The whole of Sugarcube Corner shuddered, shook, and then settled with a shiver as the cloud of flour dust created by the concluded commotion slowly wafted out the open window. Three ponies in varying degrees of shock stood statue-still, an effect enhanced by the heavy flour powdering that had turned each of them pure white.
The tallest and leanest blinked twice, slowly.
The shortest and stoutest opened her mouth, paused, and then closed it again.
The remaining pony laughed nervously.
“Well, now we know that we definitely shouldn’t fill the zap apple jelly-filled doughnuts before we bake them, anyway!” Pinkie Pie said, having the decency to look a little sheepish.
“That’s… right, Pinkie dear,” said Missus Cake, wiping flour off her face with the back of her hoof. “This was certainly a valuable learning experience, wasn’t it dear? Wasn’t it, dear?” she went on, nudging her husband’s ribs with her elbow.
“Huh? Oh, uh, yes,” Mister Cake said, clearing his head with a quick shake. “Yes, uh, definitely a learning experience,” he added, stopping short of: “for Pinkie.” He was quite certain he’d underlined that exact direction on the recipe card twice before giving it to her. Maybe she’d somehow taken it as a double negative of emphasis.
The shy grin on Pinkie’s face was instantly replaced by her usual ear-to-ear smile as the Cakes’ young assistant sprung back into her normal spirits, and literally a foot to the left, somehow leaving behind a perfectly Pinkie-shaped cloud of flour that remained eerily standing like a ghost for a moment before collapsing.
“You’re the best, you guys!” she said, wrapping a foreleg around each of the bakers’ necks for a group hug. The Cakes smiled back. Whatever else they could say about Pinkie, they had never found it possible to stay mad at her.
The moment was interrupted by a wail from upstairs, closely followed by a second. All three ponies craned their necks up toward the ceiling, where a glob of half-cooked dough dangled on a tendril of rainbow jelly.
“Oh, all that noise must have frightened the twins,” Missus Cake moaned.
“You guys go calm Pumpkin and Pound down,” said Pinkie. “I’ve got this. In fact, have yourselves a play date, and I’ll have this place cleaned up lickity-split by the time you come back down!”
“Thank you, Pinkie dear,” Missus Cake said, trotting off up the stairs.
Mister Cake hesitated, taking another look around the Corner’s bottom floor. The flour dust had spread almost to the front door, and that was just what had made it out of the kitchen, which itself was haphazardly plastered with globs of dough and jelly. He turned back to his young tenant.
“You’re sure you can handle this, Pinkie?”
“Abso-positively-one-hundred-percent-lutely, Mister Cake!” Pinkie said, executing a mock salute. “I’ll have this kitchen ship-shape in no time! Or maybe just kitchen-shape. It would be kinda hard to do any baking in a ship-shaped kitchen, even though a ship-shaped kitchen would mean we could have all kinds of pirate-themed treats, like rum cake, or chocolate gold doubloons, or marzipan parrots, but I don’t even know where I’d find a contractor at this hour, not to mention that I probably couldn’t get through even the estimate and bidding process in time to….”
“Yes! Well, it sounds like you’ve got things under control, then!” Mister Cake interrupted, recognizing a potentially infinite tangent when he saw it. “Just clean up, Pinkie,” he added, trotting up the stairs after his wife.
“Okie dokie loki!” Pinkie called after him, repeating her salute. “Now what pony would make the best first mate….”
Mister Cake chose to ignore this and instead poked his head into the nursery, where Cup Cake had already put Pumpkin back to sleep and was now rocking Pound in her foreleg with a soft lullaby. Carrot smiled at the sight, releasing tension in his jaw that he hadn’t noticed was there. It really was a whole other world of worries when you had kids of your own.
Cup Cake looked at him over her shoulder and smiled back reassuringly as she lay the now-sleeping pegasus foal back in the crib with his sister.
“All settled down now,” she whispered, tip-hoofing out of the room. Carrot quietly closed the door behind her.
“Well then, I guess we should see if Pinkie needs any help,” he said, but stopped from heading back down by his wife’s disapproving expression.
“Now dear, Pinkie said she would take care of things. It would be rude of us to go back. It would be like we thought she couldn’t handle cleaning one simple kitchen by herself!”
