The Snortling

          I wake to their terrible snortling.  They are foraging in my backyard again - devouring the souls of lesser species.  I peer outside.  Half the world is gilded now. Everything they have touched - turned to fucking gold.  All too bright to look at for long.
          The world is filthy with them now -- teeming with Unicorns.  My friend Wally had been gored in the gut by a young buck.  He shat gold nuggets everyday for the rest of his short happy life.  Yes, I said happy.  Contact with the Unis brings ecstasy, serenity, grace, they say.  I say fuck them – don’t believe it - it’s all a trap.

          It was only a year ago this hell had been spawned -- with that Internet special -- “Hunting the Last Unicorn” -- funded by some decadent eurotrash couple.  They had led an expedition, venturing to an unexplored part of the Gobi and miraculously --  they had, against all logic -- found one.  A decrepit, broken down little beast.  Most thought it to be a fake but it was forensically tested and found to be 1400 years old.  It was no pyrite ruse.
          They brought it back, cloned its marrow and thus unleashed this Pandora plague of them.  Every living thing these Unicorns come in contact with is rendered unto a bonanza of living ingot -- remaining alive briefly in an exhalted state -- then succumbing without the slightest protest.  Gold for souls.  The huge surplus crashed the world’s economy.  You cannot tell a person their pile of treasure is worthless.  It contradicts all ingrained sense of value.  But I alone knew -- these equine narwhals so revered in Fairy Tales -- were alchemical engines of Satan.  A transmutation of our baser selves into nothingness.  
          I have always had an irrational fear of them, even in my childhood dreams and I was right.  Years ago, for no reason seemingly connected to them, I had forsworn pleasure and fortune in an impulsive fit of pique and this self-sacrifice has at least allowed me be one of the last to succumb to their scourge.  But these monstrous mounts have hunted me down now.  It is quite possible that I am – ‘the last man on earth’.

          Six months ago  - my poor libidinous brother, Todd and his sorry perverted slut of a girlfriend, Sandie  --  they did what so many others were tempted to   --  chase an elusive carnal mirage.  When word of the Uni’s secrets first leaked out --  during the First Proliferation -- before the infernal saturation now upon us --  couples looking for an ultimate sex high would harvest the horn (which grows back in a matter of days – not harming the beasts in the slightest) --  grinding it to powder and snorting it.  Rumor had it --  this was an instant Nirvana-gasm.  West Hollywood, Castro Street, Chelsea were all abuzz.  Then everyone in those communities was gone  – rendered into manikins made of aurum. 
Half the rest of earth soon followed as it spread out into the straight world – making the rare amber lucre as common as grey dust.
          The high was every bit as epic as rumored but with a ghastly price - the truth: Sandie at the apex of her climax came so completely her wetness would not stop -- she melted literally – all of her molten canary-colored tissue seeping through the picnic blanket and down into the earth. (what a world, what a world!)   And wretched Todd  came so impossibly hard --  he would not stop ejaculating – the power of his orgasm such that he spewed his guts, lungs, heart ---  his entire body in fact --  impossibly out through narrow canal of his throbbing member.  Inverting.  Till he lay there --  turned inside out.  Moaning how great it was as he slowly froze into a Giger-esque sculpture of shimmering cyan.

          So here I am – in the last of human days – with the last of my food – yet still most of my dynamite.  Here they come now.  Surrounding my modest home.  Conspiring  -- snortling --  whispering and snortling.  Tapping tusks on my abode.  There it goes -- the window turning to gold.  The sum of their awful naying breath -- the wall begins to yellow brightly and I light the fuse.  This soul will never be gilded!!!

Steve De Jarnett

Steve De Jarnett is a director, producer and writer.  He was worked on episodes of X-Files, American Gothic and ER.  But inexplicably, Steve does not have an entry on wikipedia.org.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE ARCHIVES: issue #001