Two young sisters sat in the attic of their house. It was the farthest room from the living room, the floor of which was now littered with fragments of Great-Grandma Mimsy’s antique vase.
Seven years old and small for her age, Annie loved shadows, moonlight, bats, and--for no readily apparent reason--ponies. She tried to pace back and forth, but the attic was too cluttered with old junk for her to move far in any one direction. “How long are we gonna have to hide in here?” she asked.
Polly was an awkward, gangly twelve--just old enough to be interested in boys, but not old enough to be allowed to walk to their houses unaccompanied. She didn’t look up from her cell phone, but she briefly paused in tapping out a text message. “At least a few hours,” she replied. “One for Mom to find the pieces, and two for her to calm down, so . . . until dinner?”
“But it’s boring here!” Annie objected, raising her arms in protest.
“Annie, you were the one who broke the vase,” Polly said. “Now I’m stuck here too, hoping Mom doesn’t figure out we’re up here. If you want to go get a book or something, go get one, but if Mom catches you . . .” She drew a finger across her throat.
“It was an accident!” Annie whined.
Annie stamped her little boots on the attic floor, and an unexpectedly rotten board snapped in two. She let out a yelp as her leg disappeared into the crawlspace under the floor.
Polly rushed over to her and grabbed her hand. “Are you okay? I’ll help you out of--”
“No touching,” Annie reminded her.
It seemed not long ago that Annie had been very tactile, always hugging and clinging to Polly. Polly was still getting used to how touch-phobic her sister had become since she’d had to change schools.
To the older girl’s credit, she backed off immediately. “I’m sorry, Annie,” she said.
Annie struggled out of the hole. “It’s okay,” she said. She turned and looked back into the darkness. “Hey, there’s something in here! Can you reach it, Sis?”
Well, it wasn’t like they had anything better to do . . . Polly fished out something that resembled a snow globe. Not that there was snow in it, or anything else, for that matter. She rotated it in her hands, trying and failing to find something interesting about it.
“Can I see?” Annie asked. She took hold of it by the base, and she peered into the glass like it was a crystal ball. “Oh magical snow globe,” she intoned, “show us your secret powers!”
-- -- -- --
Somewhere in the dark of space, Polly silently floated. She had no eyes, but she could see distant stars all around her. She had no ears, but she could hear the whisper of the solar wind. She had no mouth . . . Okay, that might be a problem.
“Sis, where are you?” Annie yelled.
“Over here!” Polly instinctively replied. Her voice sounded strange, like she was hearing it on the answering machine. “Where are you?”
“Over here!” Annie echoed, her voice coming from nowhere at all.
After a brief pause, Annie popped into existence, her face screwed up in concentration. “Think about yourself, Sis,” she said. “Remember what you look like.”
Polly did her best. Suddenly possessing hands again, she brought them to her face to take a good look at them. They were vague and blurry--who really remembers the back of their own hand?--but at least she had them.
“So if I think of a cat . . .” Annie said. She was gone, replaced by a curled-up tabby. “Or a dog . . .” the cat said in Annie’s voice. It was transfigured, and a Saint Bernard floated in the void. “Or a fish . . .” A goldfish swam through imaginary waters. “This is so cool!”
If Polly were several years older, and if she’d had much more knowledge of illegal drugs, she might have had the words to express how she felt. As it was, the best she could frame it was that she was manic and mellowed all at once. She knew on some level that she should be alarmed by what was happening, but she couldn’t muster up an appropriate level of fear, and instead her sense of logic and reason decided to take a nap. A very long nap.
Annie, on the other hand (or paw, or fin), was simply manic. She ceased her swimming and turned to look at Polly. “Let’s make something!” she said.
“Annie, we need to find a way out of here,” Polly attempted. She realized she was giggling. Why was she giggling? “Um, wherever here is . . .”
“Sis, you’re no fun,” Annie replied.
The void was no longer empty. A planet floated below them, blue and green with swathes of white. The continents didn’t match Earth. “It’ll have magic, and monsters, and ruins thousands of years old!”
Polly’s logic stirred in its sleep. “If you just made it, the ruins can’t be thousands of years old. Besides, there aren’t any people here to leave ruins.”
“Not people!” Annie insisted, her new form quadrupedal and aggressively pink. “Ponies! Just like my Pony Princess dolls! They all live in the pony kingdom and have adventures!” She pointed a hoof down at the planet. “There’s the kingdom!”
Against what was left of her better judgment, Polly wished to see more clearly, and her vision magnified. She looked down on a village filled with brightly colored equines, going about their brightly colored equine lives.
God was real, and She was Polly’s little sister who liked ponies. This time, Polly’s sense of reason was down for the count.
“Some of the ponies are unicorns,” Annie said. Horns sprouted from a few ponies’ heads. “They can do unicorn magic. And some . . . Um . . . What else is cool, Sis?”
“Pegasi?” Polly ventured. At Annie’s blank look, she added, “Horses with wings.”
“Cool!” Annie shouted. “Make some peg-a-si, Sis!”
It was just like changing a dream. Polly had only to picture it, and some of the ponies sprouted wings and flew. One soared past a cloud, and on impulse, she made the cloud solid for it to land on.
A ground-bound, hornless pony looked up at a pegasus with undisguised envy in its eyes. “Let’s give them something, too,” Annie suggested, “so they don’t feel left out. Maybe they’re really strong! Or maybe they can make flowers grow anywhere!”
“Flowers?” Polly asked.
“Yeah, ponies love flowers! All the Pony Princess dolls have flowers in their manes!”
-- -- -- --
It felt like they spent hours tweaking the world before Annie declared it done. At this pronouncement, Polly blinked, and she came to herself on the floor of the attic. She didn't feel like she'd been sleeping there--it was more like she'd been dropped there from a height.
Polly stood up and brushed dust from her clothes. “Must have been a gas leak,” she said. She wasn’t sure what kind of gas it was, or where it would leak from, but it was the only thing she could think of.
“Nu-uh!” Annie said. “Look!”
Annie held up the snow globe. A little world hung inside it, surrounded by stars.
Polly clutched at her forehead. She felt a headache coming on. “What. The. HELL?”
“Bad word, bad word!” Annie chanted. “You said a bad word!”