Spittoon Monthly presents “The Unicorn King,” by Jordan Dotson, whose wild and witty prose will take you to a truly special place, a certain village by the sea, where just about anything might saunter into town. Following the story, we have an excerpt of our interview with Dotson on the origins of this tall tale, and finally Jack Calder extends from the work with a critical glance at today’s magical realism. If you love what you read, you can support Dotson and our editors with a quick share on social media.
The Story
THE UNICORN KING
by Jordan Dotson
Truth told, it all started with the fish-market children. All summer long they’d assailed Black Tooth, begging he teach them his secret technique for smoking cigarettes in the rain. Whenever a typhoon squall would rise, they’d gather beneath the umbrellas on the pier, wait for the boatman to light his Marlboros, then squeal and applaud as he kept the embers glowing amid downpours like great iron sheets. The trick, he’d told them with the air of a magician, was seeing all the spaces in between. Thus, you can imagine the children’s excitement, on that dreary morning with the world half-soaked to the marrow of its bones, when Black Tooth finally succumbed to their harassment and promised to reveal his technique. Those scamps nearly lost their heads. They cheered and banged their fists on the pier rail, appearing like a mad band of dwarfish pirates, and that was the moment, it was that very instant, when Black Tooth spat his cigarette into the harbor and blurted, “Is that a unicorn?”
The children, of course, didn’t laugh. Certain that Black Tooth was up to some chicanery (as was his way), they only picked their noses and watched the boatman as he stared past the rails of the tourists’ promenade, past Tiger Lee’s cage of dead sea urchins, and past the canvas tent where ornery Mama Lam, chief water-taxi tout, harangued sightseers while fanning her gelatinous bosom. A spitting rain battered their tiny faces as Black Tooth leaned across the edge of his skiff. “Come on Old Tooth!” they pleaded. “Give up the secret!” Yet the water-taxi captain didn’t budge. Instead, with his beady eyes shining full of wonder, he only stared and stared some more, and finally stared so unthinkably hard that he tipped face-first into the harbor.
The children were astounded. Having never seen a boatman lose his footing before, they opened their mouths and widened their eyes, then finally spun towards the tourists’ promenade to witness the cause for themselves. And, truly, it was a unicorn.
The beast came strolling past the Sea Food Palace. It led our herd of melancholy cows in a purposeful single-file parade. Its mottled brown fur was tangled with burs, but its human eyes seemed warm and friendly, and if one ignored the bony protuberance which issued from between its ragged ears, the unicorn appeared little different from its companions, those seven feral cattle who daily marched the village in search of salty stones to lick clean. Even so, its appearance was astonishing. The moment they saw it, the fish-market children forgot entirely about Black Tooth, and instead loosed a cheer and chased after the beast with their hands shaped into recoiling six-shooters.
Luckily the unicorn didn’t seem perturbed. It only switched its tail and paused for a moment to inspect the wild children who clambered over tables to mount it from behind. And after the smallest of them climbed atop its haunches, it gave a moo that seemed quite neighborly and set out again on its journey through the town.
Just as they started to depart, however, the creaky sky gasped, the tiresome rains disappeared in an instant, and an equally entertaining spectacle appeared: Black Tooth himself, emerged from the harbor, and looking like the bedraggled ghost of a sad drowned sailor. He’d lost his flip-flops in the frothing dockwaters, and his sopping floppy bucket hat dangled from its strap. But before anyone even had the chance to laugh, Black Tooth grinned with his tar-gapped teeth, then unleashed a shout which scared the fishy children into ceasing their whiz-bangs and bugle blasts, and caused the unicorn to twitch its ears.
“Make way for the unicorn!” he cried.
Beaming as though the goddess Tin Hau, patron deity of all seafarers, had just presented him with the first true blessing of his fifty-eight years of life, Black Tooth patted the beast on its shoulder and led it away from the Sea Food Palace at an easy but deliberate pace. “Make way!” he cried in his salt-caked voice, as the fish-market children exchanged furtive looks and scampered along behind. “Make way!” he cried, at Horatio Lau, the seafood hawker, who presently was waving a menu at a pack of frightened tourists. “Don’t you know unicorns are vegetarians!” Utterly mystified, Horatio grumbled and scratched his chin, then ran off to hassle two Germans sightseers who appeared to be cursing the herd of cattle for ambling across the road while the light was red.
“Look at that idiot,” Tiger Lee chuckled, gesturing with his chin at the gangly boatman. “He thinks he’s a cowboy!”
“Where are you going?” Mama Lam hollered, for in spite of the whitecaps and seething skies, she’d strong-armed a dozen confused Japanese into riding Black Tooth’s water-taxi to the beach across the bay. “We’ve got fares you bastard!”
