Applejack stumbled out of the house early on a Tuesday. The day had a welcoming warmth to it, with clear white sunshine making even the apple trees seem to wave hello. Clearly no accident on Rainbow Dash’s part. The pegasus been getting better and better at doing real weather lately, instead of just thunderstorms. And nowadays she always asked when the apple harvest was about to start. It seemed that after all these years she was finally starting to mellow out.
But despite the perfectly-sculpted cheeriness, Applejack could only grunt sullenly at perky bluebirds. Her mane hadn’t been brushed. Her hat was on backwards. And against all better judgment, Bloom was being allowed to cook breakfast. This meant Applejack wouldn’t be eating until later.
The apples must come down. Everything was down but the east orchard. She’d saved that awful place for last again. At this point, she had today, maybe tomorrow to clear it out. Then the rot would appear. If ponies saw brown apples coming out of Sweet Apple Acres, the family would never live it down. Well—she wouldn’t, anyway.
But the way her hooves dragged down the porch steps was her fault, and no one else’s. She must have been up all night watching My Little Pony on the cable. If only she was a little more disciplined, she wouldn’t be so tired all the time.
Elliot was under the hickory. Same place as always. He was re-stringing a couple broken strands on his guitar at the moment, but Applejack slowed down even more as she passed, knowing that once he began to play, the music would relax her enough to keep going.
He looked up as she drew near, smiling like it was his birthday all over again. Elliot winked the way apple blossoms winked in dappled shade.
“Good morning, Applejack!”
“Morning, Ell,” she grunted.
“I don’t suppose you want any help picking apples?”
Applejack gave a soft snort of amusement. It must have become something of an inside joke at this point. Elliot said it every day, every season, except for winters, of course, when he had to play guitar from the hearth. Elliot didn’t mind the sitting room, but the hickory had always been his favorite, perhaps because he was a maudlin sort of human and it had been the first place he planted himself back when he’d started playing to Applejack.
Suddenly, as if inspired despite her grogginess, Applejack ground to a halt. Her left forehoof plowed a little anthill in the path.
She rested there for two breaths. Her head swung towards Elliot, who was still tuning.
Then, almost under her breath: “I could use a little help in the east orchard.”
A third guitar string snapped with a mighty twang as Elliot’s wrist jerked. He stared up at Applejack for some time.
It took him a full minute to double-take, stretch, and then—up on his feet so fast that Applejack nearly fell backwards.
“Sure! All you had to do was ask.”
He lifted one of the largest baskets from her saddlebags, and Applejack gave a short sigh of relief at the missing weight. They walked side by side into rows of heavy apples and the rising sun.
Ars doubted he would ever see his Changeling again. The odds of her wandering back to his yard by chance were pretty much absent. She was getting on in months anyway, and the world would not be graced with her presence much longer.
But he couldn’t be sure.
From the outside looking in, his life was exactly the same as it had been before. The neighbors were a bit more suspicious, but he went on aggravating them in just the same way, and pretending to keep a garden. He wrote his poetry on rainy afternoons.
Only nothing was alike kind. What if, just maybe, she was nearby? What if, every so often, she passed by in disguise to keep an eye on him? Technically she could be anyone. She could be that girl from the drug store who always caught his eye. Or she could be the pigeon who always pooped on his windowsill. She could even be the grocer who tried to shortchange him every time he spent an hour sifting for the freshest pomegranates.
There was no way to know. Everyone was suspect. It might have driven a lesser poet mad, but Ars found a way to move on. It wasn’t worth agonizing about, after all. All he had to do was treat every single life form he encountered as though they were his beloved.
So life went on, and nothing was the same.
But as fate would have it, he did see her one last time. It happened months after the falcon tremor, well after he’d begun to suspect that she must have taken on the form of loam and stardust. He stepped out of his house one morning to find himself surrounded by impossibly thick mist, and there were eldritch noises in the air.
Ars didn’t run from the chittering sounds. They could have been coming from far away, or they could have been coming from inside his yard—everything was so obscured that he couldn’t see as far as the chain-link fence. But he stood on a tiny circle of grass to meet the sound. Incidentally, it was the same spot where he’d once stood with her falcon’s talons digging into his arm, just before take-off.
A resplendent alien stepped forward.
It made for a terrifying sight, despite not being quite so tall as Ars. The creature walked on all fours and seemed to carry the strength of a small horse. Its wings were like those of an enormous dragonfly, but without the rainbow shimmer. And its carapace was thick and grease-shiny, pockmarked as if with bullet holes. Acorns crunched under its feet.
