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What Is Disneyland?

by Lisa Locascio

To meet her childhood friends at Disneyland, Stella traveled through the night from a northern land, riding south in a dog sleigh across a moonlit snowy plain to Whitehorse, where she met a carriage drawn by caribou. The driver, a tiny Inuit man in a bright red cap, took her to the port, icy and severe in the silver dawn. A steamship waited there, all bright clean interiors, teak furniture, and clear tea. A man in a white suit gathered her foxfur muffler and led her onboard.

During the journey she lay on her stomach on the floor of her stateroom, watching the gray water slosh against her gold-rimmed porthole as the boat bore her down the Pacific Coast. Dolphins crept alongside the ship and opened their mouths silently in her window. As the weather warmed and the boat’s body sang on the open water, she unwrapped layers of blue and white furs from around her body. Blind pale servants appeared and dressed her in a touring outfit of T-shirt and shorts with trembling wet fingers. They slung a camera on a cord around her neck and covered her eyes with giant sunglasses. They rubbed thick white sun cream into her thick lazy limbs and kissed her hands with dry closed mouths.

The white-suited man led her by hand onto the deck. Stella stood at a white railing and stared down at the light sea. The man punched her ticket with the mouth of a small vole he kept in a dark wood box on a gold chain around his neck. A walkway unfurled down to a shining cement parking lot. Stella took a tentative step. Then suddenly there she was, at Disneyland, waiting for the monorail with the engaged couple she had known since kindergarten.

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