I for One Welcome our New Pony Overlords
It had been three months since Day last passed through a Dimension Gate; three months he set foot in any world but Equestria. Already magic felt less exotic, and Earth, when he finally returned to it, struck him as mysterious by compare.
The skyscrapers of his hometown, though they towered impossibly high compared to the spires of Canterlot, now appeared to him as ugly as apathy. The clouds were wild and untamed, and Day found himself checking every couple moments for a pegasus to come along and clean up the zigzagging tails of an errant cirrus. There were no pegasi, of course—few winged beings wanted to visit a place where they weren’t allowed to fly. The bill was in Congress which would free up most of America’s low airspace for pegasi, but it hadn’t passed yet. Only about one in two constituents wanted to give up valuable commercial flights for the comfort of talking ponies.
Day wondered how he could have failed to notice, while growing up, just how few grasses, trees, and flowers there were here. It wasn’t natural. He’d thought he would find the thrum of car horns and jet planes to be comforting—these had been the sounds of his cradle, after all—but mostly he just missed birdsong.
“How did I let you talk me into this again?” he asked Allie.
“Simple, really.” She grinned. “I’m dying for a rack of ribs. And you’re dying for a chance to use your vacation days.”
“And what about her?” Day pointed sharply at Carrot Top, who was a few paces in front of them.
Allie didn’t miss a beat. “She was dying to see our world. And it was a bunch cheaper to book the hotel rooms and Gate tickets together. You did say we were close friends with her, after all.”
Day waved over his shoulder. “Yes, yes. I get it.”
To occupy himself, he counting the number of non-humans in the parking lot—of the five, four were ponies. There would have been more Turians and Vulcans, no doubt, if the lot had been connected to something other than a petting zoo. Still, five—Earth’s doors were swinging wider every year. Races less outgoing than ponykind even beginning to grant humanity the time of day. A time had been when Day would have thrilled to see that many extraterrestrials in one place.
“Alright,” he said finally. “What did she bribe you with?”
“Chocolate.” Allie’s face stretched like taffy into a smile.
“Uh-huh. Pony dark is good, I take it.”
Allie hugged herself in a way that suggested Day could never even understand how good.
But he leaned in close, over her ear. “She’s a carrot farmer,” he whispered huskily. “Whatever she offered you, I can pay double.”
Allie tapped a finger over her lips. “Ooh…”
“It’s too late!” Carrot called over her shoulder. “No take-backs.”
Day sighed and waited to take another step forward.
It had rained recently, and under the grungy sky a usual assortment of worms was plastered on the asphalt path. Day hadn’t noticed them until it became the reason that he wasn’t making more than five feet of progress every five minutes. Carrot Top would stop at every single one, carefully pick up the worm and place it in the grass to either side.
At least she was covered up. At Day’s urging, she’d given into the necessities a pony had to submit to if she wanted to visit the human homeworld. Her dress this time was a much more modest, fetlock-length affair which covered her in dull blue. She’d been less than enthusiastic about it, but accepted it easily enough when it became part of her ticket to Earth.
Only, she was in a good mood ever since the Gate crossing, and happy ponies tended to lift their hooves when they walked. “Don’t prance,” Day cautioned the happy mare for about the twentieth time; he had come to muttering it automatically by this point. “Don’t want your dress coming up.”
Allie batted his shoulder. “Quit fussing, Day, she’s fine.”
Carrot Top interrupted her task for just long enough to roll her eyes at Day. “You make it sound like if I wasn’t wearing this cloth, everyone inside a block would be staring at my vagina.” She went on, barely fazed by Day’s sudden near-collapse. “It’s just a vagina. There’s nothing unusual about it.”
She backed up to sniff at his blush; Day was having trouble moving after Carrot’s banter at open conversation volume. “What’s the matter, Day?” She sprouted a sly grin and dropped her voice into a softer range. “Did you want to see it?”
