The Magic and the Healing The Magic and the Healing
by Nick O'Donohoe
The Magic and the Healing
The Magic and the Healing
by Nick O'Donohoe
BJ Vaughn is a student
in her senior year of vet school. She's to the point of dropping out of school and giving
up her hopes of ever becoming a veterinarian. She is also faced with the fact that she has
a deadly, incurable disease called Huntingdon's Chorea. (She will slowly lose control of
her motor functions and her mind will deteriorate.) Her mother had the same disease and
committed suicide. Then a professor (Sugar Dobbs) calls her and three other students to a
rare rotation: they are to go into another world (Crossroads) and help heal their animals.
In this world, centaurs, fauns and unicorns are the normal animals. They get caught up in
helping Crossroads when the entire world is threatened. This passage finds BJ as she is
helping repair a broken unicorn horn.
Excerpt from pages 39-40
BJ slid the gold bands down the horn
and added a ring of glue, in tiny beads, to the top of each band. The beads subsided as
the glue crept under the edges; the gold, a good conductor of heat, grew quickly warm. She
wished her mother could see the unicorns. There had been a stained-glass sun-catcher of a
unicorn hanging in the kitchen while Paul and BJ were growing up; her mother had dropped
it one day, trying to clean it with clumsy, uncontrolled fingers, and had wept more that
BJ thought it merited.
BJ imagined calling her mother, after all this was over
and they were back home, and telling her, "Mom, i just treated a unicorn." Her
mother would hang up--she always did--and they'd each make a cup of tea, and her mother
would call back. Suddenly BJ's eyes stung, remembering her mother's last note: "BJ,
this is the hardest letter a mother could write. This is even harder for me, knowing that
someday you may face the same choice...." The police had shown it to her, but had
kept it.
She felt a grazing at her cheek, as soft as a leaf. One
of the other unicorns had drifted close to her and was rubbing its horn against her,
rhythmic and soothing.
Fields, watching her, said gently, "They care for
innocence, you know. Grief is also innocence."
Go Back to Photoshop Images