Gardening with Rose
Admiral Biscuit
I had to resist the urge to pretty myself up as much as I could in the house. It would only take a few minutes to run a brush through my hair, and I could wipe off some of the sweat with a washcloth and some cold water, but Honey Dipper was waiting. Besides, if all the ponies using the showers were tradesponies, they weren’t going to be clean, either.
There was a pair of shorts in my laundry hamper, and I picked those up. No sense in wearing clean clothes to the showers.
I thought about changing my panties, too, but then decided that I could just slip a clean pair into my pocket and put them on after the shower. That made more sense.
When I stepped back outside, I didn’t see her right away and wondered if she’d gone in the backyard to check out my outhouse; instead she was further along the front of the house, sniffing at the flowers.
“Rose planted them,” I said. Then, after a moment of consideration, “If you’re hungry, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you ate one.”
Honey shook her head. “Roses are too perfumy, but thanks for offering.”
“I’ve got other food, if you want something. I could cut up some vegetables, or—”
“I’m fine. I don’t like to eat dinner before showering anyway. The food smells better and tastes better after I’ve gotten the scent of manure out of my nose.”
I wasn’t sure she ever would, given the piles around the back of her house, but I wasn’t going to argue with her.
•••
Back on Earth, truck stops had showers, and while I'd never used one, I was fairly certain that they were individual rooms. Naturally, I’d foolishly assumed that the showers at the spa would be the same, and of course they weren't. If I'd spent any time at all thinking about it, I would have realized that obviously they wouldn't be. They had a group hot tub, so why wouldn’t they also have group showers?
Since it was the end of the workday, the showers were quite popular. Easily a dozen ponies were already in the drying-off room, and the showers were nearly full.
All of them looked in our direction when we came in, and I suddenly felt very intimidated. In concept, it wasn’t unlike the showers at the YMCA, but I was the odd one out. The foreigner.
Top that off with it being my first time, and no one knew what to expect from me. They were naturally both curious and wary, something I couldn’t blame them for at all. If I’d been showering at the Y and a horse had walked in, I would have been paying attention to it.
And if I’d been that horse, I would have been nervous as all get out.
You can't do this. What was a good excuse? What could I tell Honey Dipper to explain why I suddenly wanted to be anywhere else? Why I’d prefer the river to a crowded shower room?
Any realistic explanation would have confused her. She was surely already a social pariah, given her job, but she was welcome. And while I could have explained to a friend that some ponies just didn’t like me because I wasn’t a pony, surely the rules changed when I was her guest. She’d vouched for me by bringing me here.
She wouldn’t understand any hesitation due to nudity. Why would she? That was something that would never cross her mind. Maybe my missing cutie mark would be a logical reason for embarrassment; ponies put a lot of stock into those.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It was not unlike a locker room, really, and that was something I was familiar with. The persistent humidity, just a touch of mildew—that would never go away no matter how much it was cleaned—almost completely covered by the scent of the soap. With my eyes closed, imagining it as the girl’s locker room, it was something I’d done dozens or hundreds of times, so there was no reason why it should be intimidating with my eyes open. My audience, such as it was, might have already seen me when I went to Sugarcube Corner naked, might have already known that I didn’t have a cutie mark, might have had their children describe Cheerilee’s drawings of me.
On top of that, it had been a long time since I’d had a proper shower. How long, I didn’t know, but it had been a long time.
I opened my eyes again and reached down for the button on my shorts as I looked into the shower room for an empty spot. There was no sense in getting undressed before there was a spot available.
Honey Dipper saw my hesitation and her ears turned uncertainly. She can't be the most popular pony in town. Maybe I was assigning human values to them that didn't apply—just because people thought that garbagemen were uneducated and filthy, maybe ponies didn’t; maybe they had a more healthy view of their society.
Ultimately, it boiled down to two choices—either dive right in, or wimp out and remain an outsider.
Harnesses are complicated and as far as I know there isn't a fast way out of them. My clothes, less so. I did manage to get my shorts and panties tangled up on my leg and had to do an awkward little hop to keep myself from tripping, but then I was naked before I really had time to completely process what I was doing.
In hindsight, I should have also expected the showers to be mixed gender, but that hadn’t crossed my mind at all, even though I knew the spa proper was. I’d just assumed that taking a shower was more intimate than sitting in a hot tub but to the ponies I suppose it wasn’t.
There was a blue stallion who had his ears pinned back and when he saw I was looking his way, he backed closer to his friends.
It was easiest to ignore him. To just focus on a showerhead and have that be my goal. Distill things to the simplest tasks. Turn on the water. Do that awkward little dance while waiting for the water to settle on the right temperature and then move forward. Ignore the other stallions in here; ignore the fact that every pony in the showers surely still had their eyes on me.
