Steel Tipped Dove

Unicorns galloped mightily in the sprawling fields that lined the valley beneath my childhood dream home; or the house I would visit while I slept.

They'd learned to live in the auspices of the Cockatrice and alongside the weasels who were immune to the Cockatrices' methods of attack. The Cockatrice Coterie had long ago banished any trace of a single mirror because all it took was a single glance of a Cockatrice upon itself to bring upon instantaneous death. For over three decades I'd gone without seeing so much as my own reflection; if I was ugly I wouldn't know it and if I was handsome I wouldn't believe it.

When I was a very young child, of preschool age, I was forbidden from stepping foot in the paddocks pockmarking the plains used as playgrounds by the Monoceros. From a distance I was permitted to view them and for innumerable hours I sat transfixed by their lines, their glee, their refusal to despair.

Steel Tipped Dove's graceful, majestic, chromatic Nothing Touches The Ground Here is the itinerant, hurtling assortment of the unicorns' theme songs and they represent in many ways their vestiges in this world.

"Wasn't Really Fair" is the first chapter of Steel Tipped Dove's intergalactic coloring book and it throttles through time in an ukulele-synthesizer melange wrapped in an outer space capsule. Shockingly facile to ingest, but once digested, it forced me to absorb the Brobdingnagian smattering that remained. Voknorim, an untried quantity prior to me until now, is a production partner on four of NTTGH's sauciest, stretched out portions; the most notable being his/her contribution to the sumptuously sardonic "Car Commercial."

"L" is a brainy, brash, skillful, glorious reimagining of Bats for Lashes' "Laura" that usurps all of the year's "Best Remies, Brah" listicles. Natasha Khan's voice is manipulated into a skittering channel that sounds like it is spinning towards the edges of earth; pulled between the forces of magical, accessible High Energy and malleable, stoic Underground Sludge.

All of the atoms in its original piano riff are accelerated to oblivion; laughing and flipping off George Clooney and Sandra Bullock until Hollywood or gravity are distant memories. Typically, the whole of the "Remix" category isn't my goblet of Earl Grey, but Steel Tipped Dove's deft, delicate handling of "Laura", a song I too share an affinity for, is high-minded home run. I would merrily enroll in and attend a weekly dual Crossfit-Pilates class (that also incorporates Lamase) while overdosing ten-times-in-a-row on cocaine that came from a country bearing a name I am unable to pronounce to "L."

Do you remember the unicorns, though?

Each year on Summer's last eve The Cockatrice Coterie convened to crush all of the season's collected mirrors. Summer, you see, was when it rained mirrors and when it rained mirrors there were too many for The Cockatrice Coterie to capture.

Over the years, five by that point in time, the Unicorns, when not rejoicing in their summer hauls of new mirror bounty, were amassing a looking glass so large and luminous that The Cockatrice Coterie would no longer be impervious or immune to. So it was that on the morning of my fifth birthday, the morning that followed The Cockatrice Coterie's mirror-mangling marathon that preceded all of the previous celebrations of my entrance into this world, that I opened my window and was instantly, momentarily blinded. When I'd swiftly regained my sight I was able to see the sprawling fields beneath my childhood dream home; in the center of the Unicorns', the Monoceros', favorite field the Unicorns had, overnight, constructed a shining Steel Tipped Dove from shards, chunks, slabs, morsels, remnants, fragment, and wafers of mirrors. When the groggy, hungover, hubris huffing Cockatrice clumsily cavorted into the valley, they stood no chance.

They saw their own reflections and were instantly vanquished. Now, every year on the final night of Summer, the Unicorns celebrate the Steel Tipped Dove.