Bouts of Forgetful Artistic Destruction
In a nearly empty library, a pegasus librarian with a blond mane the color of a sunflower’s petals sat behind an information desk and tore pages out of a hardback book. The library was called the Canterlot Public Library. The librarian was called Gale. She couldn’t remember why she had started tearing out the pages. Maybe she was angry. Maybe the story hadn’t played out how she had wanted it to and now she destroyed the world and everyone in it and herself because tearing apart the words was the only way left to feel in control of fate. But she didn't feel angry, only tired and cold. Her wings twitched but stayed close to her sides. She pressed her hoof to another page. It felt dry and stale, and she pulled at it without reading the words and tore the page out of the book and tossed it onto the floor with the others.
Behind her was a wall with a window. Through the window, Gale heard music and voices and laughing, and saw reflected on the desk a husky yellow glow from the lamp posts in the street. There was a festival on in Canterlot that night. There was nothing on in the library except the lights. The books on the library’s rows of shelves went undisturbed and unread.
Gale thought that it might have been a kind of tragedy to be a librarian and see so many books not being read. It should have been another kind of tragedy to be a pegasus and sit behind a desk all night with nowhere to go and nothing to do but get angry at novels and then forget why. Or the only true tragedy in that library might have been the only other pony in the building, the unicorn mare upstairs with the nervous laugh, the same unicorn mare with the nervous laugh who had stayed in the library until closing time the night before, and the night before that, and nearly every night since Gale had begun working there.
Gale tore out another page. It could have been an act of jealousy. Gale often felt jealous. She might have been lashing out. Maybe she had realized that she wouldn’t be able to remember later whatever she had read on those pages and, like a child, she spoiled it so no one else could have it, either. A petty and pointless rebellion, like a small dog pulling at the firm and guiding leash tight at its throat.
She hoped it was something more exciting than that. A little more drama. A bit of audacious glitz and provocative glamor. She had once wanted to be a theater actress, but she could never remember her lines and most theaters weren’t properly heated. She thought about why a librarian character in a play would destroy the very books she had been tasked with protecting. It would be some kind of important statement. Literary murder. Artistic sabotage. Take hammer and chisel to the great statues, spill buckets of black ink on the verses of the epic poems, pour ice water down the throats of the opera singers, press lit matches against the canvasses of the masterpiece paintings. Tear it all down and build up something new in its place.
But Gale knew that if she tore anything down, it would stay torn down. She did not possess the right constitution for sustained or thorough societal revolution. And she never started anything she knew she wouldn’t finish. So that couldn’t have been it.
And so why was she tearing the pages out of a book?
She didn’t know, but she tore another out, anyway.
On the wall behind Gale hung an old clock. The clock’s hands tick-tick-ticked across a picture of an orange cat, like animate, punctual whiskers. Gale thought maybe time was easier to read when it was being read off of a cat’s whiskers. Or maybe whoever had hung it there however many years ago had once had an orange cat and named it Butterscotch and loved it until it caught diabetes and choked on a piece of boiled ham that had been given to it as a farewell treat the day before its anaesthetization and died. Maybe the owner had forcefully jammed her hoof down Butterscotch’s throat and tried to pull the ham out. Maybe Butterscotch died anyway. And then the owner had loved Butterscotch a long while after that. Long enough to put up a clock with a picture of an orange cat on the wall. Or maybe Gale had hung the clock. Maybe she liked cats. And maybe not. The mind wanders when one has nothing to do. Pegasus minds more so than other minds. No pegasus pony should ever be a librarian, her grandmother had told her, just as no hippopotamus should ever be a masseuse. And yet here she was.
She took a break from her act of librarian blasphemy and turned and looked at the clock. Thirty minutes until closing time.
She stood up and stretched and walked away from the desk and up a spiraling staircase. Her hooves clanged on the metal steps. When she reached the top, she stood among more bookshelves. There wouldn’t be any need to tear the pages out of these ones. The books kept on the top floor were the ones no one wanted to read but that had to be kept somewhere because any loss of information would have been considered a grievous loss for all of ponykind, even if that information was only waterfowl migratory routes or former county zoning restrictions, and where else could you put them but in the top floor of a library where no one but the librarians and the recluses and the spiders would ever see them?
Gale wondered, if loss of knowledge of waterfowl migratory routes was a tragedy, what was forgetting what one had eaten for lunch the day before?
Gale didn’t know. She didn’t usually eat lunch.
