Once upon a time, Pony was Pizza Pop. You could go to the store and buy a box of pepperoni and bacon Scootaloos. So I did. I got a big case because they were good and I didn't know how to cook anything else. And they went good with energy drinks. Despite the looks of obvious disgust from the cashier and everyone I passed on the way home, I knew nothing was going to stop me from savoring these clearly sapient pizza ponies. I wiped a fat dollop of sweat from my flopping brow, mouth watering at the mere prospect.
To make a pizzapone, you first had to remove it from its air-tight plastic packaging, then place it face-up on a paper towel, ready for its time in the microwave. For whatever reason, this particular box seemed fresh. Most of the tiny frozen Scootaloos were wide-eyed, staring up at me out of their box, three minutes combined microwave time.
...Was one of them moving?
Clearly they had begun to thaw too early due to improper packaging; I would have to write a sternly worded email to the customer service department, perhaps attaining even more pizza pone as recompense for their horrible error. Nevertheless, the moving one needed to be dealt with now, so I reached in and plucked it out.
"Hi!" the Scootapop said. "I'm Pinkie Pie, and I made this party just for you—"
The Scootapop was staring at me, not unblinkingly, but with unnerving concentration, as I pulled it out of the jumbo-box and placed it, plastic-encased, on my kitchen counter, even taking care to pick out a spot unstained by the build-up of bacon grease left over ten years hygienic lethargy punctuated by sporadic fits of guilt-induced cleaning.
Whatever was going on with this Scootapop, it wasn't fixing my hunger issues. While deciding what to do with the strange new specimen, even as it waited on my decision, I pulled out two of the non-moving pony-pizza treats and popped them into the microwave, setting it to high for a minute and thirty seconds (omg this is so accurate if you read the back of the box it actually says one minute and thirty seconds this is what's called ATTENTION TO DETAIL everyone pick up on what we're doing this is good writing people). The tiny-eyeballs that looked like the white-chocolates stuck to an easter-rabbit began to hiss and shrivel slightly, and the miniature feathers on the wings started to crisp. One more side and another minute thirty, and that would be a pair of piping hot, tasty Scootapops.
I let my head ragdoll backwards as I drooled like Homer Simpson of the American Animated Fox Network Television show "The Simpsons" (1989-) fame, imagining how delicious these Scootapops were going to be. It was almost as if the crispy dough-skin was breaking under my teeth, gushing forth a boiling mass of cheesy innards against the roof of my mouth and tongue. I could already feel the burns...
"Dammit!" I screamed in a totally neurotypical fit of rage, slamming my fist against the microwave anemically. "Why the hell do I have to wait so long?"
My anger was rising. My head swiveled 180 degrees on my neck, gaze locked upon the defective, twitching Scootapop pathetically defrosting next to my sink.
It was pressing at its packaging now, struggling to breathe on the meager morsel of factory-packaged air not designed to ferry a still-living creature to the local freezer. I briefly considered the absurdity of two Scootapops in the microwave, and one on my counter, doing its best 'My Little Dashie' impression. Was there a fate in this cruel universe? A giant hand waiting over the horizon, to turn the magnifying glass and light a single, bewildered ant on fire?
Then there was it... The 'vid. 'vid20, you could call it. Everyone would know what you were talking about with that popular and conventional abbreviation.
I could stay in here, eating Scootapops all day. I could down them with energy drinks and then turn on a computer in front of me and type whatever I wanted into any of a nebulous collection of whitespace bars, and my demands would instantly be met to the best accomodation of humanity's ability. An entire network infrastructure designed to connect people, ideas, to make any knowledge that had ever been available instantly accessible. To put every person one search query and half-blurred recipe spit out by a malfunctioning printer from being a gourmet chef, when the day before their expertise might not have yet allowed them to master the intricate art of table-cleaning, or garbage disposal, or hiding the fact that they loved to sniff their fingers every time after scratching their genitals.
Time to make a call. Still not certain the balance between 'irate-my-business-elsewhere' Karen-hat and 'simpering-pig-worship-praise-be-for-letting-me-sample-your-product' corporate-speak. Was there a number on the box to call? Let's get some answers here. Ignore the Scootapop. It's not worth more attention than a hair in your pizza.
