House of the Rising Sunflower

by kudzuhaiku

Seeking reason

Ponyville. The flight here barely registered as a memory and everything blurred together. Sundance took a moment to try and sort out his thoughts, but failed to do so. How long ago was his grandmother committed back to the earth? Events lacked a distinct timeline. Breakfast this morning seemed as though it might have been a year ago. Just remembering what he'd eaten took a great deal of effort and the only thing that stood out was the bitterness in the lime marmalade.

"This is the post office," he said as he looked up at the sign.

"It is," Sumac replied. "Ponyville keeps its hearses in the post office garage."

"Oh." Senses dulled, Sundance stared up at the sign and studied the letters, though why he did this was unknown to him.

"Tell me, Sundance… are you a fan of the post office?"

The question barely registered and Sundance replied, "Oh, I don't know. I guess?"

"Sundance… grief is a skill." After he moved a step closer, Sumac adjusted his glasses and wrapped one wing around Sundance's neck. "It is a skill, just like dancing, baking, or making music. Nopony is born with the knowledge of how to grieve. If life has any meaning at all, any purpose beyond mere existence, it is learning how to grieve and how to cope with grief."

In response, Sundance said nothing.

"I lost my grandmother at an early age. We had a complicated relationship that I didn't understand. She was troubled, my grandmother. Even though we didn't know each other very well, her death had a profound impact on me. Not just because of how I felt about it, but because of what my mother, Trixie went through. For me, that was the beginning. Other deaths happened later. I had no choice but to sort them out and learn to live with them. And you, my friend, you must learn to do the same."

"I'll be fine—"

"No, you won't." As these words were said, Sumac leaned in until he was almost nose-to-nose with Sundance. "You're practically in a fugue state."

"I just need some time to clear my head."

Ears pricked, jaw muscles tight, Sumac shook his head from side to side.

"Look, I'm fine, really."

"Where are we now, Sundance, and what are we doing?"

"The uh, the morgue. We're putting away the hearse."

Almost frowning, Sumac pulled his wing away from Sundance's neck and then folded it against his side. After he leveled out his spectacles on his nose, he tilted his head to one side and said, "We're at the post office."

"Oh, that's right." It occured to Sundance that something might actually be wrong, though a part of him didn't want to believe it. "I'm just a little out of sorts. Surely that's understandable."

When Sumac spoke again, his voice was muted and quite soft. "Death changes us. Grief changes us. We all have to come to terms with that, Sundance. Somehow, we have to live with the fact that everpony that we love and cherish, they will die. Beyond that, we will die. That is the great shared struggle, something that we all have in common. It can be difficult to make friends and love others with the shadowy spectre of death looming over us all. The knowledge that we might lose what we hold dear can make it hard to develop meaningful attachments."

Turning away, Sundance allowed himself a slight sigh.

"Like I said, nopony is born knowing how to cope with all of this. It is something that we learn. Some of us learn the hard way, by ourselves, on our own, and in the process, maybe we pick up a few bad habits. Maybe we grow cold and distant. Or we might wallow in our own depression. Some of us pretend as though nothing is wrong, and we bury ourselves in our work… which is how I dealt with my troubles when I was younger and didn't know better. But a few of us are lucky, and we have a friend or a loved one that helps us sort things out."

Reluctantly, Sundance nodded. "Once I get home, I'll be surrounded by friends. All of this will get sorted out. I'll be fine."

"Uh-huh." Behind the green glass of his round spectacles, Sumac squinted.

"I'm just holding myself together until I have the time to fall apart."

"Sure. That seems reasonable." Lacking any sort of discernable emotion, Sumac's voice was a flat deadpan. "Come on, Sundance. We'll get a drink and then I'll fly you home. I'll also be telling Corduroy about your current condition."

"Oh, come on." A rising sense of panic could be felt and a part of Sundance wanted to bolt, to fly away as fast as he possibly could. "Is that really necessary? Can't I just sort this out on my own, in my own way?"

"No," Sumac replied, "because I don't trust you to do it. Now let's go get a drink. Dehydration can only make things worse. Care for an apple soda?"

Sundance took a moment to consider before he responded, "Sure. I guess. That sounds fine."

---

It was a sweltering summer day in Ponyville, and the world outside the window moved at a sedate pace. The ceiling fan overhead had a rhythmic squeak that was just starting to annoy Sundance, but at least he felt something. Ponies stood on the train station platform; some fanned themselves while others took refuge beneath fashionable parasols. A part of Sundance resented how life went on when he really wished that the world would slow down so that he might catch his breath.

Everything was a blur of paperwork, burnt spiders, and flooded bunnies.

