Nightly Rituals

Granny Smith looked at her three grandchildren lined up by the stairs and smiled. For a moment, she watched them grow, each year of life going by faster than she could blink. She was reminded of the moving picture machine that Filthy Rich’s grandfather had in his parlor all those years ago with its strangely turning images on circles that looked alive and—

“Granny?”

Pulling herself out of her thoughts, Granny Smith looked to Applebloom.

“Don’t start a’thinkin’ that I forgot aboutcha, Applebloom,” she said, pulling her youngest granddaughter into a tight hug, giving her a kiss to her forehead, and finishing it off with tousling her mane.

“Aw, Granny!” exclaimed Applebloom as she blushed, readjusting her bow. “Ya didn’t have to mess up my style! Miss Rarity and Sweetie Belle say that I’m really gettin’ somewhere with it!”

“But you’re gonna go to sleep, ‘lil ‘un,” said Granny Smith. “You’ll just get bed-head anyways!”

Her three grandchildren laughed, and Granny Smith joined in with her own wheezy chuckle.

“Good night, Applebloom,” she said.

“Good night, Granny!”

Applebloom smiled and gave her grandmother another hug before hurrying up the stairs to bed. Granny Smith saw a pair of fillies in her place—one a light pink and the other green—for a second or two, jabbering at each other with dusty words long forgotten.

“Oh, to be young again,” Granny Smith said quietly, wobbling over to Applejack.

They ended up meeting halfway, with Applejack stepping forward to close the distance between them. She leaned her head down, and her grandmother kissed her cheek.

“Good night, Applejack,” she said.

“Good night, Granny.”

Granny Smith watched as her granddaughter climbed the stairs, her golden tail swinging back and forth. Again, she saw something that wasn’t there—an older pony, but with the same yellow mane, ascending those same stairs in white, then descending in black.

And then there was Big MacIntosh, standing patiently at the foot of the stairs. He had always been last to receive his grandmother’s goodnight kiss, but he never seemed to mind. He had to get down on his knees for his face to be at the level of Granny Smith’s. She got up on her hind legs briefly to hug him around his muscled neck, shaking from the effort of keeping herself upright. Big MacIntosh simply stayed still, supporting her weakness with his strength. She smiled wide and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Good night, Big MacIntosh,” she said.

“Good night, Granny.”

He got up and walked up the stairs at his own easy-going pace. In his place, she saw a gangly colt dressed up in his best suit—ill-fitting as it was—coming down the stairs to meet a young filly; both were smiling. Granny Smith blinked and the image vanished. She was alone.

She shuffled around, blowing out the oil lamps. The pits and scratches on the wooden floor each told a story, and Granny Smith was able to follow them when the darkness engulfed her. There was the little pockmark that Apple Honey had left behind by worrying at the floor with her hoof for so long. And there was the scrape that Great-Grandmother Honeycrisp had made with her steel-tipped cane all those years ago. And just before the threshold of her bedroom door was the small crater that she herself had created after being dropped by Grandpa Tickled Pink. Granny Smith saw him standing there for a moment, frozen stiffly like a pony in an old daguerreotype. She smiled.

The lamp in her room was still lit, but she ignored it for the moment. Instead, Granny Smith went to her closet and pulled out a long, black cloak and a wooden box. Tying the cloak around her neck, she picked up the wooden box by the handle, holding it between her teeth. She listened briefly to the sounds of the old house and then left out the side door, the moon shining overhead like polished ivory.

There weren’t many ponies still alive that knew the paths that Granny Smith traveled, and that suited her just fine. She was not in the mood to meet anypony tonight. As she hobbled along, memories came pouring in. The brush of the cloak against her mane—

(—such beautiful hair—)

—felt ancient, as if she had experienced it a long time ago in a place where her memory could not reach. The cold wind stinging at her face—

(—such wonderful features—)

felt old as well, perhaps even older than she was. She supposed that might be true. After all, there is always something older, something wiser, and something greater than oneself. Maybe that feeling just so happened to be that thing.

The dirt path wound around Ponyville until she was looking down upon it from the surrounding hills. She smiled. Even here, there were memories to experience once more. The smell of caramel popcorn and sawdust wafted in on the winds. Granny Smith turned around and saw that the Ponyville fair—having closed down for the last time when she was just a filly—was there. With shaking legs, she walked through down the main line of stalls with ponies of all shapes, sizes, and colors filtering past.

Granny Smith tipped her head to a group of foals loitering by the Milk Bottle game and watched them giggle. The show ponies called out to her to stick around for their shows. The kissing booth mares batted their eyelashes at passing stallions. The clowns blew up balloons to impossible sizes and twisted them into amazing shapes. But Granny Smith pressed on, politely shaking her head when they all asked her to stay awhile.

She left the fair behind her as she walked slowly up the hill and never looked back, the scent of crunchy salted hay and cotton candy fading shortly afterwards.

After a long trek up the hill, Granny Smith had finally reached her goal. The iron-wrought gates to the Ponyville Cemetery swung open with some difficulty, letting out a loud creak as they did so. She stepped lightly over the threshold between the world of the living and the enclave of the dead.

Granny Smith knew a thing or two about the Ponyville Cemetery and made her way through the broken tombstones, slippery grass, and exposed tree roots. At times, she saw other ponies of all ages flitting from gravestone to gravestone, watching her. She gave them a nod, and they waved back—welcoming their old friend.

She knew most of the ponies she saw. Hovering by the Cake’s mausoleum was Miss Whiskey Rose, the town barmaid back in the days when Ponyville had bars. And hiding in the blackbriar bushes were Bonnie Lass and Starlight, two foalhood friends of hers who looked at Granny Smith with mischief in their young eyes. There were a couple of elderly ponies near the cracked, scummy fountain that she didn’t recognize but gave her regards to anyways with a tip of her head. They didn’t seem to notice her. New arrivals never did.

Granny Smith walked up the cobbled path to the top of the hill, where the Apple family burial plots laid. Here, the memories intensified to a point where they layered over each other. She saw a thousand ponies going through the motions of a hundred funerals. In each group, she noticed a green filly—her mane in two plaits—growing older as the crowd shrunk. Granny Smith blinked, and it all disappeared.

Moving through the crooked rows, she stopped at the tombstone that sat alone at the top. She set down the wooden box and spoke.

“Hello, Alderman,” she said, her voice cracking. “It’s been a while.”
Granny Smith felt the ponies of the cemetery listening in, but she kept talking.

“I hope you still know the steps.”

She flipped open the top of the wooden box and revealed the phonograph within. After she bent over and turned the crank on the side, the music began to play. It skipped and squealed, but the melody was still there underneath it all—a slow and plodding waltz.

Granny Smith untied her cloak and threw it to the side, the cold night air hitting her bare coat. Her knobbly knees clacked together, but she remained standing. A chill ran down her spine.

“May I have this dance?” a warm, smooth voice asked.

She nodded. The dance began.

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