Yet Black Tooth didn’t seem to care. Emboldened by the unicorn’s dignified bleating, he ran past the Macanese Chicken stall to scatter the errand boys tugging on wagons of junked motor parts. “Make way for the unicorn!” he yelled through their stares. His volume redoubled at the French wine shop, where the cries of the children had grown so noisy that Louis the Parisian started hiding his cheese, and soon the whole lot were like a band of dragon dancers as they clattered and caterwauled around park benches, capered through the beards of the banyan trees, and gracefully avoided the splatters of bird shit offered by a flock of frightened gulls. “Make way!” Black Tooth kept repeating, as altogether they passed the florist’s and the Melbourne Cafe, relishing the stares of the coffee drinkers and the spurts of joy that erupted from the Filipino maids. “Can’t you see it’s a unicorn!” he squawked, at the bankers’ blonde wives, who with their housekeepers so distracted had no idea how to prevent their own children from joining the riotous parade. Truly, it was some sight to see.
By the time the herd and those lunatic children clattered into the plaza at Tin Hau’s temple, a crowd had formed to gossip at the dissolute noise. Glum Wing Leung from the fruit store arrived in his Ray-Bans and silk pajamas. Chow the anchor merchant fiddled with his glass eye. A delegation of coquettish matrons emerged from the shade of the Thai massage den, and their whispers mingled with the fragrance of incense and the briny breeze off the bay. Even the teenagers lazing on the temple steps found cause enough to look up from their phones, and that, no doubt, was most amazing of all. Yet amid the uproar, as Black Tooth struggled to prevent his herd from stopping for a rest, Smiley Aunty from the bric-a-brac shop sauntered up and poked him in the ribs.
“Aiya, Black Tooth! Leave that poor cow alone.”
“It’s a unicorn!” Black Tooth huffed. “Make way! Let him pass!”
He strained and groaned against the unicorn’s haunches, as Smiley Aunty swiveled on her rheumatic legs and announced: “A unicorn! Hear that, children? That’s why you shouldn’t drink beer.”
The crowd burst into laughter. “That’s not a unicorn,” Tiger Lee hollered, gesturing at the beast’s knobby horn. “It’s a cow with a tumor! The old eunuch’s lost his marbles!” Their chants of mockery buzzed in the plaza like a swarm of flies, but despite the ridicule, Black Tooth stood firm. He gestured at all who dared laugh at his discovery with his nicotine-stained middle finger, then threatened Tiger Lee with ten different manners of a beating. Yet even as the crowd lobbed taunts and jeers, and the fish-market children hooted and hollered, a curious bystander raised his voice and almost immediately absolved the boatman of his fate as a laughing stock.
“Look at its ears!” cried Blackbeard Cheung, gliding before them on his mechanized scooter with its pirate flag fluttering behind.
“Look at its ears!” cried the parrot on his shoulder.
Everyone leaned in to get a closer look as Blackbeard pinched the unicorn’s ears between his thumb and forefinger. “It doesn’t have a tag,” he murmured, awestruck.
“It doesn’t have a tag?” the crowd responded.
“It doesn’t have a tag!” the parrot echoed, and a hush spread so quickly across the plaza that even the fish-market children went quiet with awe.
Blackbeard and Tiger Lee searched all seven of the melancholy cows, and as expected, found each to have a yellow plastic tag affixed to its ear by the Bureau of Autonomous Cattle Management. But as they combed the unicorn’s head, then tugged at its switching tail and scoured its hide (despite Black Tooth’s profane denunciations), they found the poor creature to be untagged, unadorned, unaccounted for and unclassified, and thus wholly and utterly unlicensed to be a feral cow.
“Well damn my eyes,” Mama Lam bellowed. “It is a unicorn!” And a cheer rose up to the ashy, cloud-laden skies.
Before long the plaza was bustling with inquisitive parties from all across the village. A mud-splattered band of construction workers angrily fought for purchase on the curb. Someone set up a fish ball stand. Terriers yipped like fierce little lions and a charlatan monk started rattling beads and passing around a donation bucket. A cohort of unshaven English teachers hoisted their backpacks and snapped photographs, then ran away frightened from the fish-market children, who’d once again clambered up the melancholy cows in an attempt to spur a stampede. Black Tooth himself appeared to listen nervously as the locals speculated regarding the origins of the fabled beast. Blackbeard Cheung said he’d heard of such creatures in his wayfaring youth. Mama Lam called it an auspicious sign. Wing Leung said it was an unlucky mutant, sprung to life in the polluted rivers downstream from our industrious neighbors to the north, but as was typical, no one could agree. Tiger Lee claimed it descended from the heavens, that he himself was the first to see it, but Black Tooth had unfairly beaten him to the punch. Black Tooth didn’t bother arguing then, and appeared satisfied, for a moment at least, when Mama Lam smacked Tiger Lee in the back of the head.