“Yes, but Cup Cake, she also said the kitchen would be more interesting as a pirate ship,” Carrot said with a wince.
Cup Cake chuckled. “Oh, she’d never get through the contractor estimates before losing interest,” she said. “And honestly, I just want to take her up on the break she offered us.”
Carrot gave the nursery door a puzzled look. “But you just put the kids to sleep. You want to wake them up again?”
“Not with them, Nut Cake,” his wife said, bopping him good-naturedly on the head and leaving a dent in his paper hat. “I’d give the last muffin in Equestria for a nap right about now.”
Carrot raised an eye brow. “A… nap?” he said.
“Yes,” said Cup Cake, her voice a seductive whisper. “Just think of it. The soft pillows,” she said, bumping her flank against his.
“Soft, p, p, pillows…”
“The warm blankets,” she said, pressing his hoof to her coat.
“W, warm…” he said, eyes starting to unfocus.
Cup Cake rose up her the tips of her hooves, bringing her muzzle within an inch of her husband’s ear, and whispered, “Let’s go.”
Carrot, grinning dopily as a schoolcolt, allowed himself to be led by the hoof to the Cakes’ bedroom, visions of divine delight playing through his mind as the door clicked shut behind them and Cup Cake seductively sauntered over to the bed where she promptly collapsed face-first into her pillow and started to snore.
Carrot smacked himself on the forehead and sighed. It never failed. Cup Cake had been able to switch him on and off like an egg timer since they day they’d met. Ah, well, he thought. A real nap did sound nice. Neither of them had gotten a full night’s sleep in the last week. Not since Pumpkin had figured out how to undo the safety locks on the twins’ crib. Crossing to the bed, Carrot tossed his hat onto the nightstand, let his tie fall to the floor, and collapsed into something sticky.
Sitting bolt upright, he felt behind his head and brought his hoof back with a dollop of zap apple jelly. Looking down at his pillow, there was now a large rainbow-colored smear right in the center of his head’s indentation. All he could figure was that a glob must have stuck in his mane after the downstairs disaster.
Rising back to his hooves with a disappointed groan, he tugged the pillow case off and used it to wipe the rest of the jelly out of his mane before tossing it in the hamper of dirty aprons at the foot of their bed. He crossed the room to the closet.
“Honey, where do we keep the spare pillow cases?” he said, studying the overflowing interior of the storage space.
“Mmfrmrr.”
“Thank you, dear,” he said, rearing up on his hind legs to reach the top right shelf. The pillow cases were, for some reason, tucked under a horseshoe box and, while he could reach the cases with his teeth, he couldn’t reach the box with his hoof to hold it in place.
“Alright Carrot, it’s been a few years, but you never lose the touch,” he mumbled to himself around a mouthful of cotton, and yanked as fast as he could, causing the pillow case to slip out from under the box with ease.
“Phew!” he breathed, smiling with self-satisfaction as he trotted back over to the bed.
Then there was a creak. Slowly, Carrot turned his head back to the closet, breath held tight. He stared at the closet for several seconds, waiting for the inevitable landslide of old clothes, souvenirs, and gizmos which, blessedly, did not come. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to the bed, which, as though some half-horse-half-dragon-half-goat-half-insane demigod had planned it, was when horseshoe box, whose weight had shifted ever so imperceptibly when Carrot removed the pillow case, tipped the top shelf forward.
The avalanche of nostalgia was deceptively quiet, but when it was over Carrot was left standing hoof-deep in outdated cloths and useless junk that Cup Cake nonetheless refused to throw out.
“Horsepies,” he swore, eliciting a “Frmrrfrm,” from Cup Cake.
“Sorry, dear,” he mumbled, shuffling the worst of the mess back in the general direction of the closet door. He could clean it up later; right now he just wanted to lie down next to Cup Cake and snooze.
His hoof bumped into the box that had caused all of this, and he glared at it accusingly. What was in it, anyway? He needed to know what he was going to be impotently angry at, after all.
He removed the lid and his eyes shot wide open.
“Oh, double horsepies.”
“Mrrfrmrmph.”
“Sorry, dear.”