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// October 9 [ArtPrize] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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October 9

I woke up kinda early and I was pinned between Meghan and the back of the couch, which was a little bit uncomfortable, and a little bit too warm. I could barely stretch out anything, and I didn't want to wake her up if I could help it.

I had enough room to stick my head up, and I turned an ear and could hear Aric sleeping, and every now and then he'd make a funny little snorting noise. I couldn't turn quite far enough to see him except just out of the corner of my eye.

So I stuck my head back down between Meghan and the couch, and that was enough to sort of wake her up.

She was a little bit confused about where she was, and she slid over just a little bit and then pulled at her bra, 'cause she said that the wire was digging in. And then she said that she had to pee, too, and I told her where the bathroom was.

And then when she was gone I took the opportunity to stretch out a little bit, 'cause my wings were kinda cramped, and one of my legs was asleep 'cause of how it had been folded under me.

When she came back she was holding her bra, and she said that she shouldn't have worn it to bed, and then she said that it was really weird how it had a window in the door, and I said I thought it was to let in light because there weren't any windows to the outside. But maybe I should have told her where the bathroom upstairs was, 'cause it didn't have a window in the door, just the one to outside.

She laid back down on the couch, and we kind of had to wiggle into position together. She said that she was a bit chilly because she didn't have a blanket, and it was kind of cold in the house, so I said that we could go up to Aric's room and take his blankets and bring one down for him, too. It was probably something that we should have thought of last night but we'd all been warmer then.

Meghan said that she kind of didn't want to move, but she'd be happier when she was warmer, so we went to his room to get his blankets, and she put one of them over him and then we got back on the couch together and she pulled it over us, and then sniffed at the edge and said that she wondered if he knew that you could wash blankets, because it smelled like him.

I didn't mind, though. It was almost like sleeping with him. And she didn't take the blanket back off, either.

It was just starting to get light when Aric got up and I think he was trying to be quiet, but when he got off the couch he knocked over a bunch of beer bottles, and they clanked and clanged around on the floor, and I heard him swear quietly, then he managed to kick one more when he started walking. And he saw that I was awake, so he waved at me and he was still trying to be quiet even though Meghan had woken up, too. But I didn't tell him, because I thought he'd rather think he was being sneaky, because it was kind of cute.

Meghan started snickering when the bathroom door closed, though, and she said that maybe we should put the bottles back so he'd knock them over again. I thought that was kind of mean, but it would be funny.

She asked if I wanted to sleep some more, and I said that I was done with sleeping, so she sat up but kept the blanket wrapped around her to keep her warm, and I leaned up against her side. And when Aric came back he saw us and asked if we were both early risers, and Meghan said that she loved to get up at first light, and I slapped her with my wing and said that wasn't true at all.

So Aric went back to the kitchen to make some coffee, and then while it was brewing we tried to decide what we wanted to do today. I wanted to go flying, but I didn't want to leave them behind, so I didn't suggest it right away.

Meghan said since he had Winston, we could go to Grand Rapids and see ArtPrize, which was a contest where lots of artists displayed their art all through town, and I thought that might be fun to see. And that sounded like it would be pretty fun, especially after Meghan said that she knew one of the artists, but she wouldn't tell us which one. And I asked if it was Rebekka, and she said that it wasn't, but maybe Rebekka had also made art, and we wouldn't know unless we looked.

So Aric said that he was going to go upstairs to change his clothes, and he asked Meghan if she wanted him to drive her to campus first so she could take a shower and put on something new, and she said that she probably should, but she didn't mind walking home.

And I said that I'd go with her, which made Aric kind of sad, but I told him it was 'cause he didn't have any good shampoo for me, and he had to admit it was true. And he said that he didn't mind giving us a ride, but Meghan thought he shouldn't waste the gas just to drive to college and back, so he promised to meet us back at Trowbridge in an hour, and I kissed him before we left.

If it had been a school day, I would have had us go down Grove Street, just in case Caleb and Lindy and Trinity were waiting for the bus, but since it was a Sunday I knew that they wouldn't be, so we just stayed on Academy Street all the way back to our dorm.

