Part 2

Part 2 -  Miami, Florida, and The Unicorn Queendom

The bitching about the weather started five minutes after leaving the airport. 

Uncle Anton was, it had to be said, not dressed for Florida’s winter. He had opted for departing Wisconsin’s winter, thus being toasty warm between house and airport. This had endothermically backfired in the 93-degree Miami roast. Caroline had been at the mercy of her mother’s wardrobing, but at least her mother had the sense to know that layering was the way to go. Caroline was dressed in a satsuma-colored athletic top. It seemed that her mother clothed her using reverse psychology. The more colorful Caroline’s outfit, the less people would stare as she was manhandled like some human sack trolly. 

“Christ!” Uncle Anton said.

Carline’s senses were well attuned to smell and sound (the mush she was fed barely rated a shrug from her mouth’s receptors). With limited sight, and infrequent tactile contact, she relied on these to convey information about the world. Uncle Anton’s armpits smelled like freshly removed sneakers. 

“I told you to wear a t-shirt,” Aunt Anita said, giving her husband a long-suffering look.

Anton mumbled something Caroline couldn’t quite make out. Judging by the look on her aunt’s face it probably had the words ‘screw’ and ‘you’ in it. 

Anya, sat across the aisle from Caroline, squirmed in her car seat. They were traveling in a specially adapted mini van that had meet them at the airport. 

“Look mommy, palm trees!” said Anya.

From the back of the car, Aunt Anita said, “Yes darling. Can you see any coconuts?”

“Yes! Yes!” Anya replied.

Sucker, Caroline thought. 

“Great,” Aunt Anita said. “Why don’t you count them and tell me how many you saw when we get to the hotel.”

From her position behind the driver, Caroline could see the navigation system. They had thirty-six minutes to their hotel. She decided to have a nap and check in with her subjects.

Entering the Unicorn Queendom felt like being in an elevator that began to descend at a finger-tapping crawl. Then, at some unspecified point, someone yanked off the brakes and let it plummet just for the hell of seeing what happened. The snails pace beginning was irritating, but it did allow her to prepare for her alter ego’s persona. It required a mindset shift from frail paraplegic to muscular unicorn. The sense of movement, tendons and ligaments stretching and compacting - something normal people never thought about - needed a mental warm up. Caroline thought of this as doing scales in preparation for an orchestral performance.

The sensation of reckless falling was exhilarating. In the real world Caroline was sure she’d have thrown up. It was akin to the feeling she had whenever her wheelchair lurched off a sidewalk. Her internal sense of balance felt what her eyes could not see. Caroline’s id transformed itself, the parts of her subconscious blended to form Princess Caroline, ruler of the magical Queendom of her mind. 

The Unicorn Queendom looked like evergreen Sherwood Forest. It smelled like sunlight after a rainstorm. It sounded like The Great Gate of Kiev. All around her, life exploded. The constraints of her mortal life ripped away, leaving the expression of her bones’ secret wishes. Here was where she kept the pilot flame of her life alight. Without her Queendom she would long ago have succumbed to morbidity; or worse, mortality.

The first thing Caroline did was to rear up on her hind legs, bellow a whiny that could shatter plate glass at fifty feet, then set off at a gallop. She ran and reveled in the power. As she ran, she flicked magic in spurts from her horn. Where magic landed it effected plants and trees. Flowers and fruit exploded in colors that no human gardener could fathom. Crimson daffodils were sucked into her wake’s vortex. Ivory apples bobbed, bowing in her royal presence. The grass, which even in her dreamworld came in no color other than green, put on a show of darkening as her hoofs tranced over it. This release of pressure lasted but a thin time. Caroline was accustomed to it after years of practice. Like a well-used pressure cooker, she could time the heat to silence the ballistic whistle precluding eruption.

She pranced to a stop in front of castle’s entrance. It was a fantasy castle of no practical use. The moat was full of dandelions, and the keep partial to roosting. The battlements had grotesque gargoyles leering out from them. Their expressions changed frequently, as if a portent of things to come. Today they sneered. The portcullis was closed. Simonale was playing a joke on her. She harrumphed and lowered her head, like an African rhino preparing to charge. 

‘Do you really want me to blast it open like last time?’ she yelled.

The walls were silent.

