A Brush with Beauty

by Burraku_Pansa

A Brush with Beauty

I’m feeling myself wake up—energy just slowly trickling into my muscles, it feels that distinct. My joints are really aching for some reason or another, but before I really register that—and before I even open my eyes, actually—I’m noticing sounds coming from all around me. In me, too—like, in my head. They’re bouncing through my skull like I’m surrounded on all sides by some pretty powerful speakers, but the weird thing is that the sounds themselves aren’t actually all that loud. If the feeling of waking to that wasn’t so odd, I might call them pleasant.

I finally get around to opening my eyes, but when I do, I see nothing but a hideous shade of blue. Like, it’s so outright saturated that it feels like my eyes are going to melt if I look at it for too long. Something happens to the sounds when I open my eyes, though—they start sounding familiar. It’s a little tune, just for a second—notes getting progressively higher in pitch. Maybe on a flute or a piccolo. Sort of sounds like… well, ‘waking up’ in music form, if waking up were some idealized, happy thing.

I’m feeling a little disturbed, but I sit up. All around me, there’s grass, with some patches of wildflowers interspersed. It’s looking like I’m in the valley of a few hills that I’m seeing around myself. The grass, though, and the flowers—they’re just like the sky was. Color all exaggerated, only even worse, because now there’s so many more colors. It looks incredibly unnatural, and my stomach is starting to disagree with it.

Don’t really know what I thought about it all, actually. I think I passed it off like there was something wrong with me—with my eyes or my head or something.

But anyway, I’m standing now, and before I know it, I’m walking. Nothing to gain from just sitting there, right? And I can’t look at the flowers anymore, anyway.

The valley goes on a while, or maybe I’m just hitting more and more hills. I decide to get to the top of one. It’s tall, but not too steep. Picturesque, really—just the thing I’d paint if someone told me to paint a hill. And if they only gave me some obnoxious neon green to paint it with.

There’s a breeze up at the top, or at least I think. Something’s off about it. I can hear it whistling past me, but… I don’t know. Never mind it. Maybe there isn’t one. As far as the sights go, there’s a lot more greens and blues. Miles and miles of them. Some greens off to the side are darker—a bit more bearable—and imply a forest, even if all the trees I can make out don’t look much like a real tree might.

I turn around, and things start to pick up. The hills end and I can see a town past a lot of green and brown and a big wad of red—more trees and a barn. Not a second thought and I’m on my way there, the music in my head sounding like ‘walking’ or… ‘purpose’, I guess.

The color’s still going strong, so at this point I’m starting to squint my eyes a lot.

When I get in range, I see that they’re apple trees, the spots of red here and there in their leaves so overwhelming that the color almost seems to bleed over into everything else. Second I notice that, their smell hits me, this heavy perfume of a thing. My eyes are starting to water from it all. Nothing for it, though, so I keep going.

Last thing on my mind is the time, with all this stuff overloading me, so I could’ve been walking for minutes or hours, or meters or miles. It’s all just a literal blur.

But then it all sort of snaps back, right as I hear a voice say,

“Um… Howdy.”

I clear my vision, and there’s a weird girl in front of me.

That’s exactly what my brain said to me, ‘weird girl’, but my eyes were telling a different story. Two feet shorter than me. Orange skin. Standing on four legs that didn’t end in feet or paws or hooves—that just cut off in round stubs. This ‘girl’ wasn’t human—wasn’t anything remotely resembling a human, apart from her long hair and this hat she had on.

But I couldn’t bring myself to really mind. It’s like she fit right in with everything else, somehow. Like I was probably the one out of place.

She raises one of her legs up and waves it in front of me. “Can ya talk?” she says, something like a frown on her animal face. “What’s a thing like you doin’ in my orchard?”

A feeling like waking up from a dream hits me, funnily enough. “Sorry, I was, uh…” I say, and it’s there that I realize how much I was moving on autopilot before. “I think I was just trying to get to the town.”

“Ponyville?” she asks. And now that she mentions it, I figure that she looks more like a pony than anything else, outside of a pair of distractingly huge eyes.

“If you say so,” I tell her.

She puts a stub-hoof up to her chin, and says, “I guess I could take my break a bit earlier and show y’all the way. Sweet Apple Acres can be a mite easy to get lost in, for a first-timer.” She puts the same limb forward towards me. “I’m Applejack. Pleased t’ make your acquaintance.”

