//------------------------------// // II // Story: Mixed Up // by Overlord Pony //------------------------------// "So, this is it," Starry Step said. The key to the shop hovered between them, encased in Mixtape's yellow magic. He couldn't bring himself to speak. Instead, he gave a curt nod. His landlord, a stout mare who had owned the storefront for the entirety of its life, took the key in her dark blue magic. The absence of feeling as she took the key from him, that slight weight change from holding something to not holding anything at all, made him wince. He closed his eyes tight, fighting back tears as Starry Step's hooves echoed on the dirty tile. "Are you giving me all this stuff?" she asked. Mixtape hadn't been able to find anypony to buy most of his excess inventory, and he had nowhere to put most of the boxes piled in his office—not that their contents were necessarily important. "I thought it could cover cleaning costs," he said, opening his eyes; tears fell down his nose and dripped to his hooves. "An auction house might want it." "Nopony wants your files, Mixxy." She sounded so tired. He looked up, finally, to see her standing at the doorway of his office. She was older than Mixtape's parents when he had started renting the space, and age was catching up to her. "I'll throw them out," he said. Starry Step frowned. The wrinkles on her face deepened. His eyes darted to the empty shelves to his side. "Don't worry about it," she said. There was a pause and hoofsteps, then, "I think this is important." Mixtape looked back toward her. She was out of sight in his office. He walked back to his old workspace and poked his head through the beads. The box of his favorites levitated just above its spot on the cabinet, illuminated by her blue magic. She was looking toward his desk. He quickly took the box in his own magic and pulled it close to him. "That is where you keep your favorite junk, right?" she asked. He almost nodded, but realized she was still turned away from him. He cleared his throat, then said, "Yeah." "Glad I didn't let you leave without it, then." "Thanks." His lips twitched, almost into a smile. Starry Step had always been a good landlord, and she had once even frequented the store as a customer. The part of Manehattan that the store was in had been a very up-and-coming, artsy place when Mix's Tapes opened. Starry Step had always been out-of-place in the youthful community. She only shopped for music from her own time, but the elderly mare had always seemed to enjoy the energy of the neighborhood. It had since matured as the ponies who were painting murals and holding dancing contests began their true journeys into adulthood, and Starry Step, while her music taste never changed, stopped coming when the area became overrun with restaurants instead of artsy shops. He stepped out of his old office and looked out the window. In the mornings, most businesses on the street were closed. The ponies they catered to worked long hours, and it wasn't economical for most of the stores to be open until lunchtime or later. One stallion strolled by wearing a tuxedo, but the noises from the city felt distant in their quiet part of town. "I'm going to miss you, you know," Starry Step said. Mixtape turned to see her standing near him. "You never caused any trouble, you were always on top of rent..." she shook her head, then sighed. "I'm just going to sell the place like I did with all the others. I'm too old to be taking care of properties." "I can help cl—" "Mixtape." The sternness in her voice was like a schoolteacher's. "Your boxes are not the reason I am retiring. I'm old, and I've been old. You're the last tenant I have, and this was always the plan." He nodded. He was looking past her, at the tiles beneath her hooves. "Your mess is going to be somepony else's problem, so make sure there's not anything incriminating in there before you go." He didn't move. Weeks ago, he had made sure to get rid of anything remotely illegal he had done over the years. There was no evidence from the time Threadbare had convinced him to evade taxes for two years, nor of the drugs that he had bought on occasion. He had sold his bong that he bought at a concert years ago, and all those pictures from times passed—the ones showing him and his friends smoking around fires at concerts, lude photos of his friends taken as jokes, and even the one, blurry picture of him doing lines at a house party—had been burned. "There isn't," he finally said. The morning sun painted the city in shadow, but the sliver of sky that he saw reflected in the windows across the street was the pure morning blue. Starry Step sighed. "Well..." The word hung in the air. Mixtape looked over at her, and she looked up at him. She smiled, but it didn't meet her eyes. She said, "I guess there isn't much else to say." Their eye contact lasted entirely too long, and her smile of pity wavered as Mixtape