Meghan asked me if I wanted to take a shower with her, and I said that I kind of had to because I was almost out of shampoo and conditioner, and she laughed and said that I'd probably want to even if I had lots of it, and that was true. And I said that on the way back we should stop at Meijer so I could get more, and she thought that was a good idea.

She went in the bathroom and turned on the shower, and then went back out into her room to get undressed, and I looked through her drawers to see what I could find her to wear today, and after I'd found a shirt and pants, we both looked through her underwear drawer together and decided on red. And before we could go in she had to unbraid my tail, too, so it wouldn't get all knotted.

We couldn't take too long in the shower, because otherwise Aric might have to wait for us, so we were pretty quick, and then when we were done, I brushed Meghan's hair, and she brushed me, and I would have liked to have her preen my wings but there wasn't enough time, and she said that she could do it in Winston. And then she packed a jacket and sweatshirt and some water into her backpack, so that we would have that, too.

Meghan said that she hoped he was planning on stopping somewhere to eat, 'cause she was a little bit hungry, and I was, too. It was still a little too early for the dining hall to be open, and we didn't have time anyway. So we went downstairs and she leaned against the wall until we saw Winston pull into the parking lot, then we walked out to meet him so that he wouldn't have to drive around the cars. A lot of them had penalty flags on their windshields, but they were still there.

I guess Aric was hungry, too, 'cause once we got in Winston he asked if we wanted to go somewhere to eat before we went to Grand Rapids.

Meghan didn't really want to stop at a fast food restaurant, so we went to Steak and Shake which was kind of like Denny's, but it was a little bit smaller and looked newer inside. And there weren't too many people there, so we got our food pretty quick. I had a breakfast taco, which wasn't very good, and an egg and cheese sandwich, and when we were done eating we all used the bathroom and then got on the 131 Highway.

I stretched my right wing out over Meghan's lap so she could preen it, and then after we'd passed by Plainwell, she had it done she said that she could do my left wing but it wasn't going to be easy for her with it stretched out over Aric's lap, so we switched places instead, and that was a little bit difficult to manage.

We were passing under the road that we'd taken to get to the airport when she got that one done, and I shook it out a little bit, then tucked them in and leaned against Meghan's shoulder.

Since the art exhibit was right downtown, we had to get off the 131 Highway where it crossed the 196 Highway, and that was really weird because everything was on bridges, and it was a good thing that there were lots of signs or else cars would have been getting confused about where to go.

We went into a stack of parking lots, which was kind of fun. There was a little stand like the one at restaurants where you could order food from your car, but this one just spit out a ticket. And there was a bar across the top and if you hit it you were too tall, and Winston didn't hit but the antenna on the roof did, and it made weird scraping and springing noises as it bounced across the concrete rafters.

Aric got a spot on the top level, because he said that it was easier to find later if it was on top, and Meghan said that all the floors had had big numbers and colored squares, so as long as he could remember a color or a number he would know where he had parked. He said that she was overthinking it.

They went to the elevators but I didn't want to take an elevator, so I jumped off the edge and glided down, and waited for them by the entrance. And when they came down, Meghan was looking at her portable telephone to figure out where the art was.

I'd kind of expected it to be out on the street, like a market, but I guess since humans can't control the weather maybe it's smarter to have it inside where everyone can see it no matter what the weather is.

She said that it was all over businesses downtown, and so we went into the big building that was right across the street from us, which was called the DeVos convention center, and they had a lot of art inside, so it had been a good place to start.

Meghan got us some playbills from the front that said where all the art was and how to vote, only it was the last day so she said that she didn't think we could vote anymore, but we could still enjoy it.

There were pictures and paintings and sculptures, and some of them even moved. There was one called and on her horse she flies, which was a woman riding a horse that was surrounded by birds and I liked that one. Aric and Meghan both looked at a torso sculpture of a man called Emasculation, and he had a gun for a penis, which was kind of odd, but there was a story under the sculpture that explained it.

