Sunshine, the evening sky-colored unicorn was turning 18 the next day. Before retiring to bed, she made plans with her friends on the phone and said a little prayer. She was experiencing short term birthday eve blues, but she got over it when calls started pouring in from friends, neighbors and cousins. She was turning 18 and was already a fine young, beautiful lady-unicorn in the making.
The next day, she woke up early and her parents gifted her with a golden ornament for her horn. It had a diamond on it which shone brightly on her forehead. She got dressed and was on her way to meet her friends.
Summer and Silvermoon were her friends from college. They gifted her tail-ribbons of every color, made of satin. Sunshine loved them. Bluesky and Spring joined them. They gave her tickets to a merry –go- round, with human figures to ride on. (When humans started riding on unicorns on merry-go-rounds, it gave the unicorns an idea.) They decided to go to a local pub. And as she entered the pub, sunshine ordered her first pitcher.
She drank it down and felt like an angel. And then they moved to another pub and she drank some vodka there. She was quite drunk when at her first shot of vodka, but she didn’t stop. 1, 2 and 3. And she continued. After the third drink, she couldn’t even taste the vodka, but she promptly she went on. Her friends urged her to stop, but she drank on, one shot after another.
At the first bite of a French fry, her stomach gave way. She felt mild tremors in her stomach and her head spun faster than a charged top. She couldn’t feel much of the other parts of her body, but they all seemed to go disconnected from her back-bone. The tremors turned to visible churns and she soon felt stomach quacks.
Soon she threw up. And it continued for half an hour. It worried her friends greatly and they were anxious to get her home. In her drunk, ill, pukish, completely at loss for words and energy state, she let her friends know that she couldn’t be taken home because her folks would be very upset with her. “Alcohol is for horses” her grandmother would say, when she saw tipsy unicorns at parties.
Her friends unanimously decided that they would take her to Windchime’s house. Windchime was Summer’s friends from dance classes. Windy lived alone and thus it would most convenient to go to her house. They reached Windy’s house, as soon as possible, while sunshine left a trail of her sickness along the way. Windy was glad to be of help, because when a unicorn helps another one, they get a shiner coat, she believed. She showed them to the bathroom and Summer and Silver, helped her clean up. They made her some hot chocolate milk and lay her on the bed made of cotton wool. Her tail had lost its shine. Her coat seemed rough, her eyes turned purple and her stomach continued to churn. Sunshine complained of a spinning head and stated that her horn felt heavy.
She swore never to drink again. She vowed that she would never enter another pub, let alone have a sip. She apologized to her friends for all the trouble she had put them through. It was one birthday she could never forget, yet doesn’t remember most of it, because she had passed out for significant amount of the day.
Around the evening, she was dropped back home by Spring. Spring reached her to the main door and galloped away. Sunshine opened the door slowly and to her surprise her entire family was gathered there. Her cousins, uncles, aunts and even some distant relatives who were actually horses were also there. She walked nervously past all of them. There was a table full of gifts and two tables full of food. There were balloons and ribbon and tinsel all over the house. It looked better than the fairy land outside. She walked to her parents who were standing in the center of her living room in front of a huge cake that was shaped like the moon with a rabbit on it. It was bright pink and looked beautiful, even to a drunk unicorn.
The gathering sang the birthday song and Sunshine blew the candles and made a wish. She wished that her parent and her family would never find out what she had been up to. She cut her cake and gave a bite to her folks and her brother. Her father kissed her on the forehead, next to her horn and declared – “now that you are 18, you may have your first drink” and held out a glass of wine.
Cheers.
Hic!