stayed silent. He was aware of the disconnect between his mind and reality, that he should say something, but he was at a loss for words. Emotions were raw in the last days of the store, and he felt an exhaustion unlike any he ever had before. His mind was empty. His body was empty. What filled the void was the wish of escapism through sleep despite not being sleep-tired. "What are you going to do, Mixxy?" Starry Step asked. Her tone had shifted into something softer—a voice his mother would have used when he was a foal. "I-" he faltered, cleared his throat, and tried again. "I'll figure it out." "You haven't yet?" Her voice went up an octave. He shook his head. Mixtape understood the concern—he was overrun with worry over what he would be doing next. There was nothing that matched Mix's Tapes. He had yet to find a job that inspired him like his own store had despite job hunting, albeit he hadn't been looking hard. There was no point to working if he felt nothing; he knew he would do a sub-par job and eventually be fired, which would ruin any modern, relevant experience he had. "I know places hiring," Starry Step said. "I can give you their contact information. They're just cleaning jobs, but it is something until you can get back on your hooves." She turned to the saddlebag on her side, horn lighting up. "I know it's hard to go between professions, but... sometimes things change. It's how I got into being a landlord!" Things change. Mixtape turned and looked at the store. The gray shelves, dusty and empty. The tiles, black around the edges with dirty grout. The lights: bare tubes across a tiled, porous ceiling. Black metal mounts for electronics hung at various angles from the back wall. A card hovered in front of his face. His eyes crossed to read it, but it was still blurry so close. He took it in his magic and, without reading it, looked over at Starry Step and nodded. He said, "Thank you." She gave him that smile again: the one that didn't quite reach her eyes, the one that spoke a special kind of pity. He bowed his head slightly to her, then turned away. "I hope to see you around!" she said as he reached the door. He raised a hoof at her and walked outside into the crisp air. His box of favorites floated alongside him as he turned away from the store. He opted to take the long way to his apartment, so he didn't have to see Starry Step in the window. His hooves felt heavier with each step he took, and the exhaustion he had felt only mounted the closer he approached his home. The well-kept storefronts, closed, went by in a haze and he barely registered the taxis cantering by as he looked to cross the street to the concrete-gray low-rise that held his apartment. All his focus was to keeping the box floating beside him; even it seemed to grow heavier and heavier as he continued, and he was forced to set it down after walking up the flights of stairs to his apartment just so he could concentrate to lift the key and unlock the door. Once inside, he pushed the box next to the stove with his hooves and shut and locked the door behind him. His bed was straight ahead, and he made a beeline for it. He collapsed into the pile of blankets and pillows, pulling them around him with his hooves while he tried to reach out with his magic to close his blinds and curtains. When his horn failed to even light up, he threw a soft blanket over his face and closed his eyes. Despite his exhaustion, sleep was difficult and frugal. He tossed and turned, readjusting blankets and pillows and even taking the tennis ball off the end of his chipped horn to try to make his body more willing to succumb. It was odd—he was so tired, yet his body was so awake, almost energized. He was so, so empty. The exhaustion filled every pore of his being, even the parts of him that kept him from sleeping. Let me sleep. It was all he wanted. He raised his hooves to his muzzle and sighed before turning and promising himself that he would stop moving. Eventually, he fell into a restless, dreamless sleep and woke just as exhausted as before. His bedding was kicked onto the carpet in a pile. It was like that—no sleep, sprawled out on his bed under the window—for days. He listened to the thrum of the city through the window: hooves against road, murmuring passers-by, gunshots at night. It used to be safer. He ate cereal without milk out of dirty dishes lit by incandescent light that turned his white-tile countertop yellow. The newspaper came weekly, in the middle of the day after an uncountable amount of time since Mix's Tapes went under. Mixtape navigated around the two full trashbags in his kitchen to pluck the newspaper from the door. He thought it was the first time he'd opened the door since seeing Starry Step. He shut and locked it, then headed back to bed. Any ounce of self-esteem left in his body deserted him while he gazed over the classifieds: factory work, fast food, a printer at a publishing