We spent the whole day looking at art, which was a lot of fun, 'cause it wasn't all in one place, so you could look at some and think about it and then move on to the next place to see the next art. And not everything was in the kind of place that you'd expect; we saw a bunch of art at an inn called Peaches, including a mosaic bench that you could sit on if you wanted to, and a painting of a horse called Smokey at a yoghurt store.

Aric said that we should have lunch somewhere that had art, too, and he said that we could eat at the Horseshoe Smokehouse or the One Trick Pony Grill and Taproom, and Meghan looked at her playbill to see if he was making those names up.

I thought that people might get the wrong idea if we went to One Trick Pony, 'cause I knew more than one trick, and then Meghan said she wondered if there would come a point where we ponies started to get offended by names of places.

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, because I thought it was nice that humans thought so highly of horses and ponies that they named things after them, and they'd been doing it even before they met us. She said that there were lots of sports teams that were named for groups of people and now some of those groups were bothered by it, because it put their group in a bad light.

I guess if they had insulting names, then maybe I'd be bothered by it. I said that Mister Salvatore had had me pose in Wild Horse Creek when we were coming back from Peggy's, and that had been a lot of fun.

They both wanted to see that picture, but I didn't have it—I'd have to get it from Mister Salvatore.

And then I told Meghan that Paradise had taken a picture of her while she was snuggling with Stormbreaker and Flanking Line, and she said she wanted to see that picture.

I told her that I didn't know if Paradise had a Facebook, or computer mail, so I wasn't too sure about how to get it until I remembered that Joey had sent Meghan the tornado video and he probably knew a way to reach Paradise. And so while we were walking to One Trick Pony, she typed him a computer message on her portable telephone.

There was a little sign out front that said that it was Grand Rapids' oldest business, although it had been a general store before it became a restaurant. And it was kind of crowded with all the people looking at art and eating, so we had to wait a little bit before we got a seat.

Our waiter was really happy to see me, and he said that I was the first pony who'd ever been in their restaurant and if I didn't mind he wanted to take a picture, and then a lot of other people did, too, so I got lots of pictures taken of me, and that was kind of annoying, because I was hungry, but it was worth it because the waiter said that they'd decided to comp our meal, which meant that we didn't have to pay for it.

So we all shared spinach dip, and I got a whitefish burger, while Aric and Meghan shared a One Trick Pizza. And they had a lot of good beer, too. I got the breakfast stout, even though it was lunch, because I liked it.

One of the paintings I thought was of a sad clown, but Aric said it was Alice Cooper, who was a famous musician from Michigan.

We spent all afternoon looking at more art, and it was really amazing how many different ways humans made art. I'd kind of thought that after a while it might all start to look the same, but we kept on being surprised by what people had come up with, like mosaics of tiny pictures to make a big picture, or a sculpture made out of clear cubes. There was another sculpture called Waffleman that was made out of old bits of machines and house appliances, and there were rugs and a beautiful painting of a woman nursing her baby. A lot of them had clever names, too—Aric laughed at a mosiac called Antisocial Butterfly, and I also found a collage called Hope is the thing with feathers, which was an art interpretation of the poem we'd read in Conrad's class.

Finally when it was dinnertime, Aric said that we could stay in town and then look at more art after dinner, or go back to Kalamazoo and relax.

I thought since we were here we should look at some more, and Meghan thought so, too, but she admitted that her legs were getting tired from all the walking.

Aric said he wanted to see if the Horseshoe Smokehouse would give us a special deal, too, but they didn't. Maybe because I didn't have any horseshoes. And it wasn't a very good place for me to eat, 'cause almost everything they had on their menu was meat, but they did have waffle fries, and also an alfalfa sprout salad, which was kind of small so I had two of them. And they had Founders beer, too, so I had another breakfast stout.

When we were all relaxed, we walked around for a couple more hours and looked at more art, and Meghan had gotten a computer letter back from Joey, so she sent a computer letter to Paradise.

