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// Chapter One 
// Story: My Fair Pony 
// by 2K Chrome 
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She was christened Little Applestia, but nopony called her that.

Her mother called her Sunny, because she had named her after the royal Sun Princess, “Princess Celestia,” one of the few charitable characters found in Canterlot.

Her father, Little Apple Cider, was anything but little. He was a large orange stallion that almost always had a red face and a loud beery voice. Apple Cider called her Lestia, after the mare in one of his favorite songs: “Lestia, Lestia, the presents I buys er, she throws em right back in me face.”

The other foals that played with her in the lower class streets of Canterlot that ran in and out like scruffy strays under the legs of the black railway arches called her Apple.

The Little Apple family lived in a worn down gray farm on the outskirts of Canterlot. The railway for the trains were built right by the farmland, so that the trains ran right outside the trees and showered the apples with sticky black soot. When the wind was not blowing the smoke that way, she could look into the lighted carriage windows and see the high-class mares, mysterious in their traveling veils, and the gentlecolts with their side well-groomed manes growing down into their high collars, too deep in their conversations to notice Applestia’s yellow face behind the dirty glass and the rotting apples. But she would imagine herself in there with them, rattling away to the castle, and think, “One day, ah’ll go somewhere too.”

The year was 1900. A bad year for jobs, Apple Cider said, although every year seemed to have been that, as long as Applestia could remember. He was a lazy, boastful stallion, whose tongue was the only part of him that got enough exercise. Born as a slacking farmworker, he never enjoyed working on the farm, thus decided it would be best for him to find work elsewhere. Always in and out of work, and mostly out, if there was any money to spare, he would take it off to Buck Daniels and get rid of it in beer or bets on Pegasus races.

Applestia’s mother took to tending the farm to keep them alive. She often worked late into the night; toiling using a dim lantern, until Celestia began to raise her sun and the early mailponies began soaring through the sky on their routes. Out of the leftover bits she managed to earn, she would save them up for pretty dresses for her Sunny to wear at school, “So she can look like the little princess she is.” She was very proud of her daughter who was shrewd and intelligent. Applestia learned to read and write at the shabby farm, though not much else, as there was not much bits to spend on education.

“She’ll grow up to be something better than us one day, you’ll see,” Applestia’s mother told her husband, but Apple Cider only said, “I don’t see there’s anything wrong with me.”

It was in the bitterly cold winter when Applestia was fourteen that her mother grew ill and could not leave her bed. Her father was off somewhere chasing one of the “golden opportunities” that he always knew were waiting for him round the next corner. Applestia was afraid to get the doctor because there was no money to pay him. She spent the last bits she had to buy ingredients to make stew which her mother could not swallow, and crept up to the train docks to steal enough coal to keep the fire going, because her mother was so cold all the time, except when she was burning hot.

One evening she did not get warm, and she did not move or speak, and Eliza knew that she was dead. When her father came home, Applestia told him, “You killed her!” and he went into a noisy show of grief. But it was Applestia who went out and sold their table, so that her mother could have a proper funeral.

Now she nopony’s princess. Her father took her away from school and put her to work in a textile factory, where she stood in a basement room for ten hours a day, sewing dozens and dozens of saddlebags, dresses, and such. There were other fillies to talk and joke with, and songs to sing in the sweet Southern accents of the country parts of Equestria that found their way to the city.

The other fillies hated the factory as much as Applestia did, but they stayed on there, because jobs were hard to find in the city, especially if you were poor and had no connections. But Applestia had more spirit. Knocked down so often by life, she was like one of those weighted dolls that roll back upright every time. She had never lost that feeling that there must be something better than this for her. The feeling that had made her believe, when she the fancy mares and proper gentlecolts go rattling by in the trains, “One day, ah’ll go somewhere too.” She never forgot her mother saying, with her sweet tired smile, “Something better for her one day.”

After a year, she ran away from the factory one spring morning when she could see the sun shining through the narrow windows. The manager ran after her, chasing her ruffled mane through the crowds on the street, crying, “Stop, thief!” Her father had hired her to the factory for five years, so she was stealing his time.

“Stop, thief!”

The bystanders did not think he meant Applestia, who looked too skinny and ragtag to be a villain, so she escaped through the crowd into the park, where she spent two nights under the bushes and two days sharing thrown crusts with the birds and ducks, before she dared go home to her father.

After his wife’s death, Apple Cider had left the wretched rooms in the farm, and was lodging now in Hoofton Road; not grand, but better than Little Apple Acres. The smoke and smog of the new railroads by the farm was slowly destroying the trees that the Little Apple family had grown for generations. Apple Cider took it upon himself to sell the land before it became inexpensive. 

He also had a steady job for the first time in his life. He called himself a “servant of the public,” which actually meant he was a dustpony, emptying bins full of ashes and other things ponies threw out, into his square dustcart.

