Glittering Onto The Horizon
Silver was Clay Stone's favorite color.
The little colt with knobby knees, bad breath and a smile that could break glass. His coat was the same as his brothers, a bland and muddy brown and his teeth were even yellower but he had a laugh. A great, grand laugh that could bring the entire class to tears if anyone got him started. The sound of his wheezing laughter raced to the rafters and surprised the big kids upstairs, burrowed below to scare the groundskeeper and sent the folk passing by into a riot. With his pale face and weak hooves, hardly no one could believe the truth about his weak, weak lungs.
And so it was silver they painted his coffin, carrying it through Rookwell upon the backs of his brothers to the graveyard. And so it was silver, his wooden grave marker upon the sea of deceased children was painted, standing out against the pastel colors of the infants he'd been placed next to. And so it was silver that Pinkamena painted herself for three whole days.
Not until the rains came and washed all the chalk and pebble dust she caked onto her body.
Canary Yellow was Shale's favorite color.
Shale the fifth.
The spunky filly with dandelion hair, a howling squeal and small wings that could never get her off the ground. Her coat was an oddity, a sharp emerald green compared to her gray cousins but she had a way about her. Swiftness that let her clobber anyone who called her flightless. She raised a baby bird and on show-and-tell days, she'd bring Shale the sixth, her carrier pigeon. Her wings on another body.
Shale never liked her name. It belonged to her Momma's very first unborn and at the very least, the three that came after. In school, she was called Canary to the point that even her paperwork carried it.
And so it was as Canary Shale she was buried under, right next to her siblings in a family plot. A typical Rookwell coughing fit ending in her throat closing and her lungs wilting until she was no more. And so it was canary yellow her coffin was painted. And so it was canary yellow her grave marker was painted, sitting in the middle of the expanded graveyard as a shining guide to new grave goers.
Sometimes, Shale the sixth goes to sit on it and sings.
Pinkamena wasn't good with making watercolor so she settled for wearing a yellow ribbon she traded with a foal. The ribbon lasted hardly a day before Shale the sixth yanked it out her dusty locks and threw it on the ground. Pinkamena sniffed, her face hardening into a not-cry until Shale the sixth squeaked at her and pushed the ribbon to her hooves, lifting its bird foot.
The pigeon wasn't good with watercolor either.
Ash didn't have a favorite color.
She didn't have a favorite name either.
She didn't dislike being called Ash but she didn't mind being called changeling either. She liked changeling the most. Sometimes, she could call out to the teacher 'changeling present' instead of here. It meant that she could change from her thin and cracked form. One day, her infected limping hoof would no longer hurt. One day, she would no longer wheeze when she tried to breath. And maybe her family from all the way from Yieldstone would take her back instead of sending her alone to fester here.
She was always mean, talking about Rookwell like that.
Ash lied a lot. Told long and terrible stories about monsters and teachers and creepy crawlies in the dark. She claimed with her one good blue eye and her one wicked brown eye, that she could see into the world beyond. She swore she could see one's shadow crossing before the rest of the body followed. If the shadow was gone, you were certainly marked for death. Ash often said if she did die, she would do the good thing and haunt her family for all of eternity for not bothering to visit.
When she went missing, there wasn't a body to be found. There were only remains lining the left side of the old river bridge where the children were banned from crossing. And when her family came to claim her bones, they left in a hurry. Choosing to take her away in a plastic bag than a coffin that was owned to her. Owned to every little changeling despite how much they might hate or despair the name.
It took Pinkamena a while to build a little wooden box. The shape was wrong and the nails were twisted and hanging one side but it was a box all the same. She and her father headed off in the earliest of morning. Earlier than when the rooster or the hare or even the wolves that dwell on the side of the river would bother to still be awake. She waited on the bridge as her father crossed, carrying a heavy oil lamp and shivering against the cold. Her father dug a little hole, placed the box inside and buried it quickly.
Pinkamena bowed her head as Ash walked across the bridge, transparent and still. The oil torch in her muzzle flickered, shining nothing but a thin shape and Pinkamena closed her eyes not to see.
Ash snickered and said...
When Pinkamena was born, she did not take her first breath.
Her fresh lungs gurgled. Her wet hooves went limp and her soft heart went a flutter as it stopped. She was resuscitated by her mother but it was obvious to all what the new baby was. A changeling. In a sense, Pinkamena never was able to take in that first breath, the breath that promised her a long and happy life. She was irreversibly a changeling. A child who would always have forever. A child who would never grow up and would find peace in the graveyard along with the others in their colorful resting place.
Eternity would be hers until she dropped and so her family waited and watched.
As a changeling, Pinkamena was ordinary. She was a little odd and other-worldly but hardly a different than any other forever child. They all had their fancies before they went. Pinkamena was no different. But as a child, she was excitable. Her moods and energy would bob and weave with her jittery form, running off to find this and discover that.
Once Pinkamena got old enough to understand the words 'changeling' and 'forever child', she became sullen.
She had nobody to yell at.
Who could she blame for her having a suspect heart and bad lungs?
She had nobody to yell with.
Who could she talk to about being written off as a walking coffin?
She had nobody to yell to.
By the time she got to school, all of the changelings who had been there at her age were gone.
She only knew them by their stories.
Pinkamena mourned them in her own way, not allowed to go to the graveyard herself less she deliver herself onto Death's door. When she had enough of the farm, the fields, the children, the folk, the colors, the graves and the words Ash left behind...
One day, she was gone.
Nothing to bury. Nothing to sweep away.
A coffin was buried in her stead, painted in...
“I didn't see you on the other side, kiddo. You have no business to be waiting around here like the rest of us.”
Pinkamena Diane Pie didn't have a favorite color.
According to her mother, parties couldn't count as a color.
Nor did milkweed pie she got to eat on her birthdays. Nor did the biggest ball in Canterlot, the Galloping Gala. If Pinkamena wasn't going to serious, then they planned to bury her, the soil around her, the wood and the woodcutter in those most expensive pink dyes they could afford. They begged her to think of the poor woodcutter and Pinkamena said no. She did not have a favorite color.
And so she went on without a favorite color.