So, they were playing hard ball. This called for drastic measures. She drew the magic towards her, sucked it with all her strength like a child inhaling the last smidgen of milk shake. The land paled, the color that had been flung into it bleached away. She felt the magic rise up until it filled her to the tip of her horn. The spiral of silver changed to a spike of mercury, swirling and dangerous. She heaved a lungful of air and pulled her head back, like a lion tamer whisking his whip in preparation for unleashing punishment. 

 ‘Alright, stoooop!’ a voice wailed from the castle. 

With a crack like a branch snapping, the portcullis began to open.

Caroline let her breath out slowly, lest the magic be accidentally dished out. Her horn relented its viscous form in favor of solidity.

She waited. An apology was due. 

As soon as the clunking had ceased, a figure toppled out of the portcullis’ depths. 

Simonale was Caroline’s trusted servant, friend, advisor and (she suspected) secret suitor. They adored her. Their function was to guard the Queendom in her absence. She delegated full powers to them when she was away, trusting that they would use them wisely. When she was in residence their powers were reduced to the level of minor irritant, vis-a-vis today’s attempt at amusement.

Simonale’s manifestation was usually the form of an otter, although they normally stood on their hind legs, meerkat style. 

‘Your highness,’ Simonale said, bowing so deeply that their nose scuffed the ground.

Caroline cuffed them. ‘Quiet thing,’ she said.

‘Ouch!’ they said, and straightened. They meet Caroline’s eyes before glancing away. ‘Your Queendom remains intact.’

They always said that, it was their way of telling her that all was well. ‘Bless you,’ said Caroline. It was her traditional response. She started forward. Simonale turned matched her pace with a trot.

‘So,’ they said, ‘where are we now?’

‘Florida,’ she replied, her hoofs clippedy-clopping over the draw bridge.

‘Florida!’ they cried. ‘What the f**k are we doing there?’

Caroline stopped. It took Simonale a moment to realize that they were walking next to thin air. They stopped and turned back to face her. ‘Ummm, my apologies your Highness. I’ve been watching too much YouTube.’

Caroline sighed. One of the disadvantages of having someone watch over your subconscious was that Simonale saw and heard what she did. Of course she knew they were really her. But it was nice to think that someone was looking after things whilst she was away. 

 ‘We,’ Caroline said, ‘are on our way to fulfill our dolphin swim dream.’ She used the word dream to separate it from this fantasy. She moved forward at walking pace, blinking as she moved under the shadow of the portcullis.

Simonale moved back to walk with her. ‘Really? That was easy.’

Caroline turned her head to regard them. ‘Easy? Do you know how hard it was to transmit that much real-world magic. To get Uncle Anton to agree to come here?’

‘Of course I do,’ they said. ‘We had a blackout!’

By blackout, Caroline knew they meant an eclipse. Once, in an attempt to raise her spirits, her parents had taken her to the path of a total eclipse. She remembered a terrifying stillness and absence of sound. No birds, no talking. The creepy daytime darkness. It had been almost spiritual. 

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was necessary. There’s no way Uncle Anton would have gone for it otherwise.’

The stepped into the castle’s courtyard, a ramshackle affair resembling something left over from the mash up of a medieval joust and a raucous kids birthday party. Caroline sniffed. The smell of fresh hay mixed with frosting layered up through her nostrils. 

‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘What’s for lunch?’

‘How long have we got?” Simonale said.

Caroline gave the unicorn version of a shrug, which consisted of shaking her head a few times. ‘Half an hour, depending on the traffic.’

Simonale sighed. ‘I’ll see what the kitchen can rustle up.’

They walked across the courtyard, picking their way through broken shields and giant balls of gaudy wrapping paper. On the courtyard’s opposite side they climbed granite stairs to the oaken doors which led to the main hall. Simonale prodded the doors with their finger, as if waking napping guards. The doors opened on well-oiled hinges. Inside the hall sunlight angled through windows, mapping hazy rectangles on worn rugs. Caroline moved inside, enjoying the feeling of lived-in threads under her hooves. She walked between runway tables. Benches, standing or lying in various stages of sloth, cluttered the floor. At the far end of the hall was her dais, and atop it her throne. 