Allie hung back because she didn’t want to leave Day behind. Day hung back because he hoped that no one nearby who understood Equus would think he knew this pony.
But it was difficult to walk more slowly than a pony who stopped for every single worm. And she drew attention just by being herself. Ponies weren’t riot-inducing since the first couple years of First Contact, but they were still uncommon enough in most parts of Earth to note a few stares.
Once Day had given up on avoidance, and grown impatient again, he called out exasperatedly. “You can’t pick them all up, you know!”
Carrot paused and looked up. The walk to the petting zoo shelter was covered from front to back with beached annelids. They looked like quickly greying confetti from a long-dead party.
“I know,” she said after a minute, and quietly bent to pick up the next one.
What was worse, some of the children broke away from their parents to start following her example. Before too long, Carrot Top trailed an entourage of kids who had the time of their life trying to clear the entire path of worms. The older ones giggled and let the creatures slither between their fingers. A few of the younger ones accidentally squished theirs.
Carrot Top was with one of those younger ones, showing him how to be gentle to a worm, when the first mother took notice. It wasn’t long until parents were dashing over, pulling their kids away, wiping dirt off their hands or just idly calling over for them not to touch the worms. If they happened to catch sight of Carrot Top, a pony unperturbed in the center of it all, they usually stopped for at least a couple seconds of embarrassment before tugging their child away.
The last boy, pulled away from Carrot Top’s side, tossed his last worm over the fence. “Fly, little wormy, be free!”
And Carrot carried on without the children, just as she had before.
The whole episode failed to bring Carrot Top much closer to the petting zoo proper. There was a news stand near the end of the walk, so Day went to get a paper, leaned up against the fence and read through it while waiting for her to finish.
By Celestia, was it a read. How long had it been since he’d caught up on the events of Earth? Without an internet connection, he fell out of touch so easily. Day hadn’t seen so many pictures of human beings in months. There were so many stories he could barely follow. It took him a few moments to even make sense of the front-page headline: ‘New Mexico Becomes 17th State to Legalize Same-Sex Marriage’.
Legalize? Marriage? Oh, right! Right, of course! It came flooding back in fits and starts. That had been the issue under the public eye when he left. It struck him as so odd now for people to be fighting over who could marry whom in a court of law. Marriage wasn’t usually a legal matter in Equestria, unless nobility was involved. As Day read the article, it began to sink in just how far he had drifted from his homeland.
He was still staring at that headline when Carrot Top appeared, leaning around his hip. “What does it say? Is there anything interesting happening around here?” She pointed. “That rainbow on the front’s pretty.”
Day quickly folded the paper up. “It’s nothing important,” he said quickly, shoving it in his back pocket. He could smell one of Carrot’s lectures coming on, and his life-long policy was to do everything in his power to avoid debates about politics or religion. Before Carrot Top, he had been largely successful at doing so.
Day’s private opinion was that religions were superstitious holdovers from a primitive age when man had needed to invent explanations for the existence of rain and sunrises and disease. He was quietly sure that in a few decades, a few centuries at most, all the generations of stubborn old believers would pass away, and the secular, civilized world would breathe a collective sigh of relief.
But he wasn’t about to say that sort of thing out loud. Day went into the shelter to purchase three tickets, leaving Carrot with Allie, and, or so he thought, deftly avoiding any opportunities for Carrot to try and ‘educate’ him. But when he came back out, he found Carrot by the news stand, poring over a second copy of the paper with Allie, who had clearly read the whole thing to her without hesitating.
He grimaced. “We can go in,” he said loudly, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t–
“Day!”
He winced on the inside as Carrot Top held the headline up. “Did you know about this? It’s against the law to marry certain people together! Och, that’s so mean!”
By this point in time, Day thought legislating love to be a pretty silly idea himself. But he wasn’t any more sympathetic to Carrot Top’s immediate dismissal of his country’s inner struggles. Her smug, Princess-powered superiority, thinking she knew everything—that bothered him more than anything else.