She walked past the shelves and towards the back corner. The air was cramped and heavy and dusty and lonely. She sneezed.
Gale found her in the corner, the unicorn mare with the nervous laugh, wedged up against the wall near a window, two desks and one table arranged around her, each littered with papers and scrolls and books. The unicorn mare glared down at one particular scroll, mouth set in a firm line, quill and paper at the ready nearby, as if the scroll had recently insulted her mother one too many times and she had decided that a formal essay was the only proper response.
Gale cleared her throat.
The unicorn mare picked up the paper and the quill and went to work defending her mother’s honor.
“Hey,” Gale said.
The unicorn mare didn’t look up or respond, only scribbled on her paper.
Gale thought she probably should have felt offended, but she had never minded being snubbed. Wasn’t any use in it, she figured. But she watched the unicorn for a moment anyway to tell whether she was being ignored or simply unnoticed. Gale would have preferred the former. It took a particular act of will to ignore a pony. It didn’t take anything at all not to notice one.
The unicorn mare had a purple coat and a purple mane and a purple everything else. She was young, younger than Gale by a couple years. Probably a student. Her name was Twilight Something-or-Other, if Gale remembered right. She was cute in a distant sort of way, like a beautiful mare in a classical portrait. Attractive, but very far away from the time and place Gale inhabited. Mysterious, but in an ordinary sense, where Gale could solve the mystery if she wanted, but she knew the mare didn’t want her to, and so she didn’t.
Gale watched her, and Twilight worked, absorbed in her scribbles.
“Hey,” Gale said again, louder.
Twilight blinked and looked around and then saw her. She smiled and laughed her nervous laugh, sounding embarrassed and flighty. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t notice you there.”
“The library closes in half an hour,” Gale said.
“Oh, okay. I’ll try to get everything cleaned up by then.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gale said. “Take your time.”
Twilight smiled again and looked at the window and then looked at her books.
Gale watched her for a moment longer and then reached over and knocked one of Twilight’s stacks of books off the desk. They thumped on the floor.
Twilight looked at her, eyes widening, then narrowing.
Gale looked back and said nothing.
The library was silent.
Gale’s wings twitched.
Maybe Gale did mind being snubbed. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she still wanted to be a theater actress. Maybe Twilight, and not Gale, was the tragedy-in-the-making, the pegasus with a desk job, the actress who couldn’t remember her lines, the librarian who tore pages out of books. Maybe Gale wanted to show her that. Or maybe Gale wanted to see if Twilight would have any reaction at all. Maybe Gale wanted Twilight to be like her. Or maybe Gale was just a mouse backed into a corner, biting ineffectually at the cat’s claws as they hovered ever nearer.
“Excuse me,” Twilight said.
“An accident,” Gale said, and turned and walked away. Her wings settled back fully against her sides. It was colder on the top floor. No use arguing in the cold.
Gale went back down the stairs and to her desk.
The book lay on the desk. A pile of pages lay on the floor. It wasn’t unusual for Gale to tear a page or two out of a book. If novels were meant to be truthful representations of life, they needed gaps, the whitewashed, unknowable spaces that smeared a pony’s memory. They needed the forgotten. So Gale tore pages out of books.
However, she had never torn all the pages out of a book. Tearing out just a few pages from a book meant forgetting just a few things. Tearing them all out meant forgetting everything, the mind going dark, regressing to infancy.
Gale tore out another page.
Behind her, outside the window, the music had gotten louder and livelier.
It had a beat that bounced through the glass and off of every book in the library. Flutes tittered and chirped, violins whined and wept, accordions swelled and howled, guitars strummed and strutted, hooves stomped the ground, and wings rustled and swung. She recognized the melody. Any pegasus from Las Pegasus could recognize that melody. Gale closed her eyes and that way she could smell the sweat and the burn of the alcohol and feel the warm bodies slipping past and around her and the wings of the others brushing under and over and against her own.
She opened her eyes and she was still in the library and she was cold. She listened to the music and thought about her grandmother.
Her grandmother had also been prone to bouts of forgetful artistic destruction. Not books, though. Her grandmother had targeted paintings. Her own, actually. Because her grandmother had been a painter.
Her grandmother had had a blond mane and tail, both the color of a sunflower’s petals. She had been loud and happy and bright. When she had laughed, everyone heard it and knew who had laughed. She had laughed often. She had also painted often. She had told Gale once that she painted to capture permanently the incredibly rare moments in which two ponies discovered some connection between themselves that they hadn’t known of before and would soon forget.