“Paul,” I say. I take her stub in my hand and shake it. Weirdly, it feels nothing at all like it looks—it actually is hardened like a hoof, and further up, I feel short, soft hair instead of skin. Still, though, there’s one part of me that…

I don’t know. It felt like even what I was feeling wasn’t right, just like what I’d been seeing hadn’t been.

I make to pull my hand back, but before I can react, Applejack grips my wrist somehow—in her ankle, maybe—and moves my hand to a spot in the air, palm up.

“On the house,” she says, putting her hoof bottom-up in another spot of the air. She lifts one of her back hooves up and—quick as lightning—strikes a tree trunk next to herself. I hear a rustling in the leaves above, and an apple apiece falls right into our grasps.

It’s even worse up close. Almost everything in my sight is being eaten into by the red dripping outwards from the apple. I hear a crisp, wet crunch and look up to see Applejack starting in on hers, and I decide to just go for it.

That was a bad idea.

It tastes indescribable, but not in any positive way… It’s as though my brain is trying desperately to tell me that what I’m tasting is the juiciest, most taste bud–overloadingly delicious fruit I’ve ever had the honor of stuffing in my unworthy mouth, but my taste buds themselves are all but screaming at me that I’m not tasting anything at all. Or maybe that I’m not tasting anything they have any reference for—a taste I’m not capable of understanding. It’s that same part of me that didn’t understand Applejack’s hoof or the breeze on the hill, but the feeling is coming through clear and sharp with the apple.

I hear Applejack say, “Fruit ain’t your thing?” She’s got an eyebrow raised high. “Not a carnivore, are ya?”

“Er, no,” I say, “it’s just a bit different from the apples I’m used to.”

She turns and starts to walk through the trees. “Different how?” she asks, with a touch of disappointment, or maybe even offense.

I follow, saying, “It wasn’t bad…” I have trouble putting the feeling into words. “It’s just not what I’m used to.”

“Fair enough.” Applejack walks steadily on.

The music, which I only now realized had dimmed to the background for the conversation, is back in force. ‘Progress’, with a steady rhythm and light, jaunty sounds. Every part of the orchard we come to looks the same as every part before, and I feel grateful that Applejack is there to guide me through it. Soon enough, we come to a dirt path, turning onto it.

Applejack says, “So what’s your business in Ponyville? And for that matter, where are you comin’ from? Ain’t heard of your sort in Equestria before.”

I stay silent for a few moments, thinking. Thinking, thinking, and I find I can’t actually come up with an answer. “It’s all sort of fuzzy…” I tell her. “I woke up in those hills outside of your orchard. Saw the town, and I guess it seemed better than staying put. I don’t really remember anything before that…”

I wonder if I would have realized I was dreaming if I’d thought about it more. If I could have ended it all right then and there. I’m happy I didn’t.

I’m happy I didn’t.

- - - - -

Ponyville is odd. Most buildings are unassuming and look to be made of wood and thatch in fairly modern styles, but other buildings we pass are styled as carousels, or built into trees, or—like the one we’re heading towards—look to be made out of gingerbread and frosting.

Applejack said that since I didn’t have anything in mind for what I was going to do in Ponyville, she’d just take me to where she’d planned on having her break.

As we go through town, I get the impression that she’s being very nonchalant about me—I’d thought before that I probably didn’t fit, and the clear berth that ponies we pass are giving me speaks to that. Which is just as well. Applejack’s orange is brighter than I’d like, but bearable—not so with many of these ponies, every color of the rainbow and so few of them muted. Where there are crowds of them, I can’t look for more than a few seconds without it hurting.

Applejack and I arrive at the door to the gingerbread building. “Welcome to Sugarcube Corner,” she says, pushing open the door.

The instant we’re inside, before I’m even able to look around, there’s a far, far sharper voice than Applejack’s. “Welcome to Sugarcube Corner!” it shouts, like the universe thought I didn’t hear the first time and needed the message to be drilled into my skull.

I look up, and standing behind a display of pastries is a new pony, this one pink—utterly, painfully, disgustingly pink. Like I’m adjusting to a light coming on in a darkened room, I have to squint my eyes away a few times before I’m able to fix them on her for more than just a moment, and even then, there’s a burning in the background.

