Pip was a small unicorn with a coat the colour of fresh cream, and every morning at Mallow Hill she walked the long harvest row, breathing in the sugar-pink smell of cotton candy trees coming into bloom. One by one the trees opened at dawn — puff, puff, puff — each one releasing a great cloud of fluff that Pip gathered into her wide wicker basket. The air tasted sweet enough to make her blink.
She trailed her nose along the warm, sticky tufts as she walked. Puff, puff, puff. Tree after tree, basket growing heavier, the fluff tickling the inside of her nostrils in a way that made her want to sneeze but never quite did. Then she stopped. At the very end of the row stood one tree that had not opened. Its branches were folded tight, curled in like a sleeping fist, and no fluff had come from it at all. Every other tree had bloomed. Not this one. Puff, puff — nothing.
Pip walked closer. The bark was cool under her chin when she leaned in to listen. Somewhere deep inside the trunk, she heard a sound — a small, damp, snuffling sound, like something dreaming. She pressed the very tip of her horn, gently, gently, to the bark. The tree shuddered. Its branches trembled. And then — with a sound like a cork leaving a bottle — out tumbled a tiny cloud, pink-cheeked and rumpled, landing in the grass with a soft, damp plop.
The little cloud sat up. It was round and puffed and its edges were going a deep embarrassed pink. "I only meant to rest for a moment," it said, in a voice like the sound of fog. "I found the opening-bud and it seemed so soft and I sat down and —" It trailed off. The pink deepened considerably. Pip looked at the cloud. The cloud looked at Pip. "What's your name?" said Pip. "Cob," said the cloud, very quietly. "I may have sat on something important."
Pip did not laugh — though her nose wrinkled once, very quickly. She looked around the meadow, thinking. Then she saw it: a hollow in the moss beside the old root, just the right size, just the right softness, smelling of earth and green and cool shade. She nudged Cob gently with her nose — her nose still sticky with the morning's harvest — and walked him over to the hollow, one slow step at a time. Cob peered in. He prodded the moss with one small cloud-corner. He sighed. And then he curled up, tucked himself in, and was asleep before Pip had taken two steps back. A tiny snore rose up like a thread of mist.
Pip turned back to the tree. And slowly — oh, so slowly — the branches uncurled. One by one they opened, spreading wide, and out came the biggest, fluffiest bloom of the whole harvest, enormous and pale pink and trembling at the edges, filling her basket all the way to the top. She lifted the basket. The first stars were appearing above Mallow Hill, small and pale, the sky the colour of the inside of a shell. The air had gone cool and smelled of grass and far-off rain. Pip walked home, her hooves quiet on the meadow path, the sweet stickiness still on her nose. And when she reached her own soft hollow — just the right size, just the right depth — she set her basket down, tucked her legs beneath her, and let her eyes go slow and heavy. The stars came out one by one above Mallow Hill, and Cob slept on in the moss, and the great pink tree stood open and still in the dark.
