The Princess and The Racehorse

Purveyors of the ancient art of declaring which animal a person would have been, had they been an animal, had often declared Lilly to be an Arabian race horse, all jittery when it had to wait its turn to race around the track.

But the truth was that Lilly was actually an Arabian princess, left in England by her father as a young child. This was a fact that had been lost on most, due to the fact that Lilly had been raised in England by worker bees, on account of which Lilly told her real family upon meeting them, one recent weekend, that she felt like Mooglie in the Jungle Book, in other words a boy child raised by apes. But as the guru always said, the truth shall be revealed. And so it was that one recent weekend, Lilly took a plane to meet her real family who had become acquainted to her through the Internet on Facebook and through a miracle. It turned out that her real family, also all princes and princesses, were textile merchants from the Holy Land who had lived everywhere from Tokyo to Mumbai. They had lived exotic lives but not as exotic as Lilly’s, she thought. Lilly had met them all at a wedding of one of her cousins where aunts and uncles bustled around making cups of tea, as long lost relatives were introduced to the fact that Lilly did really exist. She had long been nothing more than a rumor to many of these folks, a figment of their imagination. But now, dear reader, Lilly was for real. So Lilly met them all and then she went back home and met some more of her real family. In-between the emails flying back and forth around the planet, confirming her existence to upper class Arabs everywhere, Lilly had a duel with a cat named Jeep. Jeep slept above Lilly’s bed in the laundry room of the main house where she would meow each night and where her neighbors would stomp around feeding the cat at dawn. It got Lilly thinking that she should go hiking at sunrise and sleep with the sunset. But she just wasn’t yet an early bird. So late one afternoon, Lilly wrote a story about her new family who came from places like Nazareth, and included also a nun in Bethlehem, to submit to The New York Rhymes in the hope that she could become a famous writer and live in her own palace and not be disturbed. She thought, also, that this way she could become a writer for real, and not just for newspapers, and no longer have to water the guru’s plants or be nice to Jeep. Her new family invited her to lots of exciting places from Chile to Amman and she had also been invited to Tokyo by a filmmaker, so she figured she should also learn some Japanese while she waited for her new story to be published and her new life to begin.