written.