house, manual labor. The magic fizzled out of his horn, and the paper landed squarely in his face, forcing the odor of pulp and ink down his nose. He let it stay, then fell asleep. In his dream, he looked to the sky in a rural field, right after a Whitechimera set. The rest was blurry. Time was lost to him. He paced his apartment or laid in bed. He played the music left in his box, their familiar melodies turning into songs he had never heard—taunting, nostalgic. He glanced over his Rolling Bones magazines from years past, reminiscing all the warm summer nights, the bright lights of the store, the ponies with radios on their withers. The trash piled at the door. His sink soon birthed flies that swarmed the apartment, like they had at his childhood home after his mother left his father. A donkey and a unicorn were never meant to be. He had a friend over once, as a child, and it was after Mixtape's mom left. The kid wouldn't stay; wouldn't even come inside. It was rancid. Just like his apartment. Useless, rotting, disgusting—Mixtape felt dirty. He broke the mirror in the bathroom when he noticed his beard falling out. It was only partially an accident. Shredding his Rolling Bones magazines was not. One morning—he wasn't quite asleep, nor quite awake—a loud knocking on the door startled him out of bed. He felt off-balance as he crept up to his door and leaned over the trash bags to see through the peephole. It was his landlord. His lease expired the day before. "Fuck." It was the first time he spoke in days. His tongue felt glued to the top of his mouth, and his voice was gravely with misuse. He pushed the trash out of the way and opened the door partially. "Hey, Mi—" Mister Bristle paused, then scrunched up his nose. "There aren't any dead bodies in there are there?" Mixtape shook his head. He asked, "Would you rather talk in the hallway?" Pause. "With this door shut." "Yeah, I think so." Mixtape nodded and quickly stepped out into the corridor, closing the door tightly behind him with what little magic he could muster. Mister Bristle—a lanky, tan earth pony—still had his nose scrunched. Mixtape hadn't showered since his store closed. Mister Bristle seemed to be thinking behind his wide-eyed expression, his lips twitching as though he was ready to say something and chose not to. Finally: "Your rent's up. Are you staying?" Mixtape laughed. At first, it was just for the absurdity of asking such a rhetorical question, but then it devolved into painful hysterics. Tears fell down his face to his nose, onto his teeth, salty on his tongue and Mister Bristle stood by, stiff and stoic as though the reaction was normal. "I'll uh, take that as a no?" Mister Bristle asked as Mixtape finally calmed, taking big breaths to regulate himself. "Yeah," Mixtape said, out-of-breath, doubled-over. "Yeah. It's a 'no.'" Mixtape kept taking deep breaths, admiring the cracking concrete of the platform on the stairwell. He finally looked up, right at Mister Bristle. The landlord seemed to be struggling for words again, his mouth twitching. "What happened?" Mister Bristle asked after Mixtape gained back his breath. "I think I've gone missing." "I see," he said. Mixtape knew he did not understand. A building was on Mister Bristle's flank, not two cassette tapes. "Don't worry," Mixtape said. "I'll clean it all up before I have to go. I'll do it better than I did the store!" "Wait," Mister Bristle said. "Your store? Is it gone?" "It was obsolete, like me." There was a pause, nearly filled by Mister Bristle, but Mixtape continued, "Before you ask, I have looked at other jobs. Nothing is fulfilling. Nothing." There was a long bout of silence, Mixtape staring up at his landlord's jet-black mane, avoiding his eyes at all costs. Cutie marks were supposed to be eternal, like Mister Bristle's building; yet, Mixtape had aged out of his own. Was he supposed to die? To give up? To become a factory worker? A pony came down the stairwell and stared at them as they kept going down, toward the main floor. "When do you need me gone?" Mixtape asked when it became clear Mister Bristle would say no more. "A week, if you clean. If not, twenty-four hours." Mister Bristle lifted his hoof to walk away, but stopped and said, "I'll be back tomorrow to check. With the key." Mixtape nodded, and Mister Bristle went down the stairs while Mixtape pried open his apartment door with his shoulder. The apartment was vile; the door was shut immediately behind him. There was no easy place to start, but Mixtape knew his magic was too weak to carry loads of trash down to the dumpster. Instead, he took to cleaning his dishes, scrubbing every one down with brute force. He broke a saucer. The dishes went into the cabinets; he wouldn't be needing them, he knew, on the streets. He scrubbed the grody countertop until it shined more white than yellow from his light. Cleaned the floor. Picked up more trash. Scrubbed the