Pea protein hotdogs fetched from a pillar of steam—like an alley cat stealing out of a sewer grate, yes. The stench like heat and concrete steps glazed with dried alcohol. ‘Now made with sea salt’. Much better when it comes from the sea. Flung away from the corridors of the stadium and the streets… The sand, the water, the wind… Thrown into parched, odorless buns, those wieners. Food not fit for a lady. But what does a lady eat. Hungry now... I will pay attention to her next time. In fact, here we are. Leading my best life. I saw the real thing, a living sea—after all. But what can I say that she doesn’t already know?
what can I say what can I say what can I say to her
Inside.
The jingle of the greeting bell affected her like a loon’s cry from over moon-white lakes of a benighted waterway; it startled her from a rumination she had been having, a long dream since arriving onto the city dock filled with sun and the scents of distant shores. It had been two weeks since Coco Pommel had embarked on her trip, uncertain of the fate of ownership of Rarity For You. She stepped in, partly surprised to have its smell all the same as it was when she left it. The business day was now over, and the showroom was draped in shadows cast by the light of a slightly cracked door.
With her in a tall turquoise rolling suitcase were treasures that she had brought from outside Manehattan. Everything had been picked and preserved by her during her cruise through the Quadrupediterranean—one which saw stops in Burrocco (where she had haggled for a coconut hair comb under the shade of a palm tree), the island of Halta (at which place she had obtained a round jar of red-spiced honey, to be used for her morning toast), the great citadel of the Acroponys (there, she had hoped for a piece of ruin to display on the little mantle in her apartment; but being too closely followed by the tour guide, and fearful of scorn, she had settled for a photobook on ancient architecture, instead), all the way to the merchant city of Steerna (upon which view she had begun miss home, and so purchased there a string of pearls to hold onto for a friend). Above all, however, her traveling was given away by a strip of a sunburn on the tip of her nose, where her pelage was most thin.
She left her bag and walked into the showroom as though she were excavating a burned building, taking in every shape and smell. She noticed the sheen of corner-tucked fitting mirrors and the whiff of fabric loads—polyester, cotton, silk. She caught the oily musk of an old stitching machine and felt the slivered singe of her sunburn as passing darkness covered and uncovered her, as she timidly crept past displays toward the office light. She forgot about the suitcase and recognized the scent of sweat and money and perfume as she approached, closed her eyes, and sniffed an empty invoice envelope on the door, the smell of plastic.
Something else—ah, spring rolls, her favorite! Cabbage and oil and fried wheat flour. A fat, offensive odor amongst these delicates. The smell of self-confidence, hers. The way it lingers. I could let myself fall in that smell. Her force, gathered up in a little white container to-go. Will always be here, the way oil sticks to old gears one-hundred years after.
She creaked open the door and everything crowded in—aerosol and chlorofluorocarbon, with a note of citrus fruit from a wall plug, all blasting her.
Rarity looked up. She was bifocaled and seated at a desk with photographs of two designs in front of her; with an inspecting glare, it took a moment for her to process that a new body had entered the room.
“Coco!” she cried out, grinning filly-like as she got up to greet. “You’re a day early.”
They shared a one-armed hug, and Coco replied, “No, I just got off the ship an hour ago. I wanted to see how you were holding up.”
She glanced around the room as she spoke. There were stacks of papers everywhere on the desk and on the back counter, rolling together like waves against a dingy shore.
Rarity had on a busy smile. “How was the trip?”
Coco laughed. “Lovely.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rarity said. “And I want to assure you that the struggle has been constructive. Very manageable, in fact. Though with business maintaining as it has no doubt I’ve been a bit… hmm… discombobulated?” she offered, bolstering the same smile.
A little wine on her breath, too. Pinot grigio. The way she looks at me, I feel like she sees a spider in my hair and she’s trying to think of the best way to break the news. Searching eyes, wine and spring rolls, searching eyes, searching for what.
“I can see that,” Coco said. She began skimming the sheets in one of the paper piles, checking the dates. “As long as you’re okay. …Ah, the ticket numbers are all confused. That’s how I usually do it. A single ticket number might have many reference dates. That’s all right, it can be fixed.”
