Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for February 14, 2025

And they’ll only get dumber by the time Phoebe shows up.

STEREOTYPING!

“Butterfly, have you seen others like me? Have you seen even one?”

“Oh have you seen the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin maaaaan?”

They passed down all the roads long ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints. Listen! Listen, listen QUICKLY!

Watch the butterfly, flutter by!

My mind is blown.

Well, you 2 have something in common.

Butterflies don’t have fantastic eyesight, either.

I wonder if we’ll see Marigold transforming into a human.

Yet another “The Last Unicorn” reference…!

I wish my brain was small enough to be a Butterfly.

All butterflies know are songs, and poetry, and anything else they have heard. So does that mean this one heard someone reading The Last Unicorn?

“Look into the sky where through the clouds a path is torn. Look and see her, how she shimmers, it’s the Last Unicorn! I’m alive! I’m aliiiiiiiiive!”

This reminds of of watching the movie “The last of the Mohicans” many years ago. Daniel Day Lewis gives a big speech about how he will search and never give up looking for the woman he is about to be separated from, and then in the next scene he walks up and tells her he found her.

“No, listen. Don’t listen to me, listen!” Butterfly

Theodore Sturgeon was Guest of Honour at a VCon (Vancouver Science-Fiction Convention) and I was privileged to have a bit of a chat with him. I told him that in some ways my favourite of his works was “The Silken-Swift,” which seemed to me to have captured The True Essence of Magic, and specifically of Unicorns. He told me that Peter Beagle had told him that that story was Beagle’s inspiration, or one of them, for The Last Unicorn. I spoke with Beagle at a VCon some years later, and, as I recall, he confirmed this.

Some years later, Beagle was touring, mostly college towns, showing the revamped version of the movie. He and his publishing partner (who later ripped him off) had quite a bit of swag for sale, including lots of various books, and tote bags from Litographics containing the complete text of The Last Unicorn shaped into a picture of a unicorn. Unfortunately, that last is no longer available, probably because of the partner’s betrayal.

This is free verse!