Her grandmother had burned all of her paintings after completing them. Each and every one, sometimes while the paint still dripped, but more often the morning after. Upon waking to find them finished in her studio, she would set fire to the canvas and then go away and prepare her breakfast tea while the wood burned.
Gale asked her once why she burned all of her paintings if they had been created to bestow permanence upon the impermanent.
Her grandmother had told her she burned them because she couldn’t remember painting them, and so she had failed.
The afternoon Gale hugged her grandmother goodbye and moved away from Las Pegasus, her grandmother had been painting an illustration of two mares dancing the tengere, but it had been nothing but big, bold black lines caressing each other, then. One of the sets of lines had been larger than the other. To Gale, the larger had seemed to be strangling the smaller.
Gale looked at the cat-face clock. Butterscotch’s whiskers told her it was time to close the library.
She stood up and walked back up the stairs and into the quiet stacks. She went back to the corner and found Twilight much the same as she had been before. Gale envied her work ethic. She also envied that cute little pink stripe in her mane.
“Hey,” Gale said.
Twilight scribbled and scribbled and scribbled.
“Hey,” Gale said again.
Twilight looked up and frowned. “Oh, is it time already?”
“Yup.”
Twilight bit her lip and looked down at all of her books and scrolls and papers.
“You need more time again?” Gale asked.
Twilight let out her strange, nervous laugh.
Gale didn’t know why, and stayed quiet.
Twilight’s laugh choked in her throat and disappeared. “Um, yes, if you wouldn’t mind,” she said. “I’m so close to finishing. It’ll just be a couple of minutes. I promise I won’t take so long this time.”
“It’s no problem,” Gale said. “Take your time.”
“Thank you! It’ll only be a couple minutes, I promise.”
“Okay.”
Then a loud eruption of laughter and music burst through the closed window from the street below. Twilight glanced at the window and narrowed her eyes. She looked annoyed.
“There’s a festival going on tonight,” Gale said.
“I know,” Twilight said.
“It doesn’t seem like something you would know about,” Gale said, and felt both worried and relieved.
“It’s the Tempest Festival,” Twilight said, sounding like she was reciting a recipe for potato casserole. “It’s a pegasus celebration, mostly. It was only in the past decade or so that it started being celebrated by non-pegasus ponies. It originated in Las Pegasus about a century ago as a celebration of the calming of the Borrasca, one of the largest storms in Equestrian history. But it’s best known for the tengere, a traditional pegasus dance that is only performed once a year.”
“Will you go tonight?” Gale asked, and only felt relieved this time, but a different kind of relieved, because her suspicions were nearly confirmed.
“No, no,” Twilight said. “No, I have too much work to do.”
“Oh,” Gale said. “I’ll be there. After I finish closing up the library.”
“Um, well, I’ll hurry up and finish then,” Twilight said, and turned back to her work.
“I’ll be there,” Gale said again.
Twilight made a noise like a grunt but kept her eyes focused on her books.
“I don’t have anypony to go with,” Gale said.
Twilight said nothing, but her body tensed. This time, Gale could tell for sure that she was being ignored.
“You have a disease. It’s only a disease. Diseases can be cured by things like positive attitudes and love. I read a book once that said so,” Gale wanted to say, but she didn’t. She turned around and walked away and back down the stairs. Her wings rustled then stilled. She heard Twilight’s quill scratching furiously behind her.
Gale went to her desk and sat down. The music still played behind her, but it had slowed down. The rhythm had lulled.
The half-spoiled book still lay open on the desk. Its torn pages still lay in a pile on the floor. Gale went about tearing more pages out of the book and listened to the slow music and to Butterscotch tick-tick-tick behind her and thought about her grandmother again.
Once, years after she had left, she went back to Las Pegasus and visited her grandmother. She went to her grandmother’s studio room first. It was empty except for the same painting of the two mares dancing the tengere. It had been finished. The bold black lines had transformed into two mares. They both had blond manes, the color of a sunflower’s petals. The larger figure did not strangle the smaller figure. They embraced, like lovers, or like family.
Gale left the studio.
She found her grandmother sitting in a chair in the corner of her bedroom, wrapped up in blankets. Her grandmother looked small and tired. Her grandmother didn’t say much of anything or do much of anything. Her grandmother did not laugh. So Gale went through the house and slammed creaky doors, knocked over potted plants that had long since dried and turned brown, kicked down the dust-covered dining room table, picked up and shattered unwashed dinner plates on the kitchen floor, and screamed screamed screamed until her voice went hoarse and her throat burned.