A mare with a crying foal did everything she could to shush him. Behind the counter, a unicorn watched the mare comforting her foal with bored disinterest. There was a filly who examined a magazine rack, but she seemed disappointed, as if she couldn't find her heart's desire. Two ponies—one of them a pegasus mare with a parasol cutie mark and the other an earth pony stallion with a dirt-encrusted shovel—shared an enormous milkshake together. The glass over the ice cream display was translucent with frosty fog. A poster with bright, fresh ink promised a one-hundred bit bonus for new enlistees and was emblazoned with a saluting pegasus who wore his diced glengarry at a jaunty angle.

Sundance failed to notice all of this.

"I'd like to fall in love," Sundance said, almost mumbling these words through lips that felt too thick, too heavy. "I'd like for life to make sense. To have some reason to endure all of this, and to give everything that has happened some meaning. I suppose I want the pain of loss to be tempered… is tempered the right word? I don't even know. But I want the pain of loss to be tempered by what you have to gain. Maybe I'm selfish, or wrong, but I'd like to have some sort of reward for trying to sort through all of this. Not just my grandmother's death, but everything. I feel like I'm due a cookie."

"I could get you a cookie," Sumac offered.

This almost made Sundance smile, but as the corners of his mouth twitched upwards, his thoughtful frown asserted itself and would not relinquish its existence. Head bowed, he looked down at his bottle of apple soda and much to his surprise, it was already half empty. Or maybe it was half full. At the moment, it was exceedingly difficult to tell the difference. There was far too much glass and not enough soda to fill it.

"If you don't mind me saying, you seem a bit young to be in charge of the morgue."

A dry chuckle could be heard from Sumac, who held up his bottle and tilted it around, all the while watching how the liquid within flowed around. "I'm not in charge. But I am established. The old fogeys don't much care for the interns. As is so often the case, they've developed a shortage of patience for the living. So I am the designated intern-wrangler. Which I suppose offers the illusion that I'm in charge."

"You have a nice office though."

This made Sumac shrug. "I've worked very hard to earn it. My reward for sticking everything out, I suppose. My cookie."

"I worked my tail off in the city, and got nothing in return. Just a struggle to keep my head above water. My grandmother also worked hard. She got an early grave. Then there's my mother, who is the hardest working pony I know. Right now, she's forced to work shift-and-halfs, and I doubt she'll get anything for it other than dying a little younger than she might've otherwise. As for my dad, he just keeps his head down and doesn't complain. But he works hard too." Eyes narrowed, Sundance looked up at Sumac, who sat across the table. "Doesn't feel very fair."

"No, it doesn't," Sumac agreed whilst eye-contact was maintained.

"Would it be so terrible if things just made sense?" asked Sundance in a whisper almost guttural with sudden, unrepressed ferocity. Surprised by his own anger, which warmed his dull, numbed senses, he sat up straight and gripped his soda bottle in his fetlock. A few hard squeezes calmed him, but the anger remained, a white-hot coal that promised to ignite any fuel offered.

He found Sumac's silence infuriating, and it was a struggle to hold everything in.

Lower lip quivering, his eyelids twitching, and his sinuses ablaze with sudden terrific pressure, the sort that made his eyes water, Sundance fought to keep his composure. "I used to love the city. It was all I knew. Bricks and cobblestones. Concrete, steel, and glass. The sounds… the sounds… the rumble of the elevated train that runs above the streets. My grandmother was the one who taught me that it wasn't good for me to stick out my tongue to catch the black snowflakes that fell as the choo-choo passed overhead."

One ear—his right—went rigid, while the other went limp.

He used to race beneath those rusty iron arches that held the elevated train above the streets. Up and down the narrow urban canyons he flew at breakneck speeds, sometimes trying to race the train as he flew beneath it. All the buildings shook, windows rattled, and conversations would be interrupted as the train went by. Every car on the train would be packed with ponies who could not fly—and maybe a few that could—and they would be transported across the city to go from the residential district to the industrial parks.

Industrial parks were a mystery to him, and he failed to understand how or why they were parks.

"My love has since turned to this sort of hatred that I don't understand," he said to Sumac as his fury transitioned into something else, something that threatened to bust open the floodgates and let loose a torrent. "My grandmother's death just makes it worse. It just feels so… so… so—"

"Senseless?" Sumac suggested.

"Maybe?" This response was accompanied by a full body shrug that made Sundance lift both his forelegs and his wings. "Is there something beyond senseless? My grandmother was poisoned by mercury while making hats that she could never afford. She made fancy finery for the wealthy and well-to-do. Her life was made short so they could have their excess, and I'm… I'm… I'm—"

"Pissed about it?" Behind his round eyeglasses, Sumac's eyes narrowed.

"Well beyond pissed," Sundance said. "There's just no good way to describe it."

