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?
