150 or Below

by KwirkyJ

Redirection

To keep from wrecking anything, Octavia locked every muscle in her body. Ice flushed through her legs and magma pooled in her chest. Her ears rang.

Anxious hooves shuffled behind her.

A muscle strained behind her ear. It traveled down her neck and ended with a shudder down a wither, threatening to tear everything loose.

Slowly, deliberately, Octavia prepared herself to speak. The process was delicate and painful, drawing breath and opening her jaw, water flowing over a dam. She nearly broke, tail lashing, seized herself, and tried again: breath in, hold, wait, release. In, hold, release. Again, in, hold...

"I am mad at you, Vinyl," she said, voice rigid as wood, eyes on infinity, "because you cut the bread in the wrong way."

Author's Note:

Written for the August 2017 prompt "Boiling Point"

To understand the story the way it is intended, the following recollected excerpt may be informative:

To say "I am mad at you because you cut the bread in the wrong way" is to seem at once infantile and insane—however, as infantility and insanity largely define the human condition, it is time that we as a culture stop indulging in (and suffering from!) more enlightened notions.

The source of the above has been forgotten, unfortunately.