She finished and went back to her grandmother. Gale tried to talk to her. Whatever Gale told her, her grandmother would reply in a quiet and confused voice, That’s nice, dear. Very good to hear. Gale shouted away the last of her voice and cried right in her grandmother’s ears and still all the old pony said was, That’s nice, dear. Very good to hear.
If Gale suggested they go out and do something, anything at all besides sit in that chair in the corner smothered in blankets, her grandmother would say, Too cold. Whatever the temperature and whatever the weather, that was her excuse. Too cold, she said. Too cold. And she drowned herself in blankets and quiet.
It was called wing lock, because the pegasus ponies afflicted with the disease would often lock their wings against their sides and refuse to open them for anything. The muscles in their wings atrophied and the feathers fell away and then they didn’t have wings anymore, only frail, bony stalks that hung off their sides. Eventually, they started to forget things. Ponies’ names. What they ate for lunch. Where they went to school. Where they lived. Where they were or how they had gotten there. They forgot to bathe themselves and they forgot to eat.
No cure had ever been found. It wasn’t a disease like a cold. It was a disease of the mind. Or maybe of somewhere even deeper than that. It wasn’t caught. It was passed down, like mane color or height. It skipped generations. It started when a pony was very young and it started very small. And then it got worse and worse and worse every year. You couldn’t stop wing lock. You could only slow it down.
Gale paused her remembering and her listening and her tearing. She looked down at the book. It only had a few pages left. She flipped it over and read the title.
How to Improve Your Attitude, Your Love Life, and Your Memory in Just 30 Days Guaranteed: The Relationship Between Optimism, Love, and Mental Health.
Gale flipped it back over and tore the rest of its pages out. Then she looked back at Butterscotch, and the old, once-loved-but-not-anymore cat told her it was time to go check on Twilight again.
Gale stood and went back up the stairs. This time, Twilight was standing. She faced away from Gale, looking out the window. Gale stepped behind her and looked out. Outside in the street, lights of many colors shone on the walls of buildings, and musicians played, and many ponies, mostly unicorns, danced. A few groups of three or four, but most of them in pairs. The pairs danced very near each other, often touching, but they did not notice each other. They were only aware of their partners, and their partners were only aware of them. They moved fast and close, and they spun and stomped and stepped lightly and jumped.
“It’s the tengere,” Gale said.
Twilight jumped a little and looked at her, then looked out the window again. “I only need a little more time,” Twilight said. But she kept looking out the window at the dancers.
“Do you want to go down there?” Gale asked.
Twilight let out her nervous laugh again. “I don’t really dance.”
“My grandmother showed me the steps once, when I was very little,” Gale said. “I remember the steps. You need a partner with wings to really do it right. It’s a pegasus dance. Still is. That’s why all those unicorns keep jumping in the air like fish in the bottom of a boat. They don’t have wings.”
“It’s another element of pegasus culture that has been appropriated by unicorns and earth ponies this last decade,” Twilight said. “Princess Celestia says these kinds of appropriations are good for everypony.”
“But if you want to dance the tengere,” Gale said, “you still need a pegasus. Or else you’ll look like a fish in the bottom of a boat.”
Twilight turned away from the window. “I only need a little more time, if you don’t mind.”
“Would you like to dance?” Gale asked again.
Twilight’s eyes widened a little and then she smiled and then she didn’t. “Yeah, but I just couldn’t go down there and try it in front of all those ponies. And I have work to do.”
“Would you like to dance with me?” Gale asked.
“Um.”
“Here,” Gale said, and stepped forward and grabbed Twilight and pushed her up onto her hind legs and Gale stood up on her own hind legs. They balanced precariously. Twilight blushed and her eyes went wide, and Gale felt her own face go hot. She flared her wings. They ached. They were weak. She flapped them lightly to keep both Twilight and herself upright. “That’s why you need a pony with wings,” Gale said.
“Oh.” Twilight still blushed but she didn’t pull away. “Um, what now?”