“You’re not on your world anymore,” he snapped. “Don’t expect everything to go the way you want.”
“Oh!” Carrot Top cowered against the news stand. She dumped the paper back where it had come from in a flash.
Allie interposed herself between Day and the pony, giving Carrot Top an enveloping hug around the neck as if to protect her. “It’s okay, Carrot. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You’re too right, I didn’t!” Carrot wriggled out of the hug to march towards Day. “Listen here. Just because–”
And Allie was between them again. “Why don’t we go pet some animals?” she said brightly, turning hopeful looks on each of them in turn.
“Fine with me.” Day turned and walked into the corral.
The interaction with unintelligent goats took a bit of adjusting to, but other than that the petting zoo began as a relaxing experience. Carrot Top was fascinated by the horses; she spent ten minutes standing practically underneath a chestnut-colored quarter horse, looking up into its face.
“This is so weird,” she exclaimed breathily. “But amazing!”
The Terran horse seemed similarly entranced by Carrot Top. They locked gazes, moving only to sniff at each other every couple of moments.
Day couldn’t explain the goosebumps the sight gave him. But Carrot Top wasn’t hurting anything, so he avoided them by simply looking away from the scene. He spent a nice moment of quiet petting a glossy black Shetland, checking—when he thought no one was looking—that there was no electric tingle when he gave the horse a quick kiss on the nose.
He found to his satisfaction that there was nothing. No pleasant burning sensation, just a musty smell not quite as sweet as the scent of an earth pony.
He also stopped worrying about Carrot Top’s communing with the horses when he next turned around and found her on the wrong side of the petting zoo fence.
Day immediately rushed over, leaning against the fence to seize her attention. “Get out of there!” he hissed.
She didn’t pay him any mind. She was sticking her nose back through the wires to be patted by a five-year old boy who didn’t seem to find anything unusual with a talking orange pony’s presence in the corral.
Carrot smiled and made adoring baby-talk over the boy as he patted her. She nonetheless eyed the kid cautiously when he uncurled his other hand in front of her, with some rather bedraggled-looking oats clinging to his sticky fingers.
She sniffed once at the hand. “No offense, lad, but I think I’ll pass.” Her left ear flicked across the corral, pointing down the walk. “I just don’t know where those have been. That girl over there’s picking them up off the ground.” Her head swung towards his pocket. “That candy of yours, on the other hoof, I’d be more than happy to share.”
The six-year old paused thoughtfully for a second, and then unwrapped a couple pieces of Starburst, which Carrot Top shamelessly licked right out of his fingers.
“Carrot!” Day hissed again, “You can’t do that! It’s obscene!” He wished Allie would come to his aid. Maybe the mare would listen if it came from both of them.
Conflating Equestrian ponies with mute horses was the worst racial slur on Earth since the Turian Olympic Snowboarding Team. If he didn’t get Carrot Top out of there, he could wind up in the next paper’s headlines, and Day didn’t think anyone would stop to listen to the explanation that the pony had simply hopped inside the corral and let children hand-feed her of her own accord. It sounded even more ridiculous than it looked.
He scanned for the child’s parents. A group of matronly-looking woman were standing in the awning of the center building, chatting it up with one of the caretakers. None of them were looking this way.
So maybe he had a few moments to get Carrot Top out of the paddock before anyone noticed. But as he turned away from Carrot for only a minute, things got worse. Somehow, she’d gotten one of the children inside, and was now trotting a wispy little blonde around on her back. The girl shrieked with delight as Carrot bounced her passenger up and down; the women near the shelter smiled, but didn’t look over.
“Carrot Top!” Day leaned over the fence and hissed so vigorously that she was forced to look at him. “You’re going to get me in trouble! Get that kid off of you and get on this side of the fence!”
Carrot blew him an insolent raspberry and started a second lap around the enclosure. “Not going to do it. I’m having a ball!”
“You’re not even allowed in there!” Day snatched at the pony, but pulled back quickly when all he got was a fistful of her retreating tail. “And you can’t give a human a ride on your back! It’s indecent!”
