Ichabod Durling Smith

The man in the tight, worn, faded jeans and dirty, sweaty under shirt was on a quest of epic proportions.  The short, skinny man’s name was Ichabod Durling Smith.  No one on this earth hated his name more than he did.  His parents thought it was a lovely name and so did the kids at school, but only because it gave such wonderful nicknames that they delighted in taunting him with.  He’d had ‘My Darling Icky’ and ‘Icky Darling, Oh Icky’ yelled at him so many times they reverberated in his head ad nauseum. 

His mother loved the story of the Headless Horseman, reading it to him every night as he lay in her womb and up until he was old enough to tell her that it terrified him.  He, unlike his family, which included his parents, three sisters and two step-brothers, he could not stand horror, not even having grown up with Halloween nearly beating out Christmas out in terms of importance in his household.  He was terrified of specters and vampires and other things that creep along in the dark even though they’d all explained to him how none could possibly exist and even without their explanation, he knew logically that the quick shadow on the wall in the corner of his eye was just a figment of his overactive imagination.  Still he couldn’t help himself.  His family loved the idea of these sorts of creatures, despite their scientific background.  His mom was a chemist and his dad a physicist.  Each of the kids, save for Ichabod, were following in their parents’ footsteps.

As for the middle name, it was a family tradition, a name bestowed on the last child in the family.  How it originated and what it means is a question best left unasked for each and every member of the Smith family has a strong opinion on it.  They are all quite opinionated actually and most find it more than a tad annoying as many of them lack any sense of tact.

His last name seemed like a cruel joke.  After Ichabod Durling how could they leave him with such a plain, boring name?  To make matters worse, he had no nickname.  There was no way to shorten his name without making it sound like a taunt and there was no way he was ever going to go by his middle name.  So he was Ichabod and it sucked.  His siblings had normal names like Robert, Jennifer, and Mackenzie.  Ichabod wondered sometimes if his parents hated him.

No matter what they thought, it wasn’t out of spite that he chose to major in journalism.  It was a safe field; firmly rooted in the vines of reality.  There was nothing to be left to the imagination and he liked that.  Everything you saw was actually there.  No crazy metaphors for life or renderings of things we knew existed but could not actually see.  No, journalism was everything it purported to be. 

He did spectacular in all of his classes, maintaining a perfect GPA in a program considered to be one of the toughest in the nation.  Every semester he took an overload of classes while anchoring a news program on the college TV station and being an editor on the college paper.  While his roommates were out partying and getting stoned, he was busy working late into the night on one project or another.  He’d heard their whispers which both questioned his sanity and humanness.  Honestly, he couldn’t help his study habits; you don’t have many friends when you’re called Ichabod.

He was in his first semester of his junior year when something strange happened.  In hindsight, he probably should have just blamed it on the long hours he’d be pulling between classes, the TV station, the paper, and fulfilling the community service requirement his school had just instituted, but then in his caffeine riddled and sleep deprived mind, not to mention the overactive imagination that reared it’s ugly head at all of the wrong moments, how could anyone blame him for thinking the blue unicorn with a green swirl on its sides that suddenly appeared in his dorm room at one in the morning on the night before a major test was anything but real?