“Oh, yes, you think so? That will be good.”
“Will it?” Coco asked. Her pulse began to quicken. She let the paper she was holding fall back on the pile.
“Yes, of course. What do you mean?”
“We can do it together,” Coco said. “But, later.”
“Sure.”
They held silence a moment, scouring the waves of papers. Then Rarity, glimpsing something tragic in her friend’s expression, let herself fall in a high-back chair and kicked her hooves up on a stool.
“Ms. Pommel, please be a dear and massage my legs. I’ve been standing all day.”
Coco sized her, and, breaking off from her thought, got down on one knee. She cradled a pale limb against her chest and began rubbing, before Rarity yanked it away.
“Don’t do it you boulder head! What the bloody hell is wrong with you?”
Coco jumped back. Rarity rolled up after her and, with a wave, asked her to take the stool in front of her.
“Listen, you… Hold my hooves. Say this with me. No, Rarity, I will not massage your legs. I am a hard-working mare and talented in my profession. I perform exceptional duties not limited to organizing your messy filing system and making sure your head doesn’t fall off your shoulders.” Her nose scrunched with a playful impulse. “You would be nothing without me!”
The tragic look flickered across Coco’s eyes again.
“Oh, I could never think that,” she replied. “I’ve learned so much working with you. I think these have been some of the best years of my life…”
Searching.
The water looks green and brown and yellow with seaweed and shadows as you stand over it, pondering why you might be so close to a vast depth as to see sand and detritus and diving birds at the top, as the water recedes into one endless sapphire spreading in every direction. The air whips in short breezes with the smell of a thousand imagined civilizations, tiny orange coastlines that crest the sea. There with their spears and monuments, their eyes shadowed under antlered helmets—I am their abyss, looking back. The big blue membrane of the sea beating like our hearts, separated, impenetrable, filling the air with the scent of brine and death, muscling over the fallen, carrying us over our own deep. Then, by chance—another ship…
She smelled the wisp of a sweet-scented hoof brushing back her hair, fixing it like a cat’s dry tongue cleans a kitten’s fur.
“Did you see to it about the costume designer role?” Rarity asked her.
“I got some contact information.”
“Oh… Okay. I thought you wanted to speak to someone in person.”
Coco didn’t answer.
“They’ll love your Bridleway experience, don’t worry,” Rarity went on. “And we’ll have to start to coordinate our costumes when we go out, because all of that sunshine and happiness has you looking damned sexy and I will simply not get any attention if I am seen with your likes.”
Coco broke into a laugh. “Oh, no! You can’t do this to me! Don’t think that I won’t file a cease and desist, Ms. Rarity,” she protested, loudly and languorously and privately remiss that they were without a mirror in the crowded office space.
They compared their lives from the preceding two weeks. Coco described all of the creatures she had seen around shores far away from Equestria, taking time to recount each detail like an old storyteller; Rarity leaned an elbow on her desk, wistfully as a press-wood Penelope, wondering at, though not regretting, what she had missed. And after a little while Coco, observing the doting posture of her friend, and feeling as though she had spoken enough about herself, asked about Sweetie Belle and the trip Rarity had taken to Ponyville before she had left; to which Rarity heaved the sigh she had been holding onto, and said, “Oh, it was beautiful. Everyone is well. My parents were extremely happy to see me, and pass along their good wishes to you, Ms. Pommel.” Coco returned their acknowledgment, and there was an expectant pause. “Sweetie Belle slays me,” Rarity resumed, shuffling her seat. “Absolutely slays me. The show was a success, I think. We were all very proud.”
Coco frowned. “But everything’s not okay?”
“I’m afraid something terrible has happened. Thinking of that weekend just reminded me. One of Sweetie Belle’s friends has passed. She died a few days ago.”
“Oh no!” gasped Coco. “Was it a family friend? Someone from school?”
“No, no. It was an old mare… Maybe she was at the performance? I’m not sure. Sweetie Belle cut me a newspaper clipping. Will you help me look for it in this big mess I have? It’s somewhere in these bottomless papers… I thought I had put it right here.”