I trundled over to my desk, back hunched and knuckles dragging on the carpet in a most simian fashion. I found the helpline number immediately after I finished jacking off to the massive collection of furry porn I proudly covet, and with my withered, greasy fingers, entered it into my cellular device.
The sounds of something struggling against plastic behind me played with the tinny soft rock hawaiiana playing off the hold line, and then—
"Hello?" came a raspy, suspiciously John DeLancy-ish voice from the other end. Not that I'd know who John DeLancy is, I'm not a nerd or nuthin’.
"Yes, is this Incorporated Pizza's Pizza Incorporation's customer service helpline?"
The voice on the other end of the line shrugged. Voices can do that nowadays. THe march of technological progress sure is impressive. "I'm not sure," they said. "It's my first day. I just kind of showed up and started answering phones."
"I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but I've been on hold for over five hours," I lied, taking a seat on the orange pleather couch and staring at one of the hand-sized dust-bunnies leering at me from underneath the couch's edge. "And I'm not mad at you in particular, not you personally, like, I know you're just another person on the other end of the phone doing your job, but I'm really put you, you know, by the way your company has treated me, and I feel that I deserve some kind of compensation.”
"Oh, right! Of course, in this trying time, we're taking every precaution to make sure our food product is untouched by the 'vid. Like putting extra salt in!"
I scratched a scab on my elbow that had been there for a few weeks, and was by now in the 'protest-upon-removal' stage of wound healing, meaning there was a big, chunky scab-disc in it if I could burrow past the outside ring of hardened flesh and start scraping the thing off. It reminded me of a pineapple ring, once I got it on my finger.
"There's no 'vid in my Scootapop. But I think it's alive, and I want to know if there's any quality control going on there."
"Sure, we control every quality of our product, from the gluten-free base all the way to the factory-reprocessed meat-like cubes! Legal stipulation prevents us from referring to them as 'meat', in advertising, however, several dedicated lobby groups have set up a—"
"If I send you my email and name, can you just send me a big box of Scootapops? The deluxe ones? I like when they come all covered in green peppers and stuff. The ones with just cheese are too squishy. Their guts pop out before they're even done microwaving."
"Did you know you can now enjoy Scootapops on the go? Just contact your local My Little Door Dashie delivery service, and in six to eight weeks, you'll receive a fresh delivery right on schedule!"
Finally, the tiny wriggling Scootapop managed to free itself from the packaging, stretching her forelegs out and pressing out on the plastic like a baby pushing away the sludge of amniotic fluid, born into this world freeze-dried and with a two year expiration date. It mewled helplessly on the counter, sort of like a pigeon with no legs.
I cast a glance over at the counter, sneering at the thing now beginning to take a shaky push to standing on its hooves. "Gross."
Static-laced chuckles. "Yes, I know the delivery people (if you can even call them that) are gross, but we’re doing our best to enforce basic hygeinic policies—”
I chucked my phone to the side, not even bothering to hang up as it sailed out my apartment window and into the skull of the six year old Iranian boy who lived next door. I'd buy a new phone later. Scrambling over to the counter, I crouched eye-level with the Scootapop, which was now beginning to shake its thawing wings.
Carefully, I plucked a wooden skewer from the holder beside the sink, and gently prodded the Scootapop's eye.
"Ow!" it said. "That tickles."
I squealed like a terrified baby rat, the glass in the mounted and framed portrait of Peter Griffin I keep above my bed shattering. My first instinct was to crush the abomination, but I stopped myself short for fear of getting my hand sticky—sticky-er. I didn't want to wash off the cum-smell yet, since it was usually good for at least four days.
'If I had a bunch of these maybe I could put them in a wheel and have a cheaper electric bill'.
I grabbed a ziplock bag and scooted the Scootapop inside. Smelling what I initially identified as burnt toast, I feared I was having yet another stroke when I realized it was just the two Scootapops I had thrown into the microwave reaching perfect mahogany-brown complexion. I smashed my hand through the microwave window, pyrex scattering every which way as I clutched the Scootapops in my dripping fist, scalding cheese-based innards seeping between my fingers.
