Turning off the television he sat in the silence that followed and rubbed his face.
He questioned why he’d been watching it in the first place, honestly. Maybe he’d hoped to find the tone shifting more towards the upbeat, things seem less sour perhaps. But no, no such luck. The doom was overpowering, the gloom overwhelming, both of them more-or-less inescapable.
So instead he sat in his rather small room, rubbing his face, not feeling especially great.
Then, quite without warning, the sofa was unsettled. Violently. As though something large had suddenly manifested under it, causing the whole thing to tilt up and now balance precariously, him shifting bodily over to one side.
Unusual.
He heard the sounds of someone struggling. This was odd, obviously, as there shouldn’t have been the sounds of anyone, least of all someone struggling, least of all someone struggling beneath his sofa.
Baffled and gripping the cushions for balance he peered down just in time to see the be-monohorned, be-maned head of a white, kind of horse-like thing emerge, sneeze lightly and then blink up at him.
“Oh, hello there!” Said the horse-like thing in an alarmingly pleasant voice, face creasing in a very un-horse-like but altogether rather pleasant smile.
He found himself lost for words for a second or two.
“Um, hello,” he eventually managed to say. She smiled more widely at him.
“Excuse me a moment,” she then said, grunting a little as she wriggled out, the sofa bucking and shifting as she did so, causing him to cling on for dear life. The more she wriggled, the more of her was revealed - beyond the horn she also possessed, he saw, wings, and a rather natty sun logo plastered on her side. He didn’t know what to make of any of this.
Once completely free of the sofa she trotted and turned in place, shaking herself out and brushing herself down as best she could, the glimmery tail she had to match her glimmery hair rippling even more than it already had been.
“You really need to vacuum under there. It’s very dusty,” she said.
He swallowed.
“That so?”
The magical horse woman nodded at him very seriously.
“Very. A lot of fluff, too,” she said, then, cocking her head a little, adding: “Well, there was a lot of fluff.”
An odd thing to mention. An even odder thing to clarify.
“Was?” He asked. Her head cocked the other way and she managed a very convincing expression of puzzlement, as though he was the one asking strange questions.
“Well how do you think I got here?”
There followed your standard comedic beat of silence.
He stared at the pleasant-sounding horse and the pleasant-sounding horse stared back at him, her head still tilted ever-so-slightly to the side, her expression innocent, as though all of this was perfectly ordinary and it was mildly bemusing that any fuss was being made.
Maybe he was the one being strange?
“...I...have no idea…?”
“That’s okay,” she said with sudden brightness, standing up straight, hooves together, head raised. “The important thing is that I am here. That’s what matters!”
“Um, yes.”
Plainly she found even this lukewarm level of agreement to be delightful and immediately clambered onto the sofa next to him, making no allowance for personal space whatsoever. He didn’t know what to make of this and so did what he generally did in times of confusion: sat very still and stayed very quiet.
And despite how curious he was to see what a big magical horse-lady did to sit on a human sofa he kept his eyes forward, thinking that perhaps it was the polite thing to do. He did his best not to think about anything else, because he was fairly certain that if he did it would start him on a slippery slope that ended in a ditch of screaming.
No fun for anyone.
Speaking of a lack of fun, the horse-lady - squirming about on the sofa without a care in the world in her quest to find the optimum position - clearly found his rigid, inert response less than thrilling. Once she’d settled and sprawled she cleared her throat with increasing levels of polite insistence until finally getting his attention.
Turning his head he saw her resting against the opposite arm of the sofa, arms (forelegs?) parted and plainly waving for him to approach.
“Come here,” she said gently, with perfect and total sincere friendliness. It was so sincere in fact he was quite overcome. It wasn’t often anyone spoke so kindly to him. He wasn’t sure what the expected reaction was.
“Uh. Okay,” he said, shuffling towards her little by little until he was within reach, at which point she grabbed and pulled him in the rest of the way, squashing him bodily against her.
All at once he found himself now pressed against this magical, talking horse-lady and found his arms taken and wrapped around her, her legs going around him once she was sure he wasn’t going to let go.
“Ahh, that’s better isn’t it?” She asked.
He assumed the question was rhetorical. He hoped it was rhetorical as he was at that moment entirely unable to answer, thoroughly overwhelmed by the dramatic turn of events and clinging onto her more out of the fear to disengage than the desire to continue.
Having now got him well within her clutches she, humming happily to herself, twisted a little the better to get a proper grip on him, her (surprisingly flexible) wings coming in to add further layers of warmth to the experience, sofa creaking a little as she shifted in place.
“The benefits of a cuddle are often overlooked and underplayed,” she said, apparently to him. “A cuddle might not immediately and obviously solve a problem or do anything, but then they don’t need to and aren’t really meant to. A cuddle is pleasant in-and-of itself, and can elevate the mood and buoy the spirits. Not everything has to be a means to an end, sometimes nice things can just be nice things. Like cuddles. Don’t you think?”
“...yes.”
He’d hesitated, but he wasn’t lying.