Soon enough, the crowd stopped caring where the unicorn had come from and began to argue over what needed to be done. It was truly an epic conundrum. The fish-market children begged to see if it could fly. Big Tipper Wong, chief gangster of the village, offered to smuggle it up the Opal River in a high-speed boat, where delicacies of such kind fetched a high price. A fight broke out when Tan the Herbalist, purveyor of remedies for male dysfunction in the act of love, suggested they grind its horn into a powder to be sold at market, and in so doing inflamed the dignity of the local tailor, Ravi Maharaj, and his gang of implacable Hindu touts. Only with Big Tipper Wong’s intervention was Tan extricated from a fierce headlock, and a call put in to C.Y. Chan at the Indigenous Village Administrative Office. Despite such flagrant deviation from procedure, Chan said he’d send the proper forms to the temple (by registered mail no less), and promised to have the matter resolved in fourteen business days.
Unsurprisingly, the crowd was displeased, and Black Tooth most of all. As rankled voices churned all about him, Black Tooth dripped with a nervous sweat. The air had congealed into a balmy treacle, and in it he must have suspected that that his luck was running right out through his pores. Then just as he appeared to worry that his neighbors would tear his unicorn limb from limb, a murmur rose among the buxom Thai matrons, and out of the steaming grates of the alleyway sauntered a vision more enigmatic even than the unicorn itself: tuxedoed Gordie, the highland Scot, who’d lived in the village for twenty-five years, but was rarely seen outside of his home except when drunk on pay day. Whispers shuttled across the plaza as everyone watched Gordie swaying where he stood, before the threshold of the Poodle Sweater Shop, in a plume of vapor emanating from the alley’s drainpipes. His pewter hair curled like pigeon wings, and his right eye roved independent of his left as he took in the perplexing scene.
“Well, well,” Gordie burped, withdrawing a dented flask from his cummerbund and taking an exultant swig. “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns, aye?”
In that moment, the fisherfolk regretted their poor command of English, the foreigners pretended they understood Scots, and stunned by such a cabalistic vision, everyone gave way as Gordie crossed the plaza in a desultory sway, then disappeared singing in the palm fronds dripping off the hill. In his wake, no one said a word. It was as though the goddess herself had spoken, and the wonders of the afternoon diminished in a passing dream. Then the unicorn gave a cryptic moo, and before anyone could remember why they’d gathered, a loud crack of thunder broke open the sky, a sudden downpour came roaring from the south, and in an instant the crowds went scrambling. The plump Thai masseuses ran squealing to their den. The fish-market children quickly holstered their pistols and fled. Mama Lam grumbled and Smiley Aunty cackled, and soon the convocation had vanished entirely, except for Black Tooth himself. With a waterfall pouring from his wispy brow, he grinned at the heaven-sent river as it swept the plaza of Tin Hau’s temple clean, then patted his unicorn on its soggy head, thanked the goddess, and lit a cigarette which, despite the rains, he somehow managed to keep miraculously dry.
The following morning, everyone was so distracted by life that few even mentioned the previous day’s curiosities. Dawn broke clean and bright in the east, the squid boats returned from their morning quests, the seafood hawkers hosed down their tanks, the bakeries hummed and the shop doors opened and the skiffs at the pier swarmed in anticipation of the kind of sun-rinsed market Sunday when neverending hordes of tourists sought ferries to the white sand beach across the bay. No one but Mama Lam seemed concerned that Black Tooth’s skiff remained chained to the dock, angry as she was at losing fares. Even the water-taxi captains didn’t care, and after a swift round of condescending jeers, they forgot the matter entirely. Yet as the morning passed, a pall of fear fell over all the locals who made their living at the promenade, for they soon realized that Black Tooth wasn’t the only thing that had vanished.
Our village by the sea was a ghost town. Not a single tourist roamed the Seafood Palace nor the shade of the banyan trees. No one had come to purchase Tiger Lee’s urchins, nor the latest in counterfeit Korean fashions, nor the fake gemstones at the lapidary market stalls. Other than Mama Lam’s complaints of poverty, the only sounds that echoed off the sea wall were waves lapping sadly against the pier, the mocking of the gulls, and the mindless splatter of birdshit on empty public benches. It was in that eerie quiescence that the fish-market children came running down the promenade, licking their lips and patting their bellies with emaciated, nut-brown limbs.