Her throne was a ten-foot, curved couch with one of the arms removed. It was upholstered in a plush, tangerine fabric which she thought offset her moonlight coat nicely. The whole thing was affected by light from a moon window set in the rear wall. She could alter the angle of the light as she wished: sometimes to shine on her dazzling brilliance, or spotlight into the face of an errant subject come to grovel for forgiveness. Currently it was dipped to shine on her throne. She ascended the ten, sharp steps and reclined.

Simonale remained at the foot of the dais. 

She clopped her hooves. It really did sound like coconuts being banged together. 

Simonale jumped, as if they’d been daydreaming. ‘Ah yes, lunch. Sorry.’ They vanished.

Caroline pricked up one ear. She heard the muffled clanking of pots being shuffled. This was followed by unintelligible language which she suspected was no better than Simonale had used earlier. She laid her head on the throne’s arm, enjoying the sensation of velvet against her skin. It was like hugging an old friend. She wondered what the dolphin swim would be like. She wouldn’t be swimming, obviously. Left alone in water she would sink to the bottom. The only way she could be buoyant was wearing a life vest, so she imagined they would crowbar her into some sort of flotation device. She had listened to her father booking the trip. It hadn’t been easily. Most of the companies that ran such experiences did not want to accept the liability of having a disabled person. But her father had found a company that specifically catered to disabled children. Caroline got the impression that this was supposed to be for kids around Anya’s age, children suffering from stage 4 cancer and the like. But when her mother got on the phone and subjected a minion to such a graphic description of what passed for Caroline’s life that the company had relented (for a hiked up price). She felt sorry that she was depleting her parent’s funds with this but reasoned that, as she was unlikely to go to college, they were actually saving money. In any case Uncle Anton, gruff as he was, had probably contributed more than the cost of Anya’s inclusion.

‘Ahem. Your highness?’

She jerked her head up. Beneath her was a line of creatures bearing overflowing platters of food in varying forms: cake, pastries, oats, even straw. The creatures, her subjects, varied from rabbits up to the odd tiger. There was even a small elephant carrying a bale of hay in its trunk. 

The animal at the front of the queue, a mulatto squirrel, the one who had spoken, said, ‘Your highness, we have brought lunch.’

Caroline nodded. ‘You may set it down on the tables.’

The animals scurried to deposit their wares on the closest available spots. The elephant did a sideways move which would have impressed a ballet dancer and plonked its bail onto the table furthest from it.

‘Thank you,’ Caroline said.

The animals bowed, then popped out of existence.

Caroline got up, clopped down the stairs and sniffed at a plate of cheese and salami sandwiches. She took one and munched it slowly before swallowing. She enjoyed the sensation of grinding food, as opposed to sucking it through a straw. Her mother was inventive with the shakes, but blended chicken pot pie just didn’t taste the same.

Simonale reappeared. ‘How is it?’

Caroline regarded them. ‘Would you like some?’

‘I thought you’d never ask! I’m famished.’ They sprinted to a plate of pasties and began to scoff them whole. 

‘What’s the hurry?’ Caroline exclaimed. ‘You’ll choke.’

Simonale tapped their right finger on their left wrist. ‘Mime poo bo,’ they said.

‘What?’ Caroline asked, flabbergasted at their poor manners.

Simonale, a flake of pasty sticking out of their mouth, tilted their head up.

Caroline was about to flay them with her verbal whit when the voice of God flooded over them.

Caroline, time to wake up darling.

‘Oh,’ Caroline said. ‘You’d best fuel up then.’

Simonale nodded. They crammed another pasty in with such force that Caroline wondered why their predecessors didn’t reappear out of the other end.

The castle tilted alarmingly. Silver trays clattered onto the floor with a din reserved for restaurant kitchen doors swinging when they should have been swunging.  

Caroline baby, c’mon wake up. We’re here.

‘Gotta go,’ she said. 

‘I mo,’ Simonale replied. They swallowed with extreme effort, then belched. ‘Sorry about that, your highness.’

She smiled at them. ‘No need. I know you need to get filled up before I leave. I’ll be back soon, I promise.’

They bowed. Not as deeply as before, but presumably a belly full of pasties was a constraining factor. Caroline closed her eyes.

The return to reality was nowhere near as exciting as its entrance. She just opened her eyes. The ghost of Simonale remained on the inside of her retina for a moment, which created the strange image of them standing in the entrance of the Hotel Chatsworth. Simonale dissolved like a wisp of steam on a winter’s day. 

The chains of immobility returned. Caroline was back in prison.