“You and your decency!” She called all the way across the enclosure, and Day winced, imagining who might overhear. “This little kiddo is cute as a button! I’m going to start a business giving little human girls ponyback rides on their birthdays. And a whole mess of ponies will join me because the hours will be grand, and we’ll become famous, and then we’ll be a fixture at every birthday party in your nation. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me!”
Allie was at Day’s side, but only to tug at his sleeve. “Stop yelling,” she asked in a murmured whine. “Not in public!”
“Carrot, would you just stop and think for a second?” Day muffled himself short of a shout while Carrot Top made a show of laughing maniacally. “Can you just think about what might go wrong here?”
“Like what?” Carrot trotted to the fence and faced him, chin held high.
Day’s stare was blank. He couldn’t bring himself to say that Carrot would be giving people an opportunity to treat her like a dumb animal, so for a moment he was tongue-tied. “…The kids might yank on your mane,” he finished lamely.
Carrot turned to one side. It revealed the little girl listing dangerously to the left, digging both fists deep into the pony’s curls for balance. “I see what you mean. Ah, well. It was a nice idea while it lasted.”
Carrot second-favorite part of the trip, after the petting zoo, was riding in a car. She spent the entire time sticking her head out the window, making noises by letting her gums catch in the wind. Every time Day eased the rental car up the freeway, she had even more fun whistling and hollering at the other pony tourists who were constantly appearing alongside them in brightly-decorated electric passenger vans.
Day knew for a fact that Carrot Top, a pony who spent plenty of time doing manual labor, could pull thirty miles an hour on her own hooves if she applied herself. He had imagined that she’d get tired of the car after half an hour or so. He was shortly forced to revise that opinion.
But Carrot avoided humiliating Day by a consistent, if narrow, margin. At least so far. The only thing he really had to complain about had occurred while they were taking their seats in Allie’s favorite restaurant. Carrot had asked Day to sit across from her with Allie, “just as if I was really taking you both out on a date!”
“Oh, no,” Day had replied. “I’m not playing along with your fantasy. Allie, my love, you can sit across from me.”
And while Allie took her seat with a shrug, Carrot Top had jumped into the booth so that she slid right up against Day like a bookend.
The pony had acquiesced a little too happily to that command, in retrospect.
But she seemed content to behave at the diner, save perhaps for the fact that before their meals had even arrived, she’d drained three tall glasses of Cherry Coke. She was now hugging her forelegs around the fourth glass to get the straw in her mouth.
“You know, that’s mostly sugar,” said Allie, once she managed to break through her glazed stare of awe. She put a hand over Carrot’s hoof. “Maybe you should, like, switch to water.”
Carrot trained her wide eyes silently on Allie, and her head tilted to one side so that the far ear flopped interrogatively. Her mouth was busy providing continuous suction.
“I’m not saying it isn’t good, but a few more glasses might weigh down your plans to charm my boyfriend, if you know what I mean.”
Day shook his head with a snort. “If only. Carrot Top could drink all night and not become any heavier, dear.”
In response to Allie’s bewilderment, he leaned over the table to explain. The motion pressed Carrot Top’s flank against his hip–he sighed inwardly.
“Humans have an adaption which lets us process small amounts of sugar very efficiently. It’s also where our addiction to sugar comes from. Ponies don’t have that adaption. You know how you when we first came to Ponyville, you thought it was weird that ponies were eating desserts with dinner all the time? They can do that because getting fat on sugar is mostly a human thing.”
Allie’s mouth fell open in awe. She took in Carrot with a whole new level of admiration as the pony positioned her muzzle to drain the last drops of her fourth cup.
“I can’t even tell you how jealous I am.”
“Shouldn’t be jealous,” said Carrot, smacking her lips in between drinks. “Only leads to unhappiness.”
Allie nodded sagely. “I suppose you’d say that’s something Day and I both have to work on.” From behind Carrot, Day rolled his eyes.
