She woke up and felt so bad she didn’t know what to do. She had never felt this bad, not in all her years of mail or all her days of icky stomachs or stuffed chests or smiles that hurt too much. Her head felt so heavy, and even her bed didn’t feel nice, and she wanted to sink away into the covers and melt into the cloud and go away into dark forever. When she closed her eyes they felt big because they were wet, and she opened them and she was crying and she didn’t know why, except that she hurt too much.

Derpy had to go to work. When she was in the shower she held up her hooves to the water and cupped it against her chest and let it fall away, and she fell with it, and she landed on her shower floor and hung her head and pretended the water was turning her into mush. She wanted somepony to show up and stand on her back and hold her down in the shower until the water got cold and her breath went away and she couldn’t breathe and then she wouldn’t have to do anything.

It took her so long to turn off the shower that her clock was mad at her when she got out. She pushed the clock and it fell over, and Derpy fell over again because she felt so heavy. She didn’t want to go outside. She was afraid the sky was going to crush her. But she had to go to work, so she flew and the second the wind pushed at her she started crying, but she sniffed up her nose big and spat onto her cloud and her spit tasted like salt, and then she flew to work. She didn’t wave at the pony who she passed by. She closed her eyes as much as she could, and her chest didn’t tingle when she thought about other ponies flying. When she got to work she was almost late, and she didn’t say hi to anypony. She put on her hat and grabbed her mail and it felt like it weighed a million pounds.

Derpy didn’t eat her lunch. She went into the bathroom at the post office and sat down even though she didn’t need to go and banged her head against the door and cried. And she kind of wanted somepony to notice, and to come in and ask what was wrong, but she didn’t want them to at the same time, so she held her hoof over her mouth and her crying turned into strange noises and she had to look at herself in the mirror before she went back to work to make sure her face looked okay. She felt a bubble in her stomach all day that kept making her want to cry, but she tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

Derpy didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to do anything. She almost fell down in the sky because she let her wings stop, but they hurt even more when she didn’t move them, so she kept going until she got home. When she got inside Happy looked at her and said hello in sky kitty which was ‘meow’, and Derpy cried at him.

She felt bad. Everything felt wrong. Her legs and her chest and her wings and her hair all felt wrong, and her eyes kept crying and she wanted to take everything in her house and smash it because it was awful. She took her picture of the boy who kissed her and threw it across the room and it didn’t break and that made her cry more. She took her blankets and threw them out the window so they could fall onto the ground, and she cried. She kicked her bed and her hoof hurt but she didn’t care, and she kicked it more until she started to bleed, and then she thought ‘good’ and pretended she felt better for a second, but she didn’t. And she sat down and thought about her notebook and then thought about how much she hated it, because every time she wrote something in it, it made her words look dumb and ugly. She thought about hitting her notebook, but she didn’t.

Derpy got up and went to the kitchen. She tried to read the time on the clock in the wall but it was too fuzzy. She closed one eye and it got even fuzzier, and Derpy got so mad she wanted to scream and punch the clock until it broke into a million pieces. It was the clock’s fault she couldn’t read it. She didn’t want to dream about having unfuzzy eyes anymore.

Derpy had a drawer in her kitchen. She opened it and it was full of sharp things. She took one out and it was very long and very pointy and silver and Derpy could see it shining even though she had all the lights off except one in the hallway. Derpy felt the pointy thing with her hoof along the side, and it was very smooth, and cold. Derpy held it for a minute and she thought about clocks and eyes and playing the flute and wished she had learned how to do something other than bringing the mail to ponies.

As Derpy holds the pointy thing, she imagines the pointy thing is a screwdriver. She imagines being a pony with a watch and holding a screwdriver to the tiny little gears inside and pushing forward and turning and making them slide into place until the watch is right. She thinks about fixing things. She thinks about the word. She thinks fix. Fix. She fixes. She thinks about fixing. She holds a screwdriver between her hooves. She holds it and fixes. Fixes. She thinks about fixing things.

She holds her screwdriver, which is her knife. She takes it up with her hooves. She takes the knife

She takes the knife and holds it up and her chest feels unstuck and her crying goes away for a second because her breathing gets very slow. She holds the knife up like this and looks at it and the end is very pointy and Derpy has always meant to use it for cooking fancy things but she’s never used it.

She closes one eye, and the point of the knife is blurry. She feels a sticky thing in her chest again, and she squints and bites her lip because she’s mad and she moves the knife forward. She feels the cold against her skin and it’s against her nose and it’s against her cheek and then it’s there there there and she can feel the point of it so close to what she’s seeing it with and she squints and then she can’t see it anymore because it’s too blurry and she fix she thinks fix and she wells up all the bad feeling in her stomach and chest and her cries and she

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hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hu e rt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt

Derpy feels the hurt and sick and bad feeling going away and she doesn’t need to squint anymore
b e c a u s e

BECAUSE

Everything is blurry in the crimson cataract pooling through her eye like a blooming flower and she can feel the impossibly thin crystalline edge of the blade digging into her eye digging into her flesh separating her blood vessels and blinding her and opening her eye and helping her see and both her eyes are so wide and she only needs one of them now because she

Smiling hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt like it doesn’t hurt right now doesn’t hurt

Derpy stands up and the kitchen unfolds underneath her like a tapestry of worms and she stumbles towards the door towards the outside towards anything because she needs to run away from the hurt and she smiles and that doesn’t hurt.

She opens the door and Happy runs away from her and she holds her arms up and she can only see one of them and she flaps her wings that are sore and flies into the air.

She says it like a joke. She says it like a laugh. She says it like she’s happy.

She flies around in circles because she can’t remember how to go straight. She goes in circles above her house and she feels like it’s raining but she can’t see a cloud, and then she realizes that she can’t see and she can see a cloud and the cloud is red and it’s spilling out of her eye onto her house and cloud underneath like

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from a thunderstorm.

And finally somepony stops to look, because they're there, but Derpy doesn’t feel any better. And then her heart sinks like a weight in a pool of mercury, and so does she. Her wings give out suddenly and she falls.

She falls faster than the sky comes up around her. She falls through clouds and through a song she can’t remember anymore and through something that hurts so much more than her eye and her wings and her stomach and she wants to be sick but the world is moving too fast. She remembers a kiss on her lips but she tastes blood.

She thinks she feels a hoof touch her. Somepony she knows who reaches out his arm, just enough to touch the tip of her wing, but it shatters away from him like her whole body is falling apart, and he doesn’t follow her.

And then there’s the ground, and it says hello, and Derpy says hello back, and she laughs like squeezing a sack of sour milk and then the knife touches the point in the back of her head so far away she thinks it’s her soul and her whole eye opens up and she can see the sky in the ground and she can see herself reaching and crying and she can see the knife through the knife and it’s cutting a hole in a black cloud and Derpy can see through and there’s somepony on the other side smiling that looks like

Pieces of a Grey Cloud

by darf

Hurt