“Oh, Ars,” said a buzzing voice. “You’re still here.”
“I am,” said Ars. “Now how do you know my name?”
The cragged jaw split to unleash a short, earsplitting screech. Ars could barely register the pitch before the alien flew nearly close enough to crack him in two.
“It’s me, you fool! Who else would love you enough to sneak up on you?”
Some part of him looked, and knew that it was her. But he didn’t trust it. Some part of him looked at everything around him, every day, and always ‘knew’ that it was her. Every face, every passing shadow. Every blade of grass.
Ars crouched protectively. The motion brought his face level with hers.
“How can I know?”
“This is my true form! Can’t you see?”
He remained wary as he pored over her face, and smelled her odorless breath. “No. I don’t remember knowing anyone who looks like you. Unless I put my fingers into the holes in your side, I will not believe.”
She turned, lifting one wing, leaving her whole side exposed. He gently used one finger to trace a circle through her gaps—careful not to irritate the raw flesh underneath the shell.
“Oh, it is…”
Ars could barely contain himself. He didn’t know whether to shout or sing, so he wrapped his arms around her neck and kissed the cold, slimy surface. “You have holes,” he giggled. “Holes shot right through you. No wonder. Who could resist falling in love with a girl like that?”
===SOUNDTRACK: “Follow You, Follow Me” by Genesis===
Tom noticed that for a while, Porter had been staring at Dave with a mystified and vaguely disturbed expression. Fortunately, Dave was too occupied talking to Fluttershy to notice. But Tom was curious. He made sure to keep tabs on things from the corner of his eye, and eventually found his answer when he happened to see that Dave was showing Flutters his wallet pictures of Greta.
So he waited for the question. Tom didn’t give any indication of what he’d seen. Porter was still trying to be discreet, and Tom didn’t feel like calling him out. The chap was even trying to pretend he was still writing things down in his notebook.
After a few minutes Porter cleared his throat and interrupted the story Tom was telling. Right on schedule.
“Say, Mr. Silverstone.” His eyes lurched between the wallet pictures and Tom’s face. “Can I ask you…”
Tom interrupted Porter by passing him a drink. He leaned close across the table.
He raised one hand to keep Porter listening. “Okay. Listen tight. I’m gonna’ share a secret with you. This isn’t the kind of thing I’d tell just anyone. And you could have been a little more open-minded, but it occurred to me it's my job to teach you how. So I guess I feel like sharing."
Porter eased his notepad from blank page to page, glanced to either side, and nodded.
Tom gestured him to lean closer. Porter moved until their forehead were almost touching. Tom shook his head. A little closer.
“Kissing on ponies is actually kind of icky.”
Porter looked at his surroundings and proceeded to take a long drink.
“Hey, think about it,” said Tom. “First of all, have you ever actually smelled a pony? Like, walked right up and planted your nose on one? Er—silly question. But anyway, I have. And you know what they smell like? Horse. There’s a shocker. The rumor that ponies all wear a lot of body spray is true, but just while they’re out here on our world, and it’s not because they’re valley girls. They’re trying to be considerate.
“Actually kissing one isn’t for the faint of heart. I mean, first of all, there’s hair everywhere. It gets in everything, gets in your mouth. It’s like making out with a girl who has a giant mustache. And a beard. Secondly, your mouths really aren’t the right size for each other. The muzzle is a pretty awkward shape to smooch on. Sorry if I’m getting gross, but you know. You kind of asked. If she doesn’t know what she’s doing it’s kind of like sticking your face in a jar.
“But all that said—all of that—if you’re with the right pony, that kiss is the hottest thing in this life. In a way, it’s even better because it’s weird. You catch what I mean? Mashing your lips together? It’s because you know she wants you even though you don’t have any coat hair. It’s steamy because you know that despite how weird it feels, she still wants to give her tail a shake and jump up on your chest to plant one on you. Works both ways, too. You’re just that eager to kneel down for her. And that feels like nothing else I can describe. Once you get hooked, normal kisses seem boring. Every kiss with a pony shares how much you mean to each other.”
Tom leaned back, throwing his arms out to encompass the bar. “Now if that’s not the kind of sexy the rest of the world is into, fine. If they want to call that deviant, I’m not going to fight. But we’re going to be up here on Saturday night. Welcome to join us.”