The pony took her hoof from under Allie’s hand and used it to gesticulate in the air. “I’m starting to wonder if it’s not behind all the issues humans have about mating.”
Day crunched his eyes shut and tried to disappear into the walls of the booth. Not back to this again.
“Do you really think so?” Allie didn’t seem to have any such inhibitions. Was she blind to what she was diving into, or had she fallen so in love with Ponyville that she would sit at Carrot’s hooves like a plaint disciple?
“It’s like…” Carrot waved thoughtfully. “Everybody cares so much about what everybody else is doing with their lovers, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why. You don’t see it, after all. In fact, you go to ridiculous pains to hide what happens in your bedrooms. Logically, it ought to matter even less. But then I realized there are all these rules, you see. And everybody had been following these rules for their whole lives—and then people ignore them, and mayhap they get jealous that other people are getting up to things they didn’t let themselves do.”
Allie rested her elbows on the table and stared up at Carrot Top. “That’s deep.”
“It’s not deep!” Day tried to interject, but the waiter arrived with their meals, and he was cut off into fuming quietly. Identical mushroom, walnut and water chestnut salads were set before Carrot Top and himself. Day appreciated the determinedly neutral gaze of the waiter who set a rack of ribs swimming in barbeque sauce in front of Allie.
The salad had been the only ‘pony-safe’ item on the menu. In restaurants of the modern age, a tiny horse icon marked every item which had been produced without coming into contact with meat, or with certain pesticides that ponies, to whom the concept of non-organic farming was alien, frequently had an allergic reaction to.
Allie had been ready to fret over Carrot’s limited selection, and Carrot had repeatedly assured the humans that she didn’t mind. But now, as the smell of the ribs made Day’s mouth water, she shrank away from that side of the booth. Allie tucked in with gusto. Her knife plied away large strips of tender meat; Carrot Top tried to bury her nose in Day’s jacket.
Day tensed up as an extremely pleasant fiery sensation flooded his side where she snuggled into him. But he didn’t push her away. He sat with his hands folded over his meal, refraining from eating or even moving his arms so that he wouldn’t accidentally dislodge her. Carrot Top was trying to put on a brave face about this, and he didn’t have the heart to make it any harder for her.
He’d done his best to spare her from this. While he only saw food when he looked at Allie’s plate, he knew that an herbivore like Carrot still saw mutilated muscle and flesh. But even when Day had tried to talk to her about this, she’d insisted on coming. He’d warned her that Allie was dead set on breaking her fast from fresh meat; Carrot had said she would be fine. Day’s suspicion, now confirmed, was that she hadn’t really thought about it.
There was another matter, however, about which he felt no particular mercy towards her. And since his mouth wasn’t occupied with eating…
“That’s a childish view of my country,” he whispered, knowing his voice would carry easily to the pony’s pricked ears. “Do not come here for half a week and then presume to tell me why we do the things we do.”
A muffled sound came from the vicinity of his shoulder. He shifted a little, and Carrot repeated herself. “Then why do you think two men can’t marry each other?”
He stammered, scouring his mind for a response. “Well—why would you know anything about it?” he retorted stiffly. “What’s right for ponies isn’t all the same as what’s right for humans.”
“Guys?” said Allie. Day looked up to find her glancing over with a mouthful of meat. “Everything cool over there?”
“Just fine!” He grabbed at his fork. Carrot fled his armpit to nibble on a couple spinach leaves—but apparently that was as long as she could brave Allie’s ribs, because the second the human girl turned back to her own meal, she fled back into Day’s jacket.
“Well, alright,” Carrot muttered. “But it would make them so happy! It’s not hurting anyone, is it?”
“Some things are just wrong.”
“I don’t think so,” Carrot answered. “Only things that hurt someone should be wrong.”