Coco and Rarity split up and began sifting through paper on different sides of the back counter. They became preoccupied in the task and went silent with one another, quietly turning things over in the muted pall of death. Rarity yanked the drawer of a squeaking filing cabinet and cussed and muttered to herself. Coco lifted a stack of invoices to her nostrils. It had a musky, inky scent which billowed up when she fanned the sheets toward her face or smacked them on a counter, one that reminded her of the gold-trimmed books at Saint-Clyde’s that she was never allowed to touch when she was a filly.
“Aha!” cried Rarity, thieving something out of the filing cabinet. “That’s where I left it… Take a look.”
It was brown and thin as a dried tissue, and had been carefully snipped so that nothing showed around the border. The print was small so that the entire piece took up four and a half inches of newspaper. The back of the page could be made out in faded, reverse letters that appeared like celestial objects over a dark sky—it was a fragment of a continuation of a second-page story, concerning the town beautification committee’s response to the caterpillar endemic. Property owners who are awarded a grant are not limited from making changes to their property that reflect and enhance that property’s style and character. Anyone who feels—, it read.
On the top of the slip was a square portrait of a sideways-smiling, middle-aged mare with the title Mrs. Gray Gables (Daisy) in bold letters underneath. A tiny turquoise pendant set off layers of red and orange in her hair like the marigolds of front yard flower beds that run on for many streets. A studded necklace imbued her with symmetry and a certain determination. Like a vow-taker who had long forgotten the meaning of her purport, something inside her seemed to have weakened, taking flesh along. Her eyes were blurred, heavenward, wondering, and rimmed with thick glasses. There was a hoof placed on each of her shoulders, belonging to two ponies who were now cast into obscurity.
Rarity read it:
Mrs. Gables passed away peacefully in her home on Brass Halter Road on the 2nd quarter moon of Sun’s Length.
She was born sixty-seven years ago on Moon’s Return under Celestia’s Sun, to loving parents Plucked and Painted (Meadows), who owned the consignment store Finders Keepers that everyone old enough to dance the Hot Trot still remembers!
It didn’t surprise any of us that Gray had her own home décor stand in Ponyville Square by the time she was a young mare. She couldn’t stay away from selling to her beloved Ponyvillians for too long!
She met the love of her life, Cedar, after her parents passed. They had one wonderful son together, Heath Cropper.
Cedar’s devotion to the Gravitationist church led Gray to declare her own faith. We will remember her as a pony who believed that all of us, in the end, find our way back to where we belong.
Besides her family, her career, and her church, Gray always enjoyed Tuesday coffee with her friends Ink Berry, Sweet Spire, and Coral Bells. She liked tending her garden and crochet. She was selfless, humble, and touched countless lives, taking great pride in her store Shoreham Accents, that provided everyone in Ponyville with a reminder of the beach!
She was preceded in death by her sister White and by her husband and son. Funeral services will take place at Ponyville First Gravitationist Church and a burial will be held there at noon on Sunday.
When she finished, Rarity handed the clipping over to Coco for her to look at. She read it again to herself and became thoughtful for a moment. “Wow. Did you know her?” she asked.
Rarity shook her head like a stork viewing itself in shallow water.
“That’s sad,” said Coco. “Stories like that always make me sad. I mean, when someone has a little life like that. It makes you wonder.”
“I met her briefly when I was in Ponyville that weekend,” Rarity corrected herself. “I do know of Shoreham Accents, but I didn’t know that she was the owner. Apparently Sweetie Belle got to know her. She lived with Yona, and it was very recent.”
Coco read the clip a second time as she was listening, but the letters on it faded away, the way a sound loses shape when it is repeated by itself in rapid succession.
“That’s sad,” Coco said again. “Sad for Sweetie Belle, too. It never makes any sense. One of my aunts passed away this year. I didn’t know her very well but she left me some money. That’s what made me want to take a vacation. And I told myself that I would find a few quiet moments to remember her.”
“Did you?” asked Rarity.
“I kept forgetting—actually, I only really remembered when we were on land. There was one day in particular on our trip to the Erechneighon where I really felt that I owed her something. Because that temple has a famous south side, called the Porch of the Maidens. In that tradition, it’s said that the weight of the world is carried on the head of six mares, represented by ten-foot-tall caryatids which all support the pediment of the temple. The complex is built on a high outcropping and we were all going up steps to meet these great ponies who support us. And I couldn’t think of my aunt’s face.”
