Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for August 12, 2023

You can tell this is a filler story because they’ve completely moved on and are no longer talking about the award that sent them on this journey in the first place.

What? Does Phoebe not watch tv shows or play games about talking animals?

What about parrots?

There was once a mynah that had been trained to say “I’m a chicken hawk.”

Almost everyday is weird.

This is another example of a fantasy story about travelling to an alternative dimension in which animals converse with humans. Classic examples of this include Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I have mentioned before that I wasn’t surprised to learn that C. S. Lewis preferred Animal Farm to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm has the talking animals but not the different dimension.

Anyone remember Jiminy Cricket? “You are a human animal, you’re part of a very special breed, you are the only animal who can think, who can reason and can read”!

Maybe the train will talk too!

Better yet, they can just leave you behind.

Dakota can ride on the roof!

If you think it’s confusing here, wait’ll you see Narnia.

I suspect we haven’t seen the last of the jilted “sphinx”…

Maybe they’ll run across Jon-Tom and Mudge. Clothahump would be a good match for Llewellyn. (For all of you younger readers and fans of human/talking animal stories or Terry Pratchett, find copies of Alan Dean Foster’s 7 volume Spellsinger Series.

A horse is a horse of course, of course…

Dakota seems unhappy to be called “Talking Animal”.

Oh no, I wouldn’t miss that argument if I could help it!

I dreamed last night that that Sphynx cat called their likes who attacked our quest-party on the train.