//------------------------------// // five // Story: Ugly freedom and the pair from stallion-grad // by waste //------------------------------// The changeling girl hung around the edges of a frayed carpet and a wind burnt door. Sticky stains buried themselves into cheap carpeting and dragged her hooves into the floor. Around the door were bags and they were filled with bottles. Alcohol spluttered and bled out in yellow spikes although Watch tried to hide them. The girl still had her previous disguise. Black mane, black hooves, black coat. Black on black on black. The only blue is in the eyes. She could have had a good chance passing off as one of the dark coats in the south that lived on the rivers. It was close to seven since she shadowed the apartment he lived, either too afraid or too intelligent not to trust the stallion for a while. The apartment was older than her with scratches and dirt perched upon the wallpaper. When she isn’t staring at the door she would sometimes trail a hoof through the coarseness of the wall. Through the walls you could hear cramped families, left behind grandparents and first time immigrants. From the sounds, they shout and move like you would expect. But the girl was hopelessly soaked in rain. She was hopelessly soaked for thirty minutes because that’s how long she was staring at the bell. She hit the bell. Buzzing. Tapered off with a harsh humming croak of static. A door was opened and a stallion filled it. It was the same one with the same despair venting out of him. He seemed more sharpened than his drab presence at Amendment Street, with a more open more painful face. Although the girl hit the bell she didn’t seem at all invested in the stallion’s existence. She had the carpet in her attention and her body groaned for food. The smell of salted cabbage was deafening. Behind the stallion uneven stalks of steam break out of a pokey room that wants to be a kitchen. I think you know this already but the shivering child was bathed in sorrow. She was far past hunger and into pain. To the stallion he could only see a starving sorrow. A starving sorrow that haunted the carpet with a self-sorry face. She had probably waited a while because a small pool was forming around her. “You’re hungry. I made cabbage. Salted cabbage with potatoes. Don’t stand there like an animal. Move.” Despite her pale nature she bowed her head and limped slowly into the room. She had given up on a hello and stepped into her home for the next seven years. All of it heaved with salt and alcohol and hunger. It reeked of ruptured time and paranoia. She closed the door behind her. Compared to our last visit his flat is much better. He had cleaned and scrubbed and sprayed. He had put a scented ball of alkaline in the pipes. He had pursued all the other rituals needed to clean a flat. Despite it, in the unknown nature of homes, decay can still be felt between the walls. In the bones of it. The soft plodding to the table. Then a chair. Then him facing her with the food in between. By now you can see the haze of starvation above her. Smog made of worry. “Eat” “I need to ask a question” “You don’t need anything. Eat” “You said my Ma was going to hell” “I said you need to eat. Now eat.” His voice stuttered and stilted in the air. They shunted and slotted. Less a string of words more a halting that fit together. By now she had taken the potatoes and he was muttering. The poisonous muttering that follows you. His hooves raked through his mane. Again the guilt in that shape of a girl in front of him. “Her ma. Gods above. Her mother. The idiot was her mother.” He retreated into his frown like he said an unspeakable word. She was glad to retreat into overcooked salted cabbage. Of course it made sense. It wasn’t an idiot in the house with a changeling. It was a mother, a father and a daughter. It was a family in a bad place but in a good way. Unfortunately, now it was a hanged father, a disappeared mother and a depressed daughter shovelling cabbage into her mouth. Safe in his stare she ate like a moving shipwreck, all silent groans and creaking and smelling of salt. Like her mother she was quiet. There was almost an art to how she sat there quietly, something you could appreciate in how she did so little to break his head. He (despite his gruff eloquence) could only have described her as Howlingly quiet. Screamingly silent. He also decided to stop drinking while in front of her this evening, the result being a torturous withdrawal that started from his scalp and finished at his hooves. But also a product of his foresight since he knew she would come. “Alright that’s enough with the cabbage. I’ve got you something else.” He also knows she needs love to survive. Changelings are weird like that. He bends downwards and undoes a small fastening in the floor. He fiddles and something clicks. A little trap door yawns open to reveal oil cloth covering floorboards. He had already moved everything important out of his little vault in the floor, but had a surprise for the changeling. “Here it is child.” It was a crack beneath the oil cloth. It was a mare and stallion beneath the crack. It was a foal beneath the mare and stallion. The room underneath the crack was more spacious and at the same time much cosier. The pair would watch their child sleep then kiss each other and head towards their own late dinner beyond the sleep of their first child. They’d watch each other eat and are content that this is the world and all it should hold. She fidgeted and pressed her eyes closer to the crack. Her mouth was open because she was feeding. Although unseen and unheard, love was deeply settled and deeply held in the room below them. And the changeling drank the smell and ate the love and tried not to remember its own family to spoil the taste of her meal. When she rose, the stallion was at the table with papers and the dishes cleared. The smell remained. As does his scowl. She will understand this later but the scowl isn't directed totally to her. It’s also directed to the papers for it explains his complicated relationship with the world and why he would take her in for no reason. For now the papers are as unexplained as the secret crack in his floor. As unexplained as his addictions. His hate. The stallion puts a hoof to the papers and she leaves the crack, replaces the cloth and moves towards him. “I know you hate me child” Not true. “But for this part of the plan to work, you will have to call me papa for the rest of your life. You’ll hate that” True. “You will need to do a lot of things you will hate. But you will live. And unlike your mother you will have to do as I say” So underneath the smell of cabbage, in his painful stare, he told her of his plans for her. His words were cold and fell into her ears like ice and she knew she would loathe calling this drunkard papa. But her mama always told her that the ones hardest to love would need it the most. And he was hard to love.