“Ah... You were climbing those steps to see her. That’s beautiful, Coco.”
“Only I was so out of breath by the time we reached the top that I was ready to choke,” Coco replied, blushing and pushing her hair away from over her eyes. “I felt so out of shape. My rib cage felt like it was on fire.”
“And that’s how you remembered her,” Rarity encouraged. She got up from her seat. “Right?”
Coco rubbed her nose to hide her face and left off a reply.
“We’re both out of shape,” Rarity said. “Because we’re stuck here, doing this, most of the time. The work never stops.”
“At least you’re skinny.”
Rarity answered in a smiling voice, “Not everywhere, and you know it. We give up more than we might think to do this.”
I don’t think you ever told me how that came about happening
oh it was quite simple
working with my Aunt Whipstich in her little fabric store I developed a reputation
some in our clan were very uncertain about the whole thing
I wanted to cry, but refused to let the others see it
mom’s not one to talk about her feelings
Rarity resumed her seat, setting down a bottle of pinot grigio between her and Coco.
“Yes, always more than we might think… But not everything,” she added, pouring out two glasses. She regarded the clipping of Mrs. Gables a moment. “Well, would you like to hear the letter that I received from Sweetie Belle?” She batted her eyes to show that she had made a request rather than an offer.
“Of course,” Coco replied. “As long as it’s nothing too personal.”
“Oh, Coco! Why do you have to make this so difficult for me? We dwell in the personal, in our household. Why, I may as well read you the Sunday funnies, instead. Anyway, I think she’d want you to hear it. I’m no longer the dramatic one in the family, oh no sir.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that!” said Coco, cracking a grin at her friend’s jesting. “Fine, then. Let’s get personal.”
Rarity nodded and threw back a sip of wine. “Very well, here it is.
“Dear Sis,
“Do you remember this lady from that crazy night at the Palfrey? I’m thinking not. You probably had a million different things going through your head, but somewhere in all of that you did shake hooves with her. I wanted you two to be introduced. I thought that there would be time later for a more proper getting-to-know-you at Bayard’s or something… But obviously that didn’t work out.
“Why do I mention all of this? I’ve got a lot to say and I’m not sure where to begin, in part. First thing’s first—I’ve decided that I’m going to live in Rolling Oats after I graduate from Friendship Academy. That’s the deal I made with Mom and Dad. They’re not eager but they like that I’ve been putting in shifts at the Plumerium, something about ‘gumption’ (yech). Don’t tell them, but Gray was the real reason why I was able to get into the shop to work off damages. She put in a good word. Ms. Rose wasn’t all that friendly with me after everything that had happened.
“I’m a porter. I keep the showroom and the little greenhouse clean during the day and deal with the big stuff at night—moving plant racks, mopping the floor, etc., while Ms. Rose takes care of her books in the office. Gray came to visit us once or twice before she passed. One night when I was working on the floor I could hear Ms. Rose yelling about something. She would speak in sort of a hissing whisper until Gray interrupted in her round vibrating voice and Ms. Rose would resound with things like, ‘I don’t care anymore! I don’t care.’ I got worried that they were fighting with each other so I set down the mop and got closer to the door. Then I heard, ‘Who takes forty-five minutes to mop an eight-hundred square foot floor? I wonder what parents teach their kids these days. If that were me at that age I would have been fucking fired. I may as well do it myself.’
“I just kind of stood there a while in shock. I wasn’t even angry, just nervous that I had bungled Gray sticking her neck out for me and that we were going to need money because Ms. Rose was going to come out at any moment and kick me to the curb. That’s how aggressive she sounded, Rarity.
“Then she finally appeared after I was finished and approached me with a big grin. She asked if I wanted a water for the walk home. Super awkward.
“For the next few days we just kind of grinned at each other. A few times a customer would come in and ask me something I couldn’t answer and I’d need to get her. But it would always be quick and we wouldn’t look at each other.