“Hey, Pinkie,” says Applejack. “This here’s Paul.”

The pony, Pinkie, was smiling brightly—blindingly—when we came in, but it died down more and more the longer it took me to adjust. Then she winks at me. Then she keeps winking at me, her left eye fluttering open and closed, but it doesn’t look purposeful. “You’re not from around here, huh?”

When I’m sure I can speak without hissing in pain, I say, “No, I’m not.”

She frowns, still winking wildly. “No, I mean… You don’t belong, do you?”

Silence. I can’t think of anything to say to that. I’d been thinking it before, of course, but to have her put it to words felt strange. Ominous, even.

A few moments and Pinkie seems to catch the vibe she’d put out, worry coming over her face. “Oh, hey, no!” she says. “I didn’t mean it in any kind ‘a mean way! Sorry, that was a super bad start.” She hops over the counter and comes up to me and Applejack. She has a plated, thick slice of cake on her hoof that I didn’t see her grab. “Here! No hard, uncomfy feelings?”

The cake is pink even down to the batter, and with intricate little patterns of white frosting on top. It’s almost as hard to look at as the girl holding it, but despite that, and despite the still-fresh memory of the apple, my mouth is watering. The generosity is getting to me, though.

“That’s kind of you,” I say, “but I’ve already been given free food today. What’s the normal price?”

Pinkie manages to somehow look cheerful even with a frown on her face. “Two bits,” she says.

It takes me a moment to place the phrase, but soon enough I root around in my pocket and fish out a quarter, passing it to her as I take the slice of cake. I assume that she’s still just being generous, but as long as I’m giving her something I figure I won’t press it.

Before I manage to take a bite, Pinkie says, “What’s this?”

I look between the quarter and Pinkie’s bewildered eyes a few times. “A quarter,” I say. “You know. ‘Shave and a haircut, two bits.’ Twenty-five cents.” Her face tells me that she still doesn’t get it, so I start, “What did you actually…”

But I see Applejack at my side take off her hat, reach inside it, and draw out two coins. Two gold coins. “This,” she says, “is two bits, sugarcube.”

Pinkie’s still eyeing the quarter. “What’s this thing even made of? Silver?”

“No,” I say, trying not to eye their gold too much, “or not anymore, I think. Nowadays I’m pretty sure it’s nickel and copper.”

Pinkie drops the coin like it’s a snake. “Nickel?”

Applejack just gasps.

“What?” I say.

Applejack turns to me, pupils pinpricks in those big expanses she calls eyes. “Nickel ain’t exactly common, hon.”

“Not common?” shouts Pinkie. “This stuff’s rarer than lead—there’s just a hooffull of teeny tiny nickel mines in the entire world! A couple of these and I could probably fund parties for a whole month!”

“Huh,” I say. I reach back into my pockets, into the coin spot on my wallet, wherever. Pinkie and Applejack stare with jaws dropped as I draw out a small handful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. “What do you suppose I could get with this much?”

When they stopped staring, Applejack and I—Pinkie had to keep working—visited an appraiser that lived in the area. And then we visited a few metallurgists. And then I bought a small house.

After that, I hit that part of the dream I always do. That part where I learn to live with it. Here, though, all I had to live with was a change of scenery that hurt my eyes if I stared too long, and odd looks from townspeople. Not so bad, really. If I’d been aware it was another dream, I wouldn’t have yet called it a nightmare.

- - - - -

Months went by. I subsisted on what was left over from the nickel money and odd jobs that would come up in Ponyville’s newspaper. Even though I didn’t realize it was all a dream, I was finding myself filled with a strange feeling of… impermanence, growing stronger every day. Like I knew that my stay wouldn’t last. It made me wary of picking up any lasting job.

I would go into autopilot a lot, it seemed like. I still saw Applejack and Pinkie now and again—Ponyville wasn’t large, plus I’d visit sometimes—and when I did, I’d snap back out of it for a day or two. In those times when I had some clarity, and I was alone, I took to painting.

Um, art always sort of interested me, I guess. No, dunno know why I didn’t bring it up before. Doesn’t it interest everyone?