Gale listened to the music that came in through the window and listened to the beat of the drums and the strums of the guitars and the chirps of the flutes and then stepped in time with them, and Twilight stepped with her, and they were close together. Gale had lied. She didn’t remember the steps. She only remembered the music. She eased into the rhythm with Twilight and stepped with the drum beats and the strumming guitars, and then the violins whined, fast and long, and Gale spun clumsily around Twilight and nearly threw them both into a bookshelf, but Twilight kept up and looked scared and excited. Then the accordions let loose and wailed, quick up and down up and down, and Gale let Twilight loose and swung her about, and she flapped her wings and brought them up and down and knocked over a desk, and papers and scrolls fluttered all around them, and Twilight’s eyes widened and she laughed. They were clumsy and inexperienced and they didn’t know what they were doing, but then it didn’t matter, because they were dancing together, and even if it wasn’t the right rhythm, they were in the same rhythm together. And the drums still beat and the guitars still strummed and the violins still whined and the accordions still wailed, and Twilight still laughed, and the laugh wasn’t nervous. She even laughed as Gale picked her up and then lost her grip and dropped her on the ground, and she laughed on the ground, and Gale fell down too and laughed with her.
They sat on the ground together and laughed and then their laughs dwindled. They looked at each other and breathed hard. Cool sweat slipped down Gale’s face.
“Ow,” Twilight said, catching her breath.
“Sorry,” Gale said. “I haven’t done this in a long time. Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Twilight said, and stood up and laughed again. “That was a lot of fun. Thanks.”
Outside, the music still played.
“I’m going to the festival after I close the library,” Gale said, standing up. “Do you want to come with me?”
Twilight’s breath caught and she suddenly looked very small and tired and smothered. She looked at the window and then looked at Gale and then looked at her desks and papers and books, now disheveled and strewn about. “I’m sorry. I have a lot of work to do tonight.”
“I had to close the library over half an hour ago,” Gale said. “I didn’t do that.”
“I’m…” Twilight frowned. “I’m so sorry. I can’t.”
“I know,” Gale said, and thought about her grandmother again.
“Let me, uh…” Twilight started moving the papers and books around. “Let me at least clean this mess up for you.”
“No, don’t worry about it,” Gale said. “I’ll get it. You go ahead.”
“Oh,” Twilight said. She stood and looked at Gale as if she had forgotten something that she hoped Gale could remind her of. Her mouth moved but she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“I’d prefer if I didn’t,” Gale said. “But I guess I probably will anyway, so see you then.”
“Okay,” Twilight said. She stood for a moment longer and then took her papers and walked away and went down the steps.
Gale stayed and cleaned up the mess. She set all of the papers and scrolls and books back on the desks and table in a way that looked similar to how it had been before. She should have collected them so they could be reshelved, but she knew Twilight would want all the same ones again the next night, so she left them out.
Gale went back down the stairs to her desk. She sat down. She thought about that final visit to her grandmother’s house again.
When Gale had finished screaming in her grandmother’s ears, she had gone back into her grandmother’s studio. She took a match and lit it and held it to the painting of herself and her grandmother. The flame jumped from the match to the painting and then it jumped from the painting onto the floor and then it jumped from the floor to the curtains. The smoke was black and thick.
Gale left the house.
The flames consumed the entire house.
Gale’s grandmother still did not get out of her blankets or her chair. She did not scream or cry out. She did not make any noise. She had died silently, unnoticed.
Now, Gale looked at the pile of torn pages on the library floor. She would get in trouble if the morning librarian found them. She leaned down and spent the rest of the evening folding the torn pages into the shapes of small boats.
She gathered up all of the boats between her hooves and she felt like a mother gathering her children up into a loving, nourishing, protective embrace.
She opened the window. Music and laughter and the clumsy sounds of bodies in motion and the smell of sweat and fried food rushed into the library. She threw the paper boats out the window. They sailed through the air, white, scribbled with black. They reflected the light of the streetlamps below, and they lit up like fireflies, signaling to each other across the empty air between them. They danced. They twirled over and around, swooped underneath each other, leapt across the street like ballerinas. They sailed the currents of the music, shivered in the drums’ rhythm. They flew like butterflies, like doves, like swans. They spread apart and fell onto the ground and were crushed underneath stepping hooves.
Gale closed the window and then closed the rest of the library and thought about Twilight and her grandmother. She figured wing lock could happen to unicorns, too. It was just harder to see without the wings. But the symptoms were all the same. You couldn’t stop wing lock. You could only slow it down. A positive attitude, love, and regular wing exercises was the lie everyone prescribed.
She went outside. Twilight wasn’t there. Gale didn’t know why she had expected her to be, but felt disappointed anyway. She locked the door and walked away. She didn’t walk towards the festival. There wasn’t any use in dancing alone. Besides, it was cold out.