“I know it sounds like all of this is the reason why I’ve decided to leave Ponyville… Well, one day there’s a customer who has a delivery question and I can’t find her. Like, I really can’t find her. Like I’m in the store by myself, basically. I thought she might have been mad at me again, but if that were true, why would she leave me running her store? Was it a test? I managed okay, but I was starting to get really anxious. Then when I ran to the greenhouse to grab some transplants I heard her whimpering. And I knew what had happened. I just knew.
“I was so scared, Rarity, scared of being in front of that mare in that moment. She hated me. I wondered if she might blame me for what happened, somehow. But she needed somebody.
“I put up an ‘out to lunch’ sign as soon as I got the chance and set it for a half an hour. My heart was pounding. I stepped back to the greenhouse. She was hidden behind a rack of carnations, still sobbing. I sat on the other side of the flowers and I asked if she was okay. I told her I was a ‘good listener’... Ugh, I’m cringing now just thinking about it.
“She shouted ‘No!’ from her spot but didn’t tell me to leave. So I didn’t. I didn’t know what to do, so I just sat there with my knees folded, holding space for her. I would have liked someone to hold space for me, too, because I started crying, but I didn’t want her to know.
“A half hour definitely passed with both of us keeping to ourselves. I had to reset the time on the door. While I was up I started organizing the displays and making things look the way she liked it. A few ponies knocked on the door so I switched the sign to ‘closed’ and continued working. I worked… I don’t know, like an angel might notice. It calmed me down a little.
“Then I heard hoof steps behind me. She must have realized I was still out here by all the noise I was making moving things around. Boy, did she look a mess. She told me that it was good that I had put the ‘closed’ sign up and that I could go home. She thanked me. I told her I was sorry. I said it and made sure I looked her in the eyes. They were red and still. We both stood there like two bowling pins.
“I wound up staying. We talked for hours, until it got dark out. We were sitting on the floor leaned against the front desk and she told me what it had been like for her coming up in Ponyville and how important Gray had been in her life. She was glad that she was able to see her again, to sort of say goodbye. But I could see that she was still struggling. When I asked her about it, she would kind of talk quietly and turn her head.
“Then she looked at me, straight on—a long look, like she was working up a nerve to ask me something—and confessed to me that she was gay. I guess I was the first one she had told. I told her that’s cool. But a long time ago, apparently, Gray had said something to her along the lines that she would find her heart with a family, and, for some reason, Ms. Rose had always interpreted that prediction to have meant a traditional family. So she became closeted for so many years, afraid of disappointing a pony who had really loved her.
“After a while, she internalized that Gray despised her, as a coping mechanism, and cut off contact. Then they met again after all that time in Twilight’s room, and she was proven very, very wrong. But she was still terrified of coming out to her, and now it’s too late.
“She started to cry again, and told me there was a side of her that was glad Mrs. Gables was dead. I told her I understood, and we were quiet for a long time. We were sitting there together, just breathing, and I could tell that a change had taken place in her. I didn’t want to disturb that, and tell her what I thought, that the Gray Gables I had met sitting with Yona that night could only give herself away, and would have done so to see Rose pursue her deepest happiness—and maybe did just that. I could see in the way Ms. Rose rolled her head back and forth on the backboard of the desk the relief and freedom she felt that she could finally go after what she wanted all along. We hugged, Rarity. And it was a real hug. No bullshit.
“That night when I got home I sketched a letter to Ms. Bon about my intention to live in Rolling Oats. I put down what I could remember and cried as I wrote, just bawling, letting out everything that I had dammed up while I was trying to be supportive for Ms. Rose. I said I was amazed by just how powerfully two mares could reach each other, brought into one another’s long inner horizons by these strange roles which make up our lives, like crossing ships on a vast, purple ocean. Just because that possibility exists, I said in my letter, is why theater exists, and it’s our job to remind ponies of the magnificence of their own encounter with the passing world.
“Ms. Rose says I can come back to the Plumerium as a regular employee once my service time for the Cakes is completed. That way, I’ll be able to save bits for the move.