We saw a plant on wheels called Plant Bot—plants that drive, and I thought that Aquamarine might like that. Or maybe not, since if plants drove she'd have to be chasing after them all the time. And we saw a strange humankin that Meghan said looked like a robot, and it was holding a silvery fish-shaped thing, and was called Madonna and Child, and we even saw a bunch of old boards on a gallery floor that I guess was art but it kind of looked like the building had been fixed up and the construction people had left some of the old lumber behind.

It was getting dark when we all decided that we'd seen enough art for one day, and Meghan and Aric sat down on a bench that looked over the Grand River, and I was going to sit down with them, but then I thought I could fly a little ways up and down the river and even though I didn't have my flight gear, it would be okay because there weren’t any airplanes down there. So while they relaxed I flew north to the dam, and then back south and I waved as I went by them, and then kept going a little bit further I passed an island and then went under a railroad bridge, and then I turned around and when I landed back on the shore, we all walked together to the parking lot stack.

I flew up and was waiting in the back of Winston when they finally got there, and we didn't get in right away, 'cause you could see the sun setting off to the west, and we had a pretty good view of it from our spot. And it wasn't until it had gone below the horizon that Aric finally opened up Winston.

He had to pay to get out of the garage—that was what the little ticket was for, so it would know how long he had been in there. And he got a little bit confused with all the road signs and wound up being in the wrong lane on the 196 Highway to get onto the south 131 Highway, and we had to turn around, and he said it was really confusing because the lanes on the 131 Highway were on the wrong side, which was why he'd made the mistake.

Meghan didn't believe him until we got back on the highway and were going south, and we went over a bridge and then the north traffic was on her side of Winston instead of Aric's, and it didn't go back to the correct side until we'd gone under a bridge and she asked him what kind of crazy person had thought of that, and he said maybe it made sense when you looked at it from above.

Meghan fell asleep on the way home, and it didn't look like it was too comfortable for her to have her head leaning against the doorframe like that. Aric said that when there were people sleeping in the car it was fun to jerk the steering wheel and scream really loud to wake them up, but I thought that would be mean. And I said that she'd been nice and brought him a blanket last night so he wouldn't be cold, and I rested my wing on her lap and she was just awake enough to hold on to it.

We probably shouldn't have stayed out so late, 'cause it was a school night. Even Aric was yawning when we were getting close to Kalamazoo, and Meghan finally woke up when he turned off the highway. And it took her a minute to figure out where we were.

Aric asked if we wanted to be dropped off at the dorms or hang out at his house, and Meghan said that since we had to go to class in the morning it was probably smartest to go to the dorm, and then Aric asked if we wanted to hang out for a bit, and she said that she'd love to hang out but she had a nasty midterm next week and hadn't done any studying at all, and I'd kind of put them out of my mind, but I had them, too, and I hadn't done any studying, either.

I remembered while we were sitting at the traffic signal on Howard Street that I'd meant to ask Aric to go to Meijer and I'd forgotten, but it was too late to do it now. I'd thought we'd be back sooner. But that was okay, because tomorrow morning I could take a shower with Meghan, and use hers.

Aric dropped us off behind Trowbridge and I leaned over and kissed him, and Meghan squeezed his shoulder and said that she'd had a great time today, and that we should think about something fun to do for next weekend, and then we went up to her room.

We were both really tired, and Amy was back, too. Meghan told her that we'd gone to see ArtPrize, and she said that her boyfriend hadn't won anything this year, but maybe next year he would, and she asked if we'd seen his pictures, but we hadn't. There was a lot of art we hadn't had time to see, because one day wasn't enough, and I was thinking that next year we should spend the whole weekend, but then I remembered that I wouldn't be here next year.

Meghan got into her sleeping clothes in the bathroom, and the two of us snuggled up in her bed, and while she was turning on her alarm I asked her if she'd gotten the picture from Paradise yet, and she checked her telephone but she hadn't yet.

I think I fell asleep almost as soon as I put my head down on her chest.