It was not like him to be in such regular work: Monday those streets, Tuesday these, Wednesday dump the whole lot in the river, Thursday those other streets, Friday trot to the office for his pay. But he rather fancied his landpony, and wanted to impress her.

Mrs. Lyrica Highcastle lived on the ground floor of her house on Hoofton Road, in which Apple Cider, Public Servant, had a comfortable second-floor room, and his daughter, Applestia, a tiny attic, just wide enough to hold a rusty iron bed. When Applestia came nervously home, her father was having a cup of tea with Mrs. Highcastle in the landlady’s cozy kitchen, haunted by old smells of stews and kippers, the ghosts of all the meals she had cooked for the late Mr. Highcastle before his winter cough carried him off.

Mrs. Highcastle was an energetic, upright mare, like a soldier, with a thick poofy purple mane and a light pink coat. The high collar of her blouse was held up on her neck with whalebones, and fastened with a huge shell brooch in which she could hear the sea. Apple Cider had found it in somepony’s rubbish bin and brought it to her with pride.

“So there she is.” Mrs. Highcastle looked at Applestia without pleasure. “Two nights gone, we thought we’d seen the last of you.”

“Worried about me, Dad?” In the hideous event that Mrs. Highcastle ever became her stepmother, Applestia might have to talk to her. Meanwhile, she’d save her breath.

“Off and on, old girl,” her father replied. “Payday, ain’t it?” One hoof reached out to his daughter, beckoning for bits.

“Not from me. Ah chucked it,” Applestia said with a shrug.

“You what?!” Apple Cider yelled.

“Got fed up” Applestia pretended to be casual, although the kitchen smells made her faint with hunger. “What's fer tea then?”

“Nothing for them as ain’t in work.” Mrs. Highcastle shut her lips in a grim bar.

“You can’t send me back there,” Applestia said, glaring at her father. “He’ll put me in jail. What would that do to yer reputation?”

“We never had you in jail, that’s true.” Apple Cider was surprised to realize it.

“Always a first time,” Mrs. Highcastle said. “Take your eyes off those croissants, young filly.”

“Knock it off, Lyrica.” Apple Cider was a generous man, if it involved no personal effort. “The foal’s got to eat.”

Mrs. Highcastle shoved a plate of cold potatoes and half of a daisy sandwich at Applestia, and while she ate like a starving beast, they discussed her as if she were not there.

“Ought to take the buckle end of me belt to ‘er.”

“Strapping does not go well with that kind. Born bad, I always say.”

“What’s to be done with ‘er? She’s no good for nothing, except eat.”

“Sweep the crossings…”

“Kitchen maid…”

‘Who’d have Applestia in their kitchen? She’s always going on about apples. Send her back to Little Apple Acres, Cider. She can pick the few good apples and sell them off in the streets for profit,” Mrs. Highcastle said.

“Whose profit, Mrs. High Bargain?” Applestia’s father winked, and Mrs. Highcastle chuckled like water gurgling down the sink and said, “You are excused,” to Applestia.

So Little Applestia continued the family tradition, and for three years she sold apple pies, apple cider, caramel apples, apple fritters, and other apple products in the streets round the bustling central market, where fruit and flowers and vegetables were brought into the great city from all over Equestria. The theaters were nearby, and the Opera House, a palace of gold and red velvet. Applestia’s apples were often bought by elegant gentlecolts in top hats and glorious mares in dresses and jewels that wanted a quick bite of food.

Her friends and companions were the other shrill, ragged ponies who sold produce on street corners. One of them was Willow Grove. He was more muscle than brain, a simple stallion with mild blue eyes and a yellow coat with a blue mane. His heart was big, and he loved Little Applestia as if she was one of the fancy mares whose carts splashed them with mud as they sat on apple crates and watched the socialites drive by to the opera.

He even got flowers for her cheap, or “free,” which meant when the vendor wasn't looking. Once he brought her a bird in a little cage that he had “borrowed” from a drunken gentlecolt.

It was a lovebird, brilliant blue and green, named Azure. She kept him in her room, Mrs. Highcastle or no Mrs. Highcastle, and he greeted her with a chirrup when she came home late at night after offering her apple-based products to the crowds coming out of the theaters. With the bird chattering on her shoulder and her hooves on the iron bed head, she would gaze out over the slate roofs and chimneys and washing lines, and wonder where it had all gone to, the dreams of freedom, the journeys, the “something better.”

“We could marry old Willow,” she told the bird, “and git away from him and her.” She stuck out her tongue toward the kitchen where Mrs. Highcastle and her father were sharing a little late wine and a song.

“Willy Grove, willy grove, willy grove, willy grove,” said the bird, as she Applestia had taught him.

“But he’s not much in the top story. What’s ter become of us, Azure?”

“Azure, Azure, Azure.” His conversation was not brilliant.

“What’s it all about?” And though she was hungry and dirty and unremarks among the city’s socialites, Luna’s moon silvered the chimney pots for her, and the stars were as much hers as anypony else’, and she could not help the feeling somewhere…. some day…