“And in case you’re wondering, I’ve already heard back from Ms. Bon. She was happy to hear from me, and fondly remembers your exchange with her at Ponyville Gravitationist. She disagreed with me about theater. She gave me the following counter-example: a mare who was a well-known socialite in Rolling Oats passed away about a year ago. From the description, she seemed to cut the figure of a Pinkie Pie—familiar with everyone in the city and their families, knowing where everyone dwelled and what their birthdays were. She lived inexplicably, off social graces, and could always be seen with a boa and a feathered cap, rounding the corners of the old streets like a happy ghost. Well, like I said, she died. And Celestia knows who prepared her service, but they stitched her up and sat her right there in the front of the gallery slumped over in a floral chair to greet her ex-acquaintances as they rolled in. And the weirdest thing is that everyone loved that she was able to attend her own funeral. They thought it was the best idea. That feeling, Ms. Bon says, is why theater exists—just a story in a universe where stories don’t exist, the kind of confidence and neurosis that goes with that, something which speaks to our primal cultural instincts.
“She’s right. And now I’m not sure.
“Two shopkeepers, either finding something real in the improvisation of their lives or turning up something sublimely counterfeit in the mere models that happen to comprise them…
“So I need your advice. What do you think?”
The letter fell out of Rarity’s hold and wafted under the chair she was sitting in. She bent over to pick it up and her hair fell forward and touched the floor like a cataract. She snatched the papers from between her legs and, a little drunkenly, tumbled back in her seat with strands of her mane still draped over her eyes.
“Honestly,” she said, moving her dangled locks like a toddler disgusted with an old toy, “why do ponies think I know anything about life? Here I am in this ramshackle store, flanked on every side by mannequins that nobody looks like, putting together and poring over outfits for mummied sophisticates as if it’s the most important thing in the world.”
when we learned there was an unfinished building for lease not far away from Ponyville Square
a portion of whom could complete the upstairs
my own little shop
my parents and some of our close family
juice boxes in the cooler for Sweetie Belle
some in our clan were uncertain about the whole thing
so there I was, a young mare fresh out of charm school, running a shop with genteel ambience downstairs and an unfinished wooden inferno upstairs
quite simple
I think I’d be terrified in that situation, I said
it all passed through up into the vault above the light of the lamps as I sank into myself, into my work
in those days
the sound of crickets from the Ponyville tree line
I wanted to cry
when she got bored she would sing into one of the little electric fans I had or try on outfits I had hanging about
frizzy hair in bunches sticking to her shoulders
“Let me ask you—” Rarity continued with a slur mending her speech—"how many of us in fashion actually have taste? How many of us can say that we know what style is—how many actually care? We hold out hope that what we do matters because there are some of us who tell what we see, rather than are told what to see. Quel miracle. But I tell you, Coco, the older I get, the less convinced I become that I am a proprietor of insight into anything besides my own… ineluctable ordinariness.”
Rarity pushed her books to the side and put her back hooves up on the desk, and with an exhausted groan let her hair cascade over her shoulders and the arms of her seat. Her declamation had made Coco uneasy, who, after everything, had little to say, and who watched her friend with an awe similar to that of a child who had encountered a scolding adult; and who, finally, was prompted to ask what she had been afraid to receive an answer to, “Are you still thinking about selling Rarity For You?”
Rarity glanced at her. “More life questions?”
Coco broke a smirk. “Right, right. I’m asking the wrong pony.”
“You had your chance with the maidens and blew it,” Rarity joked.
“It’s just… The store is called Rarity For You. The name would have to be changed.”
“Hmm… Indeed it would,” Rarity said. “But that’s not the important thing, Coco. Do you understand?”
Coco nodded.
“Maybe it is just what I need, to let go of it. Just like Sweetie Belle’s leaving. To not be so afraid of finitude. There is a freedom in that.”
Rarity pondered a moment.
“But… Perhaps we must have recourse to different methods of prognostication. I’ve heard that in Yakyakistan there is a custom that whenever a tribal elder is confronted with a serious dilemma they must decide on it twice—once while sober, and once while absolutely doused in their celebrated raki. If said parties disagree, it is believed that there is within that yak a conflict of essence.”
“And as for us city ponies…?”
Rarity brushed the idea off. “Forget about all of it. Tonight, you and I are yaks, Ms. Pommel!”
“Hear, hear!”
They laughed together.
“To Mrs. Gables,” Coco added.