Anyway, I’d paint when I was at my house and not just going through the motions. Not much furniture in the place, but loads of easels eventually. Thing was, though, that the paint was just the same as everything else. Bright, blaring. Even dark colors still had this vague ‘lit-up’ quality. Painting wasn’t making the colors hurt any less, but if nothing else, it was getting me accustomed to the pain. I was near the point that I could ignore some of the less bright ones.

One day, though, everything stops making sense.

I wake up to the sun shining in through my window, and I blink away the hurt of it. I look around my room, and it’s dark as night. I’m thinking too slow to pick up on just what’s wrong with the picture, but the question answers itself a few seconds later when, before my eyes, the room turns bright.

I look out my window again. Really look. The sun is up, but it isn’t alone. Houses are floating up in the sky, too. Ponies.

And the sky isn’t right. The sun may be high, but the sky is the color of a sunset, pinkish-orange and darkening. Then, like someone flipped a switch, the sun isn’t there anymore. The moon is out and the sky is an ocean green. I get out of bed.

As I open my front door and make to step out onto the street, I instinctively shift all my weight backwards, trying to throw myself back inside—my house is one of the floating ones. I stand again and peek back out. Luckily it looks like I’m just a few feet up from the ground, unlike some of the ones I saw before that had to have been hundreds of feet up.

I hop down to the cobblestones below, only to find that they’re not cobblestones anymore—more a grayish, lumpy gelatin that I sink down into, up to my ankle on the left and my knee on the right. A great, sucking squelch and I manage to get myself free, resolving to step carefully.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to think of it all. Things had been strange for me before all this, but this felt different. A wrong kind of strangeness. It didn’t fit. Even the music in my head was wrong, sharp and ugly notes with a pattern that was hard to make out. ‘Chaos’.

I decided to try and find Applejack and see if she knew what was happening.

- - - - -

I’m seeing ponies around as I start passing closer to Ponyville’s center. More and more frequently, though, their colors are muted or grayish. At first, I was relieved that looking at them didn’t strain me, but then I started to notice their faces.

No one was happy.

In the months before, even if I rarely interacted with anyone I wasn’t working for, I could still look out my window and see smiling faces, hear laughter and cheerful conversation. It was like even if I wasn’t feeling fully in tune with everything, I could still leech a bit of happiness off of everyone else. I could see that happiness existed, and it was nice.

Now, though, ponies looked frightened, or angry, or even just blank. They’d run away from me or heedlessly past me or around in circles. They’d kick and scream and yell at one another. One boy was just sitting by the side of the road, staring up at the sky and wailing his heart out at nothing I could see.

It's wrong, all of it. The thought crosses my mind that I’d bring all the color back to them in a heartbeat if I could—all the pain—if they would just go back to normal.

Seemingly out of nowhere, I hear an explosion. It might’ve come from the center of town, and while I feel a bit worried about getting hurt, I’m more worried that Applejack or Pinkie might be there. I make my way to the town square as fast as I can.

As I make it past the last building and into the square, I see my fears realized. Applejack and Pinkie are here, along with a number of friends of theirs that I’d sometimes seen them with in town. Also here is a thing my brain labelled ‘monster’, and behind him, a smoking crater that must have come from the explosion.

This time, my eyes are agreeing with my brain. There’s no other word but monster for this thing—a collection of parts from too many different animals, all thrown together. There’s a dark sneer on his face, victorious-looking. I know immediately that he’s the cause of all of this.

Just looking at him—just looking—I’m getting that same weird dissonant feeling as from the apple and everything else, but stronger than ever. This sense that there’s more to him than I’m seeing. Something past him or in him that I couldn’t hope to understand. The thing was, though, that his ‘something’ is different from the apple’s or the hoof’s or the breeze’s, or any of the other things I’d touched or smelled or tasted in my time in the dream since. His ‘something’ comes from someplace else, and it doesn’t fit.

But now something’s happening. Applejack and Pinkie and the rest are glowing, and points of light are shooting from them out towards the monster. The glowing ramps up, and even at the edge of the square I’m feeling wind rush out from them, or maybe just pure force. The six of them start floating in midair, and the lights coming from them concentrate into one big mass—a rainbow that flies out from them at the monster.

That rainbow. It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen since I woke up in the field. Brighter than the sky and the apple and the crowds of ponies. The colors that make it up are so pure and saturated that I think it might drive me blind, but then I realize.