“Where have you tramps been?” Mama Lam squawked, fanning her colossal bosom in the shade of her tent.
“At the Unicorn King’s!” they cried. Then the lot drew their imaginary pistols and attempted to dragoon Mama into battle, before tumbling off in the direction from which they came. Equally curious and agitated, and with no one to harangue into giving up money, Mama Lam gestured to Tiger Lee and her team of water-taxi captains, and they left their posts and followed along with their bone-dry flip-flops cursing and spitting as they went. They marched past three dozen empty taxis, past the idling ice cream truck, past the sparkling mermaid fountain where not a single child was playing in the spray, and at the outskirts of the minibus station where the hawkers of cheap towels and beach blankets choked on exhaust for the length of their lives, Mama Lam, Tiger Lee and the water-taxi captains were struck with inexplicable awe.
The line of tourists stretched a hundred meters. It passed the playground and the public swimming pool, then layered itself against the sea wall, hundreds of people, all appearing hungry and somewhat excited, though unconcerned with the chalked sandwich boards selling squid sticks and cuttlefish stew. Utterly bewildered, Mama Lam plowed ahead, only to find herself rebuffed by angry Caucasians who cursed her for cutting in line. With no other choice, the water-taxi captains had to drag her all the way to the end of the queue, where an hour and fifteen minutes passed before they discovered the makeshift attraction that had captured the hearts of so many holidaymakers.
The unicorn wore a regal horsecloth sewn together from fishing boat nets. Its painted horn gleamed bright white in the afternoon sun. Grill smoke billowed from a secondhand tent with a tattered pennant fluttering at its peak, and when Black Tooth sold her a Unicorn Burger for the exact same price as a water-taxi trip across the bay, Mama Lam was so wildly impressed that she didn’t even bother to haggle.
And that’s how it happened, eight years later, on the day that he died from a smoker’s heart attack, that the richest man in our village by the sea, subject of countless fawning business editorials, recently acquitted of bribery within the Bureau of Autonomous Cattle Management, gave thanks with the very last breath of his life to the goddess Tin Hau, to the noble but melancholy cows who’d supplied his very first hamburger patties, and most of all to the unicorn, who in Black Tooth’s last will and testament was named sole inheritor and Managing Director of his chain of restaurants with thirty locations in the Old Territories and the New. The fish-market children mouthed twenty-one shots when his ashes were eventually cast to the sea, and despite the typhoon that pummeled the pier and soaked the spectators gathered that day, it was said that each of those sly, fishy children, all now fully grown sailors themselves, exchanged furtive grins as they alone remained, somehow, miraculously dry.
THE END
So—a cow unicorn?
Jordan Dotson: I lived for a time in a beautiful little village by the sea, with boats in the harbor and a tourist promenade, and where the local villagers had worked as sailors and fisherman for centuries. They spoke their own language among themselves, though sometimes you could get Cantonese or a smattering of English or Mandarin out of them, and they drank a lot of beer and threw wild barbecue parties on Tomb-Sweeping Day. A lot of foreign banker types lived in the hills outside the village, and the place was a jewel. The only truly multicultural place I’ve ever seen in my life. One of the things I loved the most about the village was this herd of ancient, mangy cows that tromped about like they owned the place. They’d stop traffic and poke their heads in the coffee shops, and no one ever acted as if this were strange. Sometimes they got to be a nuisance, but really they were as much a part of the community as anyone else. My friend used to wonder why the local government never slaughtered them and gave the villagers a big steak feed. One day I was walking to the swimming pool while the cows milled about the pier, and everyone just let them go about their business, kind of like a mother who’s learned to ignore a rowdy toddler. So, I was watching this cow nosing around a fish tank in an open-air seafood restaurant, with nobody shooing it away, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Nothing ever surprises these people,” I thought. And right then, with that thought, the story appeared almost fully formed in my head.
In many ways it’s inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” but saying that feels like a disservice to the village. It’s a beautiful place that kind of exists outside of time, with no subway and no high-rise apartments, where biracial, trilingual, barefoot kids dangle from the banyan trees, and fishermen smoke on the docks all night, and pythons occasionally eat people’s poodles, and it’s the only place I’ve ever been where a unicorn might really appear, and this is my love song to it.
Critical Accompaniment
What’s “magical” about magical realism?
by Jack Calder
I feel compelled to classify Dotson’s story “The Unicorn King” as magical realism. This despite the fact that nothing strictly magical happens in the piece. Yes, there is the eponymous unicorn, but this could reasonably be explained as a “cow with a tumor.” So too Black Tooth’s ability to light a cigarette in any amount of rain strains credulity, but we hear of similar stories from wartime soldiers or particularly crafty smokers. Despite the absence of magic in a narrow sense, this story practically screams magical realism. What gives?