There was a faint nod from Sumac to show that he listened.

"I want all of this to mean something," Sundance said, almost whining. "I want my grandmother's life to have meant something… and right now, all I can think about is how my grandmother's very existence allowed high society mares to be fashionable. And it just… eats me up inside."

"It's good that you're getting this out."

This gave Sundance pause, and after a moment lost to thoughtfulness, he replied, "It is? Because this feels like poison. I feel sick to my stomach. All of this feels absolutely wretched."

"Would be worse if you held it in."

"My dad told me not to complain." Sundance's gaze fell down to the shiny surface of the formica tabletop and the gleaming chrome trim along the rounded, beveled edge. "He never said much, my dad. So when he did say something, it was hard not to listen. My words feel jumbled somehow. He was a quiet sort, so when he spoke, his words had… they had a certain weight to them. And my dad seemed fond of telling me that I shouldn't complain, because it made me less of a pony. Here I am, complaining. That's what I'm doing. And I feel so conflicted about it. I'm not making the best of a crappy situation, I'm complaining. I feel guilty."

"Well, don't feel that way," Sumac suggested in warm, supportive tones.

"I can't help it, though. It's just there."

"Well, you need to change the way you think," said Sumac, whose tone changed to something a bit more firm. "Get mad if you have to. Complain if you need to. The reason why nothing ever changes is because nopony wants to complain. We're taught to follow the herd and don't cause trouble."

"Yeah." Sundance breathed out his agreement and then sucked in a deep breath to fill his lungs with much-needed air. Where did all of his anger go? A curious, unpleasant numbness had overcome his heart, his barrel, and he was fearful that he might suffocate. A part of him desperately wanted to lie down and take a nap. To shut out the world.

His brief moment of hot fury was gone, and replaced by the cold creep. All of his limbs seemed heavy again, and fatigue threatened to overwhelm him. His neck ached from the heaviness of his own head and for the first time he noticed how his jaw throbbed from clenched teeth. All of the fight was gone, his motivation, his upset. It was almost a relief to go numb again, but a quiet voice in the back of his mind protested.

"I want to go home…"

Author's Note:

There's no point in complaining...

Comments

[A.P.O.N.I.]

It bothers me, unreasonably so, that everyone assumes that everything he's feeling is due to the death of his grandmother. No one seems to have asked how his day was, what his life was like, if he was starting from a good emotional place before this. It's like they're so focused on the metaphorical car's flat tire that they haven't asked how the car was running beforehand.

I've deleted much of my rant about this. Just know that I know that this is an overreaction.

[Snowliasion]

Sundance deserves a cookie about now.

[kudzuhaiku]

10073856
I was wondering if anybody would notice.

[Bronzedragon]

"I want to go home…" And there it is! The Barony is no longer a Place that he was sent it is Home.

[Quiznak]

Great chapter.

[harts fire]

Sundance takes time to stop and look at his life and finds he is unsure about it.

[Autumn Colors Fall]

"Well beyond pissed" is a feeling we need some new words for.

[EonAon]

I'm sadly going to say I dislike this segment. Mostly for the trope of the outside pushing of the bereaved so early. People grieve in their own time and own ways and that Sumac is pushing the issue right now about Sundance not knowing how to grieve is kinda wrong to do to somebody in the first days of even considering how they feel about the loss of a loved one. Sumac should know this. Now if at a 3 to 6 month or longer period if a person cant get over the loss, then asking them how they feel and helping them get out of a funk by pushing them somewhat would seem more like a concerned bystander.

Or if Sumac had asked what Sundance had been up to that day or what had made him furious in the first place then acted/listened accordingly it would feel more like a outsider caring. Right now it feels more like Sumac is pushing his own agenda more than actually caring about how Sundance feels, even with the talk about how people don't know how to grieve.

[kudzuhaiku]

10074322
Even professionals can sometimes be misled. Sumac sees someone who appears to be affected by grief, and seeks to help them. This is not a bad thing. Sundance's issues go beyond mere grief, but not even Sundance knows that yet. There is somepony that can help him though. Care to guess who?

[Bloody_Tofu]

Seems like Sundance needs his dragon pony and chief Diamond Dog to help sort him out.

[AyanamiRei]

The only thing worse than complains....is EMPTY complaints, or complaints as ATTACKS against the Innocent. Try to DO something about what you are angry about, and if you can't do something about that...then find some other way to make your or the world of others better! Tiny little things we may not feel is a big deal, can be HUGE (ESPECIALLY overtime) to someone else.

Sometimes all someone needs is someone that they feel is safe to be THEMSELVES around. 100%. Without the judgement. Without feeling the need for performance. Without having to fake being happy. That can mean a lot to the right people <3