Dear Glass Unicorn,

It is I, the Dust Bunny. I saw your blog post and wanted to write you as a way of acknowledging your existence, however meager (or meagre, if you live there) it might actually be. It is true that I was there when you fell off the shelf where you had been perched with the other glass animals in that menagerie. I won't ask you whether you really fell, whether you were pushed by another glass animal or whether you jumped. I could understand any of those things happening in life, because I know what life is. I'm sorry I did not respond when you read your long novel to me, but please know that I heard every word. I was not in a coma but it's as though my consciousness was separated from my body. I was weirdly relaxed. It was as though my consciousness was tuned into a frequency where the station was almost coming in clearly, but with some weird bleed-over and dissonance from other stations and the white noise background radiation that's left over from the big bang (that shit you can hear on any radio). I can't articulate a response to hearing your novel at this point in time, but I don't want you to take that as a value judgment. It's not that I don't believe in value judgments. I'm not a freak like that. I do believe strongly in value judgments and make them all the time, like when I decide on a rainy afternoon whether to take an abandoned shopping cart in the parking lot inside the store, or just leave it there for the unhealthy-looking kid who gets paid to do that. I think at that moment my feelings about art and life on earth are divided evenly between some sort of fucked-up irrational empathy for the empty shopping cart (as readers we are susceptible to this stupid cartoonish form of anthropomorphism vis-a-vis images in the world or even in text) and some bullshit halfhearted empathy for the kid who will need to fetch it later. I guess the cart is the art and the kid is the artist. Only assholes explain. Whoops! Maybe when I pass the kid he will be a real asshole to me or something. Maybe the cart will be a real asshole too and one of its wheels will have some sort of wheel disease that makes me curse it because it makes me feel handicapped. Am I missing out on the universe's offer to experience empathy by shoving that cart angrily into a wall? But no such moral/critical quandary existed when you read your novel to me as I lay on the carpet beside you. I can't explain. I'm not trying to make up some deflective parable about literary criticism here to save your life or anything. I mean if a glass unicorn decides it's gonna jump and shatter, that's what it's going to do. So please don't assume you've forced open some door in my soul with an emotional crowbar. Because there is no door, no crowbar, and possibly no soul. But if you want to talk for a while, we can.

Regards,

The Dust Bunny