The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit
Windflower didn’t spend as much time studying the snowpony as she’d spent with the snowman. If she’d seen snowponies before, it might not have had as much interest for her. Or maybe she didn’t want to be outside today.
I lost sight of her as she went up to the attic, so I left the kitchen and went to the living room. We still had more of Stranger on a Train to get through.
She did her usual little pause in the hallway before entering the room. This time she had her stuffed pony with her, held in her mouth like a kitten.
Milfoil usually was a lot better at picking up what Windflower wanted, but this time even I could figure it out. The book was on the coffee table, and she just tapped it with her hoof before gliding up to the couch and taking the spot next to me. She dropped her pony right next to my leg and put her head down on it.
I really, really wanted to see if I could pet her, but I was terrified of scaring her.
Or scaring myself.
So I just opened the book and began reading.
•••••
She fell asleep before I finished the chapter. She was almost touching my leg, or maybe she was and I just couldn’t feel it. Milfoil had said that Windflower was cold, and I thought I’d be able to feel if there was something cold pressing against my leg, but maybe my pants blocked it. Or maybe it had to be deliberate; maybe when she was sleeping she didn’t have her cold-touch powers.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Milfoil whispered. “She’s comfortable. Let her be.”
“But . . . I want to.”
“The day she comes into the living room without hesitating, that’s the day that she trusts you’re not a monster.”
“It’s so hard sometimes. Thinking of her like a little girl—but she’s not.”
“We’re just watching her, doing the best we can for her, until it’s time for her to move on.” Milfoil looked down at Windflower. “We shouldn’t be talking about this right now. I don’t know what she can hear and what she can’t, and I don’t want to upset her.”
•••••
I’d seen stores in Manehattan put out Hearth’s Warming displays, and just like back on Earth, you could buy ornaments, garland, and all the other festive bits and bobs.
That apparently wasn’t how they did things in Haywards Heath—stores simply didn’t sell decorations.
I’m sure I could have bought them if I’d wanted to. There was a daily train, and ponies had also invented mail-order goods. I could have found decorations in a catalog and had them sent in plenty of time for the holiday. I hadn’t bothered, because why decorate my home for myself? What was the point?
But of course it had to be done for Windflower, so I went out with Milfoil to get supplies.
•••••
“I had half a mind to have you help me decorate my house first,” Milfoil said. “So you’d get an idea what it ought to be like. But you’ve seen Hearth’s Warming decorations before, haven’t you?”
“In store displays, and humans have Christmas, which is a lot the same.”
“It’ll be interesting to get a human perspective, I think.”
“And you’ll tell me if I’m not doing it right.”
She nodded, and I stuck my tongue out at her.
We were sitting at my kitchen table since it was the only decent working surface I had in the house. The kitchen counters were covered with more supplies—Milfoil insisted I get the simple things accomplished first and then she’d move me on to more complicated tasks.
The first order of business was making the daisy-chains. I had vague memories of doing that as a kindergartner, and it wasn’t all that complicated, just repetitive.
And, of course, slightly embarrassing, since Milfoil was better at it than I was, despite not having hands, although I started to get much quicker as I got the hang of it.
I hadn’t been thrilled by the idea of making my own decorations at first, but I quickly warmed to the task. Yes, they were more crude than what I could have bought from a store, but it was more personal this way.
“Do you normally make new decorations every year?”
“A few. Not everything, though. These will keep for years.” She glanced over at our diminishing supply of colored paper. “I think we’ve got enough daisy-chains for now. It’s time to make some garland.”
“With the rest of the paper?”
“No, with the evergreen boughs, silly.” She smiled. “When I was a filly, my sisters and I would hunt through the woods for good boughs and we’d gather it up a little bit at a time. Sanguinary—she’s my oldest sister—said that mom and dad didn’t know how to make garland, so we had to do it, but we had to do it in secret, ‘cause they thought that deer brought it. When I got older I realized that that was dumb. Of course our parents knew we were the ones making it, and of course they knew how.”
Garlands weren’t all that hard to make. There were lots of different evergreen tips and it was a matter of overlaying them and tying them together, and she had florist’s wire for that. Cut to length, and none of it was straight, suggesting that this wasn’t the first garland to be made with that wire.
•••••
We spent the whole afternoon making decorations, and I had to admit I was really feeling the holiday spirit. We were both going to be tired tomorrow, since we’d skipped our usual afternoon nap, but that didn’t matter.
I started a fire, and we just had sandwiches and salads for dinner, then Milfoil filled up my watering can and said that while we waited for Windflower, she was going to check on the flowers.
It was always fascinating to watch her working with the plants. She was as thorough as a nurse with a patient, touching the plants with her hooves and her nose, and even talking to it in a language I didn’t know. She’d put her snout right in the dirt as well, checking the moisture or something. Maybe she could smell if it had the right amount of nitrogen or phosphorous or whatever it was that plants ate.
I was so busy watching her work, I didn’t notice when Windflower came downstairs. All of a sudden, I felt something cold brush up against me and jerked away, which in turn scared her.
Rather than flee back upstairs, she rushed across the room to Milfoil, who made a bit of a show of yelling at me for being mean to Windflower.
At least she didn’t smack me.
Once all that got settled, we went into the kitchen, where the Hearth’s Warming decorations were laid out. “We thought we’d let you decide where they should go,” Milfoil explained.
Windflower studied the decorations and then went back to assess the living room.
It took her a few trips back and forth before she was ready. Without thinking, she tried to pick up the daisy-chain.
Her ears dropped, but Milfoil was ready. “We can hang it all up, but you have to tell us where it should go.”
She wasn’t ready to give up just yet, and tried grabbing it somewhere else, and then with her mouth, only to fail every time. Finally, she admitted defeat and backed off.
I gathered up the bundle of paper rings and waited for her to lead me into the living room. And waited—even I could tell that she was frustrated and agitated; she went over to one of the strings of garland and tried to pick that up, but couldn’t.
She floated up on top of the counter and opened the cupboard door and then slammed it shut again, as if to demonstrate that she could at least interact with parts of the house, then tried for the garland instead.
When she failed to lift it, she instead went through the kitchen window and into the backyard.
“She’s not dealing with this well,” I muttered.
“You just keep holding that daisy-chain. And let me do all the talking, unless she ask you a question directly.”
“Fine.”
A minute later, something thumped against the window. Both Milfoil and I looked over, and then she shook her head. “The poor thing.”
Milfoil opened the window, and Windflower came in triumphantly with a dead flower from the garden, still trailing a bit of dirt from its roots.
She took it into the living room and set it proudly on the mantle, where it did not look festive and in fact did nothing to improve the room’s decor.
I kept a fake smile plastered on my face anyway. So long as she didn’t bring the whole garden in, I wasn’t going to try and stop her.
I don’t know if she was aware of our disappointment in how this experiment was going, or if she herself realized that a dead flower was a dumb decoration, because after she backed up a little bit to look at her handiwork, she shook her head and fled into the safety of the flowerpots, finally winding up right against the wall.
I looked over at Milfoil, and I wanted to say something about how stupid this idea had been or how it had backfired, but I couldn’t.
She pointed to the couch, and I nodded. I set the daisy-chain back on the kitchen table and sat down on the couch and Milfoil joined me, laying her head down on my lap where she could keep an eye on Windflower.
As I ran my hands through her mane and along her back, my brief anger at this misguided attempt to help Windflower feel more at home evaporated. Tomorrow we’d put this behind us, decorate the house ourselves, and that was that.