Day bit his lip, but not because of the argument. Every time Carrot spoke, her breath seeped through his clothing, and Day could feel it against his skin. It was no small effort to ignore it. His heart was beating in a mixture of very different feelings, each of them warm for different reasons, that were hard to deal with all at once.
He would have agreed with Carrot Top had anyone else entered their conversation to take the side Day found himself defending. But while he privately mocked the prayerful humans left in the world, he discovered an unexpected sense of loyalty towards them when they came under the attack of this smug little pony. They weren’t this cocksure. How dare she assert that her primitive, backwards impulse to abdicate moral responsibility to a cosmic parent figure was superior to their primitive, backwards impulse to abdicate moral responsibility to a cosmic parent figure?
“That’s too simple,” he said hotly. “You can’t wave away any issue you want with a blanket statement like that—and don’t you dare quote that book,” he added swiftly as he caught Carrot closing her eyes contemplatively. “Some things don't hurt others in obvious ways. Some things aren’t natural.”
Carrot nickered in annoyance–and then turned to smile over-brightly at Allie, because the girl was looking at them again.
“Is your food okay, guys?” She wiped her mouth with a fifth napkin. “You haven’t eaten much. Day? You sure you don’t want to share any of these ribs? They’re really good.”
Day felt Carrot’s muscles bunch up against his side; he tried not to enjoy the sensation. “No, thank you,” he said with a light smile. “We’re just fine over here.”
“Your people flew to the moon in a bottle,” Carrot said under her breath. “I don’t think that’s natural. But you don’t seem too broken up about it.”
Day finally took a few bites of his food; he was stymied for an answer, and unwilling to continue with anything less than a scathing retort. He considered pointing out that Earth’s satellite wasn’t the same moon as lie under the province of Carrot’s precious Princesses, but she would have shot back with the fact that her point still stood.
Suddenly, a devious thing occurred to him. He had once watched a stallion named Thunderlane being browbeat by a mare he was with—an uncomfortably public spectacle for all bystanders who’d been involved. Day couldn’t even remember what the argument had been about, only that Blossomforth had been seen putting Thunderlane down on more than one occasion before then. The fight had been heated and quiet, and a thousand times more awful to listen to than if the ponies had aired their feelings with a good old-fashioned shouting match. But suddenly, that wish had come true; Thunderlane had burst into tears and fled the train station at a gallop. Blossomforth had called out after him and then cantered away with her head held low after a solid round of disapproving looks from everpony around her.
And after Day’s evening commute back from work, he had barely walked a block from the station before he’d found the couple sitting together under the oak tree on the old Ponyville hill. The mare had been nuzzling tentatively at Thunderlane’s back and apologizing profusely as she plied him with bundles of flowers. But the stallion had kept her out of cuddling distance, jumping on the tips of her hooves, by continuing to sniffle every minute or two.
Day didn’t need his obsessive readings on ponies to understand the scene. He’d experienced Allie using that kind of leverage on him before, back when they were a little younger and he’d had the occasional tendency—Celestia only knew how—to take her for granted and bury himself exclusively in his work.
It had never occurred to him to do the same thing before. He was a man. Men just–didn’t do that. But colts… Day was suddenly struck by the certainty that he had the option to cry, or even sniffle, and simply walk out of the restaurant. Even if he only fled to the restroom for a few minutes, he could make Carrot shamefaced and bring her to a halt, all logic forgotten. It wasn’t the kind of thing Day could picture himself doing. But he was shocked at how tempting it was. He could even feel the ready tears, like a reservoir behind his emotional bulwark.
No! He couldn’t do that. That was no way to stand up for what believed in—or for what he didn’t believe in, all the same.
“Very well, then.” Day thought even harder and darker. He carefully reached his fork over to Allie’s plate and brought a slice of meat over to his salad. It was a delicious-looking cut indeed, basted to an even brown with just a touch of crispiness at the edge. “Let’s assume what you say is true, Carrot. In that case, would you mind if instead of ordering another of these, I cooked up my next meal with a few ribs from an Equestrian cow?”