It doesn’t hurt.

It feels good, looking on at it. It grows and expands out across everything I can see, past all of the buildings in the square and further out. It’s warm, and it’s safe, and it feels right. The force coming off of the six ponies is too much for me to handle, and I fall to the ground. Just as quickly, though, I feel it end.

I open my eyes, and far above is a cloudless sky, as blue as it always should be. And it doesn’t hurt to look.

- - - - -

By the end of the next day, everything in town seemed pretty much back to normal, oddly enough. I got the impression that things like that monster weren't too uncommon an occurrence here, but this one might've been somewhat worse than normal.

Apparently, though, whenever one of these fiascos is over and done with, and after any damage is recovered from, Ponyville pulls together for a great big celebration. Pinkie told me in no uncertain terms that I was invited whether I liked it or not. Thankfully, I liked the idea just fine.

Right as the sun disappears over the horizon, there's an explosion of noise and color in the town square. The gathered crowd is roiling, cheers going up into the warm night air.

And none of it hurts. Even with this mass of brightly colored people talking in bright voices about bright things, I can stand to be here. More than that, being here is fun.

I hear Pinkie's voice over all the chattering and the music, saying, "You came!"

I turn around and find her, with Applejack and their four friends grouped up and talking amongst themselves not too far behind. "Hey, Pinkie," I say, smiling. "Happy to be here."

Pinkie's eye twitches, like most times I see her. It's her right eye, though—it's always been her left before. Like when I first met her, the smile she had on at first slowly disappears. "Huh," she says, and the smile is back a moment later, maybe even brighter than before. "Let me show you to my friends!"

I agree, and it's a storm of introductions, each of them telling me who they are and what they do. I don't think I even remember what most of their names were, but all of them seem nice enough.

"So," I say after a break in the conversation, "what exactly was that you all did yesterday? That light?"

The purple friend, who might be named Twilight, and who might also be a bit tipsy, says too loudly, "The light of friendship!"

The rest of them giggle, and I let out a chuckle myself. The white friend with the really easy name, Rarity, says to me, "I suppose she's right, in a way."

"Yep," says Applejack. "All of us've been able to do that since we started bein' friends." She stares down into her mug, smiling. "Always comes in handy when there's some big, bad beastie we can't get rid of the normal way."

The rainbow-haired friend, who I'm very thankful I never saw up close before the colors stopped hurting, pumped her hoof into the air. "Right," she says, "then it's wham, we throw the friendship right in their face!"

Another few giggles.

"Well, it was impressive," I say. "I'm really grateful for it. Thank you." I heard myself say it really emphatically… but I wasn't quite sure why.

The group of them stop giggling—apart from Twilight—and look at me. Rarity says, "Well, you're welcome, darling, but we did it for the town."

"Yeah, uh…" says the rainbow one, looking a little embarrassed, "Why'd that sound so personal, big guy?"

I didn't have an answer. I felt incredibly grateful to them and what they did, but…

"I get it," says Pinkie. We all turn to her, and she looks to me. "I think we helped you fit."

- - - - -

“They didn't get it, and I didn't fully get it in the dream, either. But the night went on, and I had a lot of fun, and we all said our goodbyes when the sun started coming up—Pinkie's felt a lot more final than the others, and more heartfelt. Not long after that, I went to sleep in the dream, and I woke up in bed back home, and it was morning.”

That same sound for a few long moments, of a pen tapping on a pad. “Thank you for sharing it, Paul,” says the therapist, “but I’m afraid I’m not sure what you’d like me to take from it. It was certainly an interesting-sounding dream, at least.”

Paul, a smile on his face, sits up higher in his cushy chair. “I don’t know what to take from it, myself, if I’m honest, but it feels important to me, or like it will be.”

A slight smile finds its way onto the woman’s lips as well. “It’s certainly good to see you so enthusiastic. If you don’t mind my asking, though, how do you think the dream might be important?”

“I don’t know yet,” says Paul, glancing out the window at the daylight, “but I know I’ll figure it all out.”

Comments

[horizon]

Ha — nickel. Nice.

I like what you're doing with the colors — I think I see where you're going with it, but I'll wait to see what act 3 has to say — but I'm also amused by the fact he's hearing the background music.