“…Yes. To Mrs. Gables,” Rarity said. They clinked glasses. Then Rarity seized the clipping and made another inspection of the mare staring back at her on translucent paper. “Probably my age in this picture,” she said. “There but for divine grace go we, Coco. Someday someone will be having a laugh over my poor dead face, wondering where it all went wrong for me.”
She folded up the clipping and tucked it in an envelope along with Sweetie Belle’s letter and tossed it into the sea of papers.
Stone pillars wafting with the smell of fried chickpeas and donuts, going to see Auntie who supports us. The ancient world is a big kitchen long forgotten. Even the land smells like food. Big statues covered in the grease of spring rolls. Because you can’t eat limestone, needs to be carved out for you, served. The grapes grow down below in great magnitudes, juicy, sweet, intoxicating. What was it like to find that first purple jewel—welcome to my home, says Auntie. The mare at the desk on the cruise with my application, her blouse like my aunt’s. Auntie For You. I pushed my face into that fabric, once—a filly, I remember, fearful in her big loathsome sunflowered house, sun and breeze in the windows coming through her shirt.
“Hey, by the way—there’s something I’m still curious about,” said Coco.
Rarity peered at her through spilled purple tresses. “Hmm? What’s that?”
“You never said what you saw at the show.”
“The show…”
“Black Box Theater. What was it like? I think you left that part out.”
“I suppose I did…”
Rarity closed her eyes and let her head roll back, the floor dusting her mane like the gravity of Equestria pulling the stars down from the firmament.
“Well. They gathered us all in an outward facing circle so that we could only see part of the environment we were in. We waited for a very long time, I recall, fidgeting on old church pews which the actors had moved for this purpose, and we couldn’t see each other very well, either, and I began to forget the rest of the audience and felt alone with myself. Then after a little while more the performers filed out—I should say, I heard them file out, but only saw a few of them cross my section of the performance space.
“So… this isn’t going to be visual, I thought. I was tired and forgot about Sweetie Belle and closed my eyes. I heard the sound of scratching—hadn’t I seen an office desk at one corner of the room from where I had entered? Now someone must have been working there. Sweetie Belle told me later that the whole set had been improvised that morning using only objects which could be found around the church, completely from scratch. It all felt very loose, like fragments of my intuition were appearing and finding new applications—like I was thinking hard, but not in the clear, discrete sort of way we associate with thinking.
“Then the sound of paper tearing—which I found to be very relaxing, actually—followed by even and purposeful hoof steps on that same side of the room. When they stopped, there was the sound of flowing water and something being pounded against the wall. There was some connection between the patroller and the water which I did not understand.
“Yes… a sound piece. As time progressed those hoof steps came nearer and nearer, but whatever I might have felt about them was washed away by the water wheel, which in the pristine clarity of my senses had become like the lapping of an ocean. In a strange way I wished that my parents and Sweetie Belle were there to enjoy it with me, though I knew they were in the room, somewhere. I felt impervious to the hooves. I would open my eyes when I chose to.
“And when I did, I saw that a charcoal sketch of a horseshoe had been posted in front of me over the old church mural, three feet tall. Was it made for me, or what the artist imagined for themselves? There were tiny, flowing figures of flowers on either end of it, reminiscent of a variety I wasn’t acquainted with. But then I believed that they could be me, sure. But in a different life. One where the artist’s sensibilities and my own faded together into the deep blue behind the leaves and stars of a balmy night.
“And when I looked down the circle of the audience I saw that the whole wall was lined with horseshoes of different curlicue forms, and that some of the ponies still had their eyes closed.
“And the pony at the desk was my sister, working busily, making a dozen and more designs for stained glass windows, not looking up but scribbling furiously, shutting out everything.
“And next to her were ponies siphoning water from a large jug and turning the wheel of water without speaking.
“And the sun was setting, and orange rays passed through the old windows of that building, filling my ocean of sound.
“And I began to recognize the silhouettes of those I knew in the room fading in and out of that golden water, into and out of my dream.
“And Mom and Dad and Sweetie Belle were there, like floating timbers from an unknown shore.
“And we were the drift and sitting on top of it at the same time, looking toward the sun.”