The color drained out of Carrot’s face, which was quite a spectacular transformation for a mare with such a healthy coat. That shut her up.
“Marge Buttermilk’s grandmother, perhaps,” Day continued. “She perished just recently, didn’t she? Train accident; quite tragic. But, be that as it may, she’s clearly not using her body anymore.”
“You—you wouldn’t,” Carrot stammered, slipping on the very edge of the seat. Her ears were fanned back, and her barrel expanded and contracted in shallow spurts.
Day maintained an atmosphere of perfect composure. “Why not?” He picked off a crumble of beef and licked his finger. “It’s a modest proposal. It won’t hurt anyone to eat a body that isn’t being used anymore. And I thought you said that nothing was wrong as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else. So it couldn’t possibly be a crime in a harmonious place like Equestria.”
In the middle of the crackling dry thunder between their barely-parted noses, he stopped; something was suddenly different. Day listened for a moment before realizing what it was. It was the sound of Allie munching happily at her ribs; that sound was gone.
Turning to find her watching them intently from behind her seventh napkin, Day realized that they weren’t whispering under their breath anymore.
“Guys?” Allie squeaked.
Carrot Top drew herself back up. “You…monster.” She raised a hoof, and Day flinched; the cover of the seat broke as she plowed her foreleg into it, and at the strength of the impact Day’s smug composure broke for just an instant. “How dare you even suggest such a thing?”
“Carrot Top?” Allie reached across the table, too timid to bring her hand all the way to the mare’s flaring nostrils. “You’re going to break something. Calm down.”
Day refused to let himself be intimidated. He knew she wouldn’t hit him. “How dare you be such a hypocrite,” he said, a little louder than he’d intended to. “You make blanket assertions about anything you want, and then flip them inside out as soon as anyone turns them on you!”
“You don’t care about anything but being right!” Carrot Top was standing in the seat now, tail lashing, which made an unfortunate tangle of the back trails in her gown. “All I’ve tried to do since you came into my life is show you some love, and you throw it into my face because if everyone isn’t doing things your way, they have to sit at arm’s length and take whatever friendship you deign to give them!”
Allie managed to get a hand on Day’s arm as he was rising from his chair. “Day,” she said desperately. “Honey. Please—please calm down. We’re all friends, right? It’s no big deal. Right?”
“Wrong!” Day twisted hard, forcing her off of him. But Allie the woman wasn’t quite as sturdy as Carrot Top the pony; he wound up throwing her back into her own seat, flush against the wall of the booth.
“I don’t know why I paid to bring you here,” he announced. “You probably don’t even care about my planet. This is just another chance for you to practice being a home-wrecker. If you were any kind of gentlemare, you’d understand that no means no and no and leave me alone.”
The tables in the two adjacent rows were now sitting in unbearable silence, watching the towering pair which made such a strong centerpiece to the isle. Waiters were ducking into adjacent rows to avoid coming anywhere near them. Doubtless, no one understood the Equus Day and Carrot Top were shouting at each other, but no matter what the shape of syllables, their tone was unmistakable.
“Hah!” Carrot cried. “That’s a laugh. You can’t last two days without crawling back to me. I let you pretend it’s just so you can talk about carrots. With mixed signals like that, I’m surprised you’re even good enough for–”
Both man and mare stopped for a second and turned to the other side of the booth.
Allie was sitting flat exactly where she had landed, her face streaked with tears winning slow but steady ground against her composure. She trapped them in quivering wet eyes for several frozen seconds before picking herself up, covering her face, and running away in a tight stride as if determined not to break into sobs in public.
Day and Carrot Top immediately sat down—causing a maître’s de to pause in their beeline for the table. The mare and the man didn’t look at each other, nor did they touch their food.
Eventually, Day picked up a napkin and watched it flutter, navigating the long stretches of silence between himself and opening his mouth. “We should go after her,” he forced himself to say.
