Unicorn Summer

The television in our living room showed a unicorn that summer—a pearlescent creature with a single, spiraling horn—destined for Madison Square Garden. I was eleven, and unlike the adults around me, I still believed in the possibility of a miracle. I didn't know about surgical grafts or the grim theater of animal acts. I only knew that I wanted to see it.

My father's youngest brother was staying with us then, the youngest of my grandmother's five sons. When I asked him to take me, he answered without thinking. He was lost in his own thoughts.

"Yeah, okay. I'll get the tickets," he said.

A week passed. The circus was moving closer, the ads getting louder. "Did you get them?" I asked.

"They're in the mail," he told me, his voice flat and practiced. "Any day now."

That was the start of the ritual. Every afternoon, I'd leave the apartment and head for the lobby. The Brooklyn heat was a physical weight, smelling of hot asphalt and the briny ghost of the harbor. I'd stand before the bank of dented metal mailboxes, my small key slick with sweat.