Mellie was seven when she discovered the unicorn farm.
The unicorns’ brilliant coats glistened like sunbeams through raindrops. Manes floated like misty clouds.
From a distance, Mellie gave her best neigh. One neighed back.
Later, she learned the farm shaved down the magical horns, selling pieces for potions. Over the years, their horns grew short and jagged, their eyes pooling with sadness.
Mellie poured over spellbooks. At age 11, she left for magic school.
Seven years later, Mellie returned and whispered the spell she’d practiced. The crackling fence vanished. Mellie neighed, urging freedom, and unicorns galloped away, misty manes vanishing into the nearby woods. All except one, which neighed and bowed its head.
Mellie hopped onto its back, and she was seven again. The dream was finally real.
Carol Scheina is a deaf speculative author whose stories have appeared in publications such as Flash Fiction Online, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, Stupefying Stories, and others. Her writing has been recognized on the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fiction Longlist, and she has become a fan favorite here for her finely crafted flash fiction pieces on the Stupefying Stories website. You can find more of her work at carolscheina.wordpress.com.
It’s impossible to overstate how crucial Carol has been behind the scenes here, for all her help with The Pete Wood Challenge, The Odin Chronicles, Tales from the Brahma, and more. Therefore, if you haven’t already read it, you really should check out “Six Questions for… Carol Scheina,” if for no other reason than to get the complete (we think) list of everything by her that we’ve published in the past four years.
If you don’t have time for that, though, you should at the very least read “How to Return an Overdue Book to the Summer Library.”
The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. For each contest Pete Wood
spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a
few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted,
usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries,
determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to
Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.
You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.
This
time the challenge was to write a flash fiction story of no more than
150 words in length that was inspired by the phrase:
“Happy Trails.”
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