I could focus on Honey Dipper. I had no doubt when I was distracted by the ponies in the shower, she’d checked me out, but she wasn’t staring. She’d satisfied her curiosity and moved on.
And I thought that after spending the day with her shoveling shit, we’d bonded. There was always solidarity among those who did the least desirable jobs. I hadn’t wimped out and I hadn’t screwed up, and that was important. More and more I understood that manual laborers don’t deal in drama, they live in a binary world where you can do the task or you can’t, and if you can, you’re automatically accepted into the group.
In her case, it was surely a small group. I could see her finding ponies who were willing to pull the wagon or roll barrels with lids or even shovel some of the less odorous piles, but her generous pay told me that she wasn’t exactly awash in assistance.
Honey Dipper had more experience with the knobs, and got it right on the first try. She let out a happy little sigh as she moved under the spray while I was still standing around feeling really awkward and of course every eye in the place was still on me, but it was a different feel than them mentally undressing me. It was simple curiosity, nothing more.
I stuck a hand in the water and it was good enough, so I moved forward and grabbed a bar of soap off the shelf. “Back on Earth, they have these individually wrapped,” I said.
“Why?”
“So you don't get germs from other people.” I shouldn't have said that; now she was going to think that humans were filthy animals.
“Soap cleans you off,” she said. “How could you get germs from it?”
“Uh. . . .” That was a good question. Could you get germs from soap, or was that just some kind of weird human paranoia? “I don't know. It doesn't make sense.” Maybe ponies were wrong about that. But thus far there hadn't been any wide-scale illnesses that I knew of that had affected the ponies.
“Is that how you lost your coat?” Now she was putting some space between us.
“I never had one,” I said. “Humans don't.” There was some speculation that our ancestors had mostly lost it to prevent things like lice, and we'd kept the hair on our heads to protect us from the sun. Pubic hair was to hold in scent and cut down on friction, and presumably armpit hair did the same.
“I don't know why,” I said, trying to get my thoughts back to safer ground. “It's just the way it is, it’s the way it’s been for a very long time.”
“So do you have to wear clothes to stay warm?”
“Yeah.” That was a much easier answer, even if it wasn't entirely true. It was warm enough to go without.
She grabbed her own bar of soap with her mouth and began scrubbing herself.
I considered for a moment that the bar of soap I was holding had been in a pony’s mouth, and then I considered how the ponies would actually care about how soap tasted—both new and after use—and then I started washing myself human-style.
I couldn’t help but watch her as she bathed, and I kept reminding myself not to stare. When she ran out of places she could get with a bar of soap held in her mouth, she sat down on her rump and held it in her forelegs. When I turned around to rinse off my back, I observed that several other ponies were doing the same, if they didn’t have a friend to help them at least. Unicorns had it easy; they just floated the soap wherever they needed.
By the time Honey Dipper was shampooing her tail, I’d finally tuned out my surroundings and gotten lost in the pleasure of taking my first shower in a very, very long time.
•••
We dried off in the little common room, and I almost offered to help Honey Dipper because it felt like the polite thing to do. Other ponies were drying each other off, and I'd seen some of them washing each other, too, but I thought maybe it was something like tail-braiding. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking, although I certainly would have helped if she'd asked.
I could have spent longer in the showers, but that was something I'd do when I went on my own time. It would have been rude to delay her while I was enjoying my shower. Some time in the future, I'd come and spend however long I wanted, maybe earlier in the day when there were fewer ponies jockeying for space.
For now I was clean, and that was what mattered.
I hesitated as I pulled on my panties. Now would be an opportunity to be adventuresome, to break down the final barriers . . . but it would be safer with Rose. I suppose I could have asked Honey Dipper to walk with me, but maybe she was planning to go right to dinner or the bar or meet up with her friends and it would be really rude to impose like that.
Some day when Rose was free, that would be better. We were a lot more comfortable around each other, after all.
And then I thought back to working in their flowerbeds. They were behind the house, and you couldn’t really see them from the street. I’d never really considered it, but that would be a nice, safe place to get accustomed to being au naturel. Rose surely wouldn’t mind—in fact, she’d probably be happy I was doing it, even if she didn’t say so—and Lily and Daisy could deal with it.
If I was going to do that, then it might be nice to be more girly. My options were limited in that regard, but I did have some beeswax candles at home and maybe I could use the wax from them, since razors were off the table.
I could experiment with that tonight. Maybe try a bit on my leg or my arm and see what happened.
Before we went our separate ways, I asked Honey Dipper if she wanted help again tomorrow. Her ears perked up, and she nodded. “Most ponies don't want to work with me if they can help it,” she said.
That was something I could understand, but it really wasn't bad work, all things considered. Being outdoors had been nice, too.