Love in the Heavens

A love story is a point of view. It depends upon who’s telling the story as to how the love story is perceived. The Vintage Princess has taken it upon herself to give her version of the ménage à trois between Consuelo, Saint-Exupéry, and the Little Prince. (continued from Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince).

The Vintage Princess tells her story.

This morning I woke up with a crown on my head. Well, more than a crown, I’d call it a tiara. You see, I’m only a princess. And a very old one at that. This makes me quite happy, actually. Little girls want to grow up to be a princess. No girl I’ve ever known wanted to be queen.

The downside of being a princess is that there’s a good chance that, for political reasons, you’ll be married off to some king and then, maybe, become queen. Now how boring would that be to sit around all day wearing a heavy crown with a gown too bulky and long to let you climb trees?

Although my parents had tried marrying me off, I had no intention of marrying some fat, old, white man and decided to escape. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to. But then one day, I met this blonde-haired boy who claimed to be a prince from another planet. This little prince was looking for his lamb, and I helped him find it thanks to Schrodinger’s cat. The prince and I got along well and easily became friends. When I told him about wanting to escape, he said “no problem”. That he had friends who could help me out.

The next morning, the little prince told me he’d contacted his friends, and this was the plan: All I had to do was to climb to the top of Mount Cynthus and wait for the night to come. Sure enough, right after it got dark, a spaceship came and transported me away. The crew on board was quite friendly and we easily telepathed together.

Finally, we arrived above the Sahara Desert and, after hugs and exchanges of coordinates, I was beamed down to the ground. It was my first time on Earth, and I didn’t know what to expect. Luckily, my friends from the spaceship had given me a knapsack full of things they said would be useful.

The desert was hot and I needed shade. In the distance, I saw something that looked like a lopsided airplane. Hoping to find some shade under a wing, I walked towards the plane.

Next to the plane was a man dressed in an aviator’s suit. He seemed quite surprised to see me. I must have seemed out of place with the tiara on my head. Nevertheless, good manners are never out of place. I extended my hand to introduce myself and said: “Hello, how are you? My name is Vintage Princess, what’s yours?”

He said his friends called him Toño. Toño was a pilot and his plane had crashed. He was trying to fix it so he could leave and go home.

Toño, it seemed, had a hesitant personality. He lacked spontaneity and I wondered why. After we’d been sweating in the sun for some time making awkward conversation, he took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and placed it in my hand. Then he asked: “what’s this a drawing of?” “Why, it’s obvious”, I responded. “It’s a boa digesting an elephant.” After my response, he looked quite surprised and studied me carefully.

“On my planet,” I continued, “we have lots of boas and they swallow things all the time.”

For example, my friend, Sally, was sunbathing on the beach when a boa crawled right next to her and swallowed her without warning. After that, I never saw Sally again. Once, when my back was turned, a boa tried swallowing me, too. But I had a bottle of aerosol pepperoncino on me and started spraying like crazy the boa’s stomach lining. In a short time, the boa started flipping around and had to gasp for air. That short gasp was all it took. With the mouth opened, I jumped out as quickly as possible and began running before the boa could react.

My escape was possible because snakes don’t chew since they swallow their victims whole. Boas then secrete hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes to break down the food. Chemical teeth. The digestion takes the boa much time and energy depending upon the size of the victim. That’s why, if you’re swallowed by a boa, you need to escape before digestion begins.

I know of a boa that swallowed a garden gnome but the gnome, made from cement, refused to decompose. Despite the hydrochloric acid’s aggressive nature, it had difficulties fragmenting the gnome. Therefore, the gnome refused to decompose and the boa was forced to carry it around inside him making the boa look like some silly Carnevale float looking for wheels.

Toño the pilot then explained that he always has the people he meets look at his drawing. “Can you believe” he asked, “that most people don’t see a boa digesting an elephant and see, instead, a hat?”

the boa digesting an elephant *

It had been a busy day for both the pilot and me. Tired, we improvised a sleeping space in what was left of the cockpit. We looked up at the stars and tried searching for Orion, Cygnus, Scorpio, and Cassiopea. I found Cassiopea. It looks like an M made from stretched out elastic.

Looking at a nighttime sky can really make one curious. I asked Toño if he’d ever been to another planet. He said no but had recently met someone who travelled the skies visiting other planets. That’s when I knew he was talking about the Little Prince.

Toño said the Little Prince had shared many stories with him. That despite their different ways of perceiving life, Toño had really enjoyed his company and was sad to see him go. In fact, it was that subtracted companionship that saddened him so much.

Aside from myself, no one had understood that the drawing was not a hat but a boa digesting an elephant.

Suddenly I had a sort of epiphany—what if the Little Prince had me dropped off in the Sahara on purpose? What if he’d felt badly about leaving his friend alone and, to compensate, sent me. Well, now that was a thought. I was too tired to think about it and fell asleep under Cassiopea’s sagging M.

*drawing from “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

To be continued…..