Down the Cellar Stairs
Getting a unicorn down a cellar staircase is exactly as complicated as it sounds. Sera takes the worn steps one careful hoof at a time, folded nearly in half, muttering silver-bell words you suspect are unicorn for things you're not allowed to say.
The cellar is old — older than the house above it, Aunt Bee says — with walls of round river stones and shelf after shelf of preserves glowing like stained glass in the lantern light. Peaches, plums, honey, pickles. And now: one unicorn, settling into a nest of feed sacks and quilts between the potato bin and 1987's apricots.
Aunt Bee comes down last, and hangs her little iron bell on a nail beside the iron door.
All night the wolves circle the house. You lie in your bed and hear them — a soft padding, around and around, and a hissing where their noses meet the iron and the doorstep and something else, something in the very boards of the old house that will not let them in. “A hundred years of my family's stubbornness,” Aunt Bee said, and apparently stubbornness works.
Toward dawn, the padding stops. The ordinary birds start up. You have never been so glad to hear ordinary birds.