Carrot Top nodded right away. The pony was staring miserably at her own plate, but she responded in an equal tone. “Don’t know if it’s the same as with…ponies. Should we go now, or wait a few minutes for her to calm down?”
“Not too long,” Day murmured. “But a few would be best. Check the bathroom on our way out, but she’ll probably at the car.”
“Okay.”
They fell back together into sullen silence. The less discrete patrons within earshot were still staring. Day and Carrot kept themselves apart, but together within a quiet sphere of silence. They tried to take shelter inside it.
Day fidgeted. Carrot Top tried to eat a couple more leaves off her salad.
“I wouldn’t ever do something like that,” said Day. “I was just trying to make a point.”
“By being as cruel as you could!” Carrot pounded a hoof on the table, stopped herself when the silverware rattled, and slouched. “I mean—oh, horseapples.”
“Yes,” Day drawled from behind crossed arms, “clearly you’re one to talk about making mistakes.”
“And I’m going to keep making terrible mistakes.” Carrot furiously nuzzled Day’s upper arm. “Because you’re worth making mistakes for.”
She’d pinpointed the most sensitive spot Day would let her go after without raising a fuss. How did she know him that well?
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I think a lot of people who think humans of the same sex shouldn’t marry each other get their ideas from a book not too different from yours.”
“Then why do they have to fight about it so much?” she sighed.
Day used his free arm to quietly take a look inside the English-Equus dictionary he kept with him at all times. He discovered, with a sense of frustration it may be difficult to convey, that there was no Equus word which translated to ‘religion’.
“I’ve—been told,” he said, fishing for words, “that not everyone agrees on how to interpret what it says.”
Carrot hummed, low and hum. “That does sound like a bother. Whenever we get confused about The Royal Pony Sisters, we just ask Celestia.”
Day sat up suddenly, the way he did when an equation became crystal clear in his head. Turning with deliberate slowness, he looked down at Carrot Top for a brief and intense moment.
“And that,” he murmured solemnly, “is the difference between a pony and a man.”
Twenty hours later, the front door to Day’s Ponyville flat creaked open. A thin-stretched after the lights came on, it admitted Day, his girlfriend, and a mass of wheeled luggage that looked half as bedraggled as the pair. Allie went straight to the couch and collapsed, while Day set each of their suitcases out on the floor to pull items out of each and fold them into piles by type and color. He wouldn’t be able to relax properly until he had the wash ready for tomorrow.
But the clean clothes far outweighed the dirty ones. He already regretted leaving Earth early.
The flat was filled up with companionable silence for a while. Around the time Day finished re-folding the shirts, Allie propped herself up on an elbow. “Are you okay?” she asked suddenly.
Day set the next sock aside and leaned back against the couch. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve had it with all this love,” he sighed. “I wish that pony had never taken a shine to me. I wish no one ever had.”
Allie gasped and reached down to wrap her arms around Day’s neck. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” he said. “I would rather still be the quiet, sullen engineer with the glasses and the rumpled clothes that no girl ever talked to. That would be better than this.”
“Day,” she moaned desperately. “What about me?”
“Allie–” He choked back a noise and held onto her arm. “Yes. I love you.”
She held him through the next aching breath.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m going to explode.” He whispered so quietly that she had to lean halfway off the couch to hear him. “Sometimes I don’t even know what’s wrong.”
With a tiny whimper, she pressed her face to his neck and began to nuzzle him—something she must have picked up from ponies. It felt far too good to resist, so Day didn’t try. He just enjoyed the warmth as she sought to make him relax.
“I love you, Day,” she cooed. “And I would never want anything to make you feel miserable. I just want you to be happy.”
“Okay.” He reached up a languid hand to cup her face, and tilted his own back for a kiss.
She slid further off the couch onto him, guiding her hands down her chest until she leaned too far, tumbled over Day’s head and landed in his lap. Day was perfectly positioned to blow into her belly button, making her laugh.
Five minutes later, the lights at 138 Cranberry Lane went out.