I probably should have lingered a while longer, even once we’d talked that poor journalist into submission. But I quite simply needed another breather. My body was the one to let me know; almost before I knew what I was doing, I’d found an excuse to get up and was out front.
There was an old porch swing to one side of the steps. It didn’t swing, but I could sit and look inside from a relatively comfortable distance. Through the windows I saw blobs of color drifting from table to table. Lyra was nervously walking up and down the length of the bar. Hoping to get noticed, as always.
With my vision blurred a bit from the shape of the glass, I couldn’t tell the difference between what was going on in there and what went on during any day at home. Lyra had thought everything would be different here. And I was happy that she liked humans. Really, I was. But the same problems that kept her from going out and meeting other ponies weren’t going to magically disappear just because she was talking to a human. I think she was discovering that everything, even humans, were more intimidating in person than on a comic book page.
I was distracted from my dismal reverie by a squeaking door. Trying hard to pretend I hadn’t been spying through the window, I straightened to see who it was. Porter walked out.
He made for the steps, with his camera in his backpack and his notebooks in his back pocket. I supposed all that he’d come for was in order. He leaned against the post nearest the doorframe and stood there for a while, staring at the approaching storm. We were the only two presences on the porch. I don’t think he noticed me.
Some time later, he pulled out a phone and dialed a number. I tried not to listen to what came out of the speaker, but there was no blotting out the crisp clear words on his end.
“Hi, Joan? It’s me…yeah. Listen, do you want to—I don’t know. Hang out? …No. I’m serious. No, I…I don’t want anything. I just want to see you. Yeah, really. I’ll try to explain when you get here. I’m on…just a second.”
He stumbled down from the porch, hazarding a foray through the dark sidewalk, and sliding back and forth to guess which way the nearest street sign lay.
“Maynard Avenue,” I called out helpfully. Porter looked up in surprise, appearing to notice me for the first time, and then repeated my directions into the mouthpiece.
After he’d hung up, Porter dashed around the building into the parking lot. There was a beep, and he returned a minute later, racing up the patio steps with an enormous sheet of paper in his hands. He set it on the boards, uncapped a pen, and began writing. Every couple of moments he’d look my way, prompting me to try and convey the impression that I wasn’t staring at him. He filled up the paper to every extremity, and once there was no more place to write, he started to fold.
Sometime later a black car pulled up to the curb.
A plump woman in jeans stepped out and found Porter waiting at the base of the stairs. “Porter,” she said drily. “What the hell is up with you?”
But Porter was having none of that. He stepped forward with both arms wide to give her a hug. This seemed to alarm her at first, but once she realized what he wanted she vaulted forward and latched her hands around his neck.
I looked towards the corner of the patio and tried my hardest to become invisible. Because of magical training, I succeeded; the spell was well within my ability.
Once they finally separated, Porter stood back just far enough to hold out his folded paper flower. “I just started thinking,” he said—spinning around once to look at the Little Pony— “About some stuff.”
“What?” she grabbed his shoulders. “What’s the big idea? You can’t just call me out of the blue—”
He put his hand over hers. “It doesn’t matter. The important thing is, you’re here. Do you want to go for a walk with me?”
“Really?” She kept hanging back, eyes pinched in just a trace of suspicion. “Where?”
“Um…” Porter spun, looking all around. “I think there’s an ice cream shop down this way. If you want, we could go get some.”
It took a second. But once her mouth closed, she slid her hand inched forward, settling it on his arm. “Wow. I’d like that.”
His face fissured with a smile. “Wow. Alright. Let’s go.”
He offered his hooked elbow, which she accepted, and they set off down the road.
I quietly lifted myself off the swing and followed them a ways, tip-hoofing across driveways and letting the grass muffle my horseshoes. When the rains came, they stayed hand in hand. He swung off his jacket and held it over her head, to which she laughed and pulled out an umbrella for both of them.
I couldn’t hear their conversation from this distance, only catch a little bit of Porter touching the hair above her cheek. My horn glowed. With a smidgen of spellcraft I shaded the rain around them in a soft pink glow—not so much that they would notice, but enough to do a little something for them before I turned back.
These love stories Tom thought were so important—they weren’t anything really. I could have read embarrassments just like them in the Golden Oak’s paperback section. Not much had changed. And yet…
I am the Element of Magic. And personal student to the greatest spellcaster ever to live, on top of that. I know magic when I see it. And this was it.