Now. The moment. Like holding a cockroach between your fingers while you were masturbating to it.
Did anyone ever play that game where you have to hit all the blocks with bubbles, and if you stand still for too long in one place, lightning rains down on you? Anyway. There was an earthquake at just about that moment, so I curled into the fetal position and tried to think thoughts related to pony-pussy, so that if I died my consciousness would be transported into Equestria forever.
"Mew?" The Scootapop pawed at me through its baggie, stretching the plastic against the zip-lock seal. 'Zip-lock' is probably copywritten.
"Why is there so much hate inside me," I asked. I picked up the bag and squeezed it in my hands like a jello-sock or water-tube or weird squishy stress-ball. When you push really hard on one end, or smoosh their but together, their eyeballs pop out really far. You can see the little wrinkles and veins that are normally invisible, like a magnifying glass to a grape.
"I could eat this Scootapop, or I could torture it for the crimes of someone who escaped universal justice," I mused, caring to avoid gerunds but stumbling around the landscape of sentence construction haphazardly, scrambling for ways to turn a single sentence into a more-interesting body of text. "I could say something, and then I could do something as I say it," I said. I breathed heavily, snorting through my nose, wheezing like an out-of-work air conditioner. Wheezing like a metaphor reaching for a poetic conclusion.
You could take time to describe things. It's a fucking tiny Scootaloo in a bag. It looks exactly like what that sounds like. If you want me to detail the texture of the plastic, or the exact dimensions of the Scootapop, or anything beyond what is immediately transmitted and then discarded by my brain to keep me functioning at a surface human level.
You could look at a picture of a fucking Scootaloo, a picture of a fucking pizza pop, and put them together. It was the entire enterprise of human society to imagine these things, and then to shit them out into stores to be consumed.
When they went through, they made you shit too. I liked to close my eyes on the toilet, put my hand over them, and imagine my prostate floating in space, the only muscle capable of exerting independent force, filtering existential nutrients from nihilistic fecal matter and spraying the results endlessly into the cosmos. The world's only self-containing difference engine. Always making waste out of what it needs, always needing more to make itself waste.
"This Scootaloo probably isn't even 50% pony like the box says," I said, saying things to myself, as people do. "If I eat it, I might get food poisoning. And if I don't, I'll be really unhappy about it.
I sat the baggied Scootaloo on the counter-top once more, and narrowed my eyes at it as I consumed the mass of its siblings I had crumpled in my fist. What was to be done about this? I can't have something like this in my home, especially not if it's going to send me into spirals of existential dread every thirty seconds. I need at least 45 seconds of recovery between existential crises.
Maybe there was a solution in my blown-glass Cheerile-pipe. You could put ground up plant-matter in one end, and your mouth on the other, and light the pony's face on fire and inhale as she screamed through the white-hot butane, suck in a mix burnt-hair and unexplained chemicals that had lots of fancy names but weren't visible to the naked eye.
Then again, if I went to the pipe, and then loaded it, and then smoked it, I'd be different, but the Scootapops in my apartment would be the same.
They'd persist, even if I didn't. My body could decompose, but the image of them swelling up and drooling out their own organs in the microwave wouldn't leave. It would make me hungry forever.
"Time to watch My Little Pony," I said, and pulled the twelve-gauge shotgun from its normal place below my body-pillow. Fitting the end as securely in my mouth as was possible, which in the end felt kind of like trying to chew a deliberately-oversized jawbreaker. You have to do the trigger with your toes, too, or so I'm told.
"Make yourself useful," I said to the Scootapop. I pulled it out of the baggie and placed it by the trigger, putting one of its miniature hooves right against the cold metal. "Pull that or I'll put you on for the defrost setting until you turn into a stain on the rotating glass."
Smiling, with a series of infant-pitch cooing noises, the Scootaloo hobbled to balance on the gun and put its weight forward at the same time. Its smile broadened as its hooves finally found their hold, leaning with a giggle as the small thumb-size half-circle descended into its catch.
"Hi!" the shotgun said, spraying my brains across the entire city. "I'm Pinkie Pie, and I made this party just for you!"