bathroom. Contemplated a shower. It was dark by then. He took three trash bags down to the dumpster, but his magic failed him at the bottom floor. He carried them with his teeth, like an earth pony, one-by-one to the dumpster. He washed out his mouth with mouth wash after. His efforts barely made a dent. Ultimately, he felt there was no point in cleaning, but it occupied his mind, pulling him from the VHS reels of his past playing through his head, distracting him from the inevitable question of why he was put on Equestria. Was his time up? Did he misunderstand? He walked up the flights of stairs and into his apartment; he still had to shove trash bags out of the way. He showered. It was exhausting, and it made him think again, about who he was. Why he was. What the cassettes meant on his flanks. He got the cutie mark before his parents split up. It was a surprise, considering his parentage: hinnies usually did not receive cutie marks; however, he was one of the unlucky minority. He got it as he worked on fixing a cassette deck for a friend in grade school. His shampoo was purple, like his coat. He washed himself until it fully lathered away the greasy texture off his body. Repairing technology from his youth was easy. He understood it: tape on reels. Vinyl he understood: grooves. Turntables were easy. But discs? There wasn't a tangible way they worked. Something with magic crystals; something with lasers. Unicorn-devised. Hot water trickled down his ears, along his back and down to his unkempt hooves. They had grown long in his isolation. He cleaned his mane and tail until they lathered—his hair had been so dirty it gleamed in the light in the bathroom before the shower. It was why he broke the mirror—partially. He dried off and jumped into bed. The bedthings smelled. The rest of the trash was taken out before Mister Bristle arrived the next day. Mixtape's magic cut out halfway through. The rest he dragged with his teeth. Vile. He was vile. Mister Bristle found the apartment acceptable and allowed Mixtape his last week's stay under the stipulation that the apartment remained clean. That day, Mixtape washed his bedding and folded it into the box with all his favorite things from the store. Then, days blended. He got one more paper. The classifieds made him bleak. He took another shower and brushed his teeth. He spit out more blood than toothpaste. He filed his hooves. It all felt so final. A stage of his life was ending. The mattress and dishes stayed in the apartment, except for a singular bowl and cup he decided to take with him. He dropped off his key to Mister Bristle and faced Manehattan with a snark-filled, "Good luck out there!" from Bristle. Mixtape stayed at a motel; he sprawled out across the uncomfortable twin bed and hardly moved. He only had so many days. He didn't look for jobs. He had done nothing to improve his circumstances, simply wallowing in the stiff sheets and springy mattress, dazed. Something divine wanted him to suffer; it was exhausting to push against it. He didn't get the paper at the motel. He stared at the cigarette-stained popcorn ceiling. At one point, the grody ceiling had turned into a roadmap from staring too long. Then, time was up. When it was time to leave, he handed his key over to the receptionist and left; no words were exchanged, though the earth pony's woeful expression haunted his mind. He only stayed a week. The thin walls acclimated him to sounds of violence: screaming, yelling, gunshots. His box floated next to him as he faced the city once more. There was nowhere he could go. It was never far from his mind that he could have boarded a train, returned to the Smokey Mountains and his father, but he didn't. It was part of the punishment he outlined for himself. Summer was coming to a close, and autumn would soon bring cold. Perhaps he would freeze. The idea was morbidly appealing as he walked the streets. Nopony nor creature paid him any mind. He settled in at sundown that night in an abandoned factory building in a bad part of town. He pushed past plywood guarding a low window and crawled into the darkest recess of the place, hoping to not be found by a gang, and set up camp for the first time. He didn't feel hunger or thirst; he did not feel exhaustion—he just longed for the escape of sleep in his shadowed corner behind long-forgotten crates. The first night was the hardest, with the mice skittering and violent voices that sounded close. The gunshots were louder than at the motel. Then, the third day, it was normal. He hadn't moved. He still wasn't hungry, but he managed to fill his cup and bowl with water on the second day when it rained. It wasn't much. Nothing was. Freezing and dehydrating into a mummy in the corner of an abandoned building felt like a natural end, yet the third day was different than the others. His discomfort finally pushed him out of his suicidality and into a different mindset: survival.