For as bizarre, inexplicable and all-round unexpected as this whole situation was (and it was all of these things in spades) he could not find it in himself to deny that it was pleasant. Because it was pleasant. There was just something about her, really, starting from her stridently chipper attitude and then moving on up through just how soft and warm and tactile she was.
She was this thing, right there, this comforting presence and weight.
Were he of a more artistic, wankier turn of mind he might have thought of her as a solid, comforting point on which to anchor himself in a world that seemed otherwise always to be on the verge of spinning out of control.
But he wasn’t like that, so he didn’t think that.
He just cuddled her a bit harder than he had been before, and she cooed as a result.
“I thought you’d understand,” she said and he could tell that she was smiling when she said it, too. He might have been smiling himself, but he was less sure about that.
A lull followed. In this lull, quite without meaning to, he found himself starting to relax, and the more he relaxed the more comfortable he became, and thus the easier it was to relax. Some sort of horrendous, cuddly vicious cycle. If the occasional, poorly-stifled giggle from the horse-lady was anything to go by this was all part of her scheme.
“Sometimes it really is the little quiet moments like this,” she said after a small period of cosy nothingness. “Nothing really has to happen, nothing big or exceptional. Just something small. It’s very easy to be lost in the shadow of the bigger things, don’t you think? The smaller things, I think, help you gain some perspective. The little things that just aren’t even that big of a deal.”
He considered pointing out the fact that a magical horse emerging from the fluff collecting under his sofa was in point of fact quite a big deal by his standards and something a lot of other people would be likely to make a bit of a fuss about, but he didn’t have the heart to actually say it.
So he didn’t.
For as much as he had absolutely no idea what the hell she was even talking about, he couldn’t deny the very real sense of contentment and security he got just from hearing her talk about it. Whatever it was.
She could have read the back of a cereal packet to him at this point and he would have enjoyed it and felt safe and happy hearing it.
So what he said instead in response was:
“Yeah.”
Which seemed to work. Certainly she didn’t feel the need to say anything in return, and so they just stayed melded to one another in increasingly comfortable silence for a bit.
It was, he had to admit to himself after a certain length of time, actually fairly easy to feel better in the midst of this small, cosy thing. The outside world was still there, outside (appropriately enough) but it was staying outside. He and the horse lady were here inside, safe for now, and warm and comfy.
And he was held and she was held, and he could just hear her heart beat, and feel the rise and fall as she breathed, and nothing else really happened. And nothing else really needed to.
Eventually, unprompted and quite so suddenly he even managed to surprise himself he said:
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
And after this they entered a period where there was no further need of anything being said.
This period lasted a length of time, the length of which was of no consequence, really. It lasted as long as it needed to, however long that was, and this length of time was punctuated only by occasional, minute shifts in position to maintain comfort of keep bits and pieces from falling asleep.
All was well.
Though, sadly, it did have to end.
“I have to go,” she nigh-on whispered directly into his ear.
He understood. It was inevitable. Magical horses no-doubt had important things to do. Other people to intrude upon, probably. Or having to pose dramatically so that they could act as models for wonderful artwork on the side of vans. Important things.
So, nodding silently into her, he unwounded himself from her and she unwound from him (after a final farewell squeeze) and slipped off and onto her hooves onto the floor, stretching a little and shaking out a few spots of stiffness.
And with that done she immediately started to crawl back beneath the sofa.
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but for some reason it most certainly hadn’t been that.
“Uh, you’re going back under the sofa?” He asked.
“My work here is done,” she replied with a grunt, shoulders already having worked their way under and the rest of her wriggling furiously to follow. He watched this in a detached sort of a way, kind of impressed honestly with just how determinedly she was able to get back under there without any hands.
Getting her rear in seemed the trickiest part, somehow. Or at least it took her the longest. But once that was in she was in.
He’d rather expected some sort of magical ‘whumph’ or something of that nature and then the sofa to bang back down as she disappeared back to wherever it was she’d come from. But instead there was nothing. She was just there, hiding. Badly.
There was no punchline to this. He waited for one, but this appeared to be what the plan had been.
“You’re - you’re staying under there?”
“Shh. Pretend I’m not here,” came her whispered reply.
As she said this that long, billowy tail of hers blew loose out the side and she had to quickly reach to tuck it back in again.
“...right.”
Pretending she wasn’t there proved difficult. Not only was the sofa still at an alarming angle, but she also swiped his snacks when she thought he wasn’t looking, reaching out and somehow managing to grab hoof-fuls of crisps from the bowl he’d got for himself.
Honestly, he had no idea what to make of that. Anyone who could grab crisps with a hoof probably should be allowed to, he reckoned, even if the sound of not-so-covert munching drifting up from below took some getting used to.
At length he did turn the television back on again, but this time only so he could watch a pleasant film about a man who was also a pig and who flew planes. He thoroughly enjoyed it. And, from the sound of things, so did the magical horse lady who was most certainly not still under his sofa.
Things might not have been great, on the whole, but they weren’t all bad.
Which was nice.