It has something to do with the uneasy alliance between the colloquial, folk-tale tone and the undeniably modern setting. The narrator speaks with the familiarity of an old sea dog telling a local legend, peppering his tale with all sorts of rhetorical flourishes. There are “scamps” who get up to “chicanery,” colorful national characters, riotous scenes that convene the whole village—but where is this cozy locale? If not for the pointed insertion of modern features (phones, bucket hats, tourists), we might place the story in some hazy, timeless sea-village. But all indications point to modern Hong Kong, or thereabouts.
Part of the “magic” of this story is the struggle to reimagine Hong Kong as a “village,” a place where everyone knows each other, and manage to have more or less personal relations. This is typified by a character like Gordie, who commands such a legendary status amongst “the folk” that his mere appearance can silence an entire crowd. His legend apparently stems from the fact that he is “rarely seen outside of his home except when drunk on pay day.” If only isolation were such a notable feature in a city! A city is full of drunks who never leave home, shut-ins and the mentally ill. Isolation, if not the rule, is certainly no exception. Gordie’s fame can only be the work of a particular kind of “magic.”
Such “magical” contradictions proliferate throughout the piece. The village is parochial, yet jammed with international tourists. Cows wander the streets, but are duly tagged by a bureaucracy. The eponymous unicorn blesses his herd with the dubious honor of becoming a successful tourist trap. In this half-real city atavisms and stereotypes mingle freely with the spirit of modern enterprise.
This points to a deeper problem with contemporary “magical realism” as a whole. As magical realism has become more established as a genre, it has tended to shed “realism” in favor of “magic.” Authors working in the genre increasingly take up the style and flavor of magical realism without disciplining it to any kind of reality. What is being fought out in the present is a battle over the “why” of magical realism.
Examining a figure like Marquez, who most consider an archetypal magical realist, we find that his “magic” usually functions as a device of critique. The Autumn of the Patriarch examines the mystique of the dictator, how his power extends deep into the psychology of the people and himself. The pleasure we feel when reading the description of his “magic” is precisely the pleasure of watching a grand military parade; it is a study of the seductive powers of violence. When we read The Autumn of the Patriarch, we are prompted to reflect on how easily we are swayed by the spectacle of power. But how with contemporary magical realism?
Here we find that the magic has come into its own. Rather than questioning the pleasure of fantasy, the standardized genre of “magical realism” wholly affirms it. A romantic image of parochial village life is projected onto the modern city, in which all violence takes on the form of a pleasant familial squabble, and the characters’ real enmities and differences are resolved into a deeper togetherness. When we catch an occasional glimpse of something like real suffering, the rollicking prose carries us through these images so quickly that they can do little more than leave a strange aftertaste on the way to new pleasures. What was once a sharp critical tool is now merely stylish flavor.
This new “magic” defangs the world, preemptively reconciling for us what is so often strange and difficult in life. It reanimates the “folk” for cities, which are more and more only filled with people. It is “magical thinking” in the most derogatory sense.
There are two possible reactions to such a style. One is to regard it as aspirational. What inner resources would we have to marshal to live in such an enchanted place? How would we begin to cultivate such a kindly eye? Or, on a more general level: what changes must take place in the world such that we could live in it this way? The latter response would see this magical imagination as registering a loss or an absence. That if we do not live in this colorful, cosmopolitan home—complete with a bureaucracy without teeth—what might we have to change so that we did?
All this, however, need not apply to Dotson’s story. What I felt most when reading Dotson was joy. That is the story’s great strength. I laughed at his riotous urchins and the march of the taxi-men. I nodded in recognition of the various skillfully handled archetypes. It may be more appropriate, after all, to think of the story simply as fantasy: realistic magic. And just as we go to a magic show to be astounded and amazed, we read Dotson for his feats of imagination. He restores us to vitality and good cheer. But once the old sea-dog finishes his tale, it’s time to pat him on the shoulder, spot him another drink, and exit the bar to colder streets.
Jordan Dotson was born in Appalachian Virginia. His recent work has appeared in decomP, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Eunoia Review, and Scoundrel Time, for which he received the 2019 Editors’ Prize. He is also co-writer of Incognito, a China-US co-production which won Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 AFMA Film Festival in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Virginia with an MFA from City University of Hong Kong, Jordan recently relocated to the US after living in China for 15 years.
Cover art by David Huntington
Interview conducted and edited by Deva Eveland
Critical Accompaniment by Jack Calder