The following story is about 4 different generations of mothers and daughters and the conflicts they encounter in Equestria. This story is told throughout 9 vignettes that are "out of chronological order," which makes the story complex but enjoyable.
The following story is written in 9 sets of vignettes, or short scenes. The story depicts of four mares, all of them mothers and daughters of different generations, and the conflictions that each generation of mares face. This story is told out of chronological order, and the setting of each scene shifts back and forth unexpectedly, and yes this makes the story have a high complexity level, however this is what makes the story unique and gives readers a chance to express their own interpretations of the story. To follow along pay attention to places, events, and the personalities and interests of the characters.
She is often sitting upstairs, in her room, at times when she has to be at home, however she would rather be elsewhere. She is almost at the age of 16, though her breast size still humble, a mare’s mind indignantly captive in the frame of that of a child. I love to stroke her soft and fuzzy fur, but I do not dare to do such a thing. Just the other day, she came down with a case of the flu, and I gave her a gentle back massage to comfort her, as I did I marveled at her small and nimble body.
She is so graceful, yet when she sleeps she sweats like a stone in the wall of a well. She strives for perfection. This is what makes her want to destroy us, for we are too fat, too jocular, too sloppy, to affectionate, too grotesque in our ways of unicornism. Her father smokes his pipe too much. Her younger brother chews with his mouth wide open, getting food all over his snout and mane. Her older sister puts on the most revealing and erotic of dresses to impress the stallions around Ponyville.
Everyone in the house talks of nonsense. She would be a better mother than her mother, but time has tricked her, and made her a daughter. After an argument or fight, if she is not allowed to go out practice her flying techniques, she goes off into the corner of the house and sinks into the beanbag chair in an attitude of strange torpor. We overtire her without meaning to.
She takes interest in the newspaper now, reading of races that will part take soon in celebration of the 1000st Summer Sun Celebration.
She is in her room, writing a musical composure. It is 4 days before the 972nd Summer Sun Celebration and she has volunteered to write a musical for an assembly that will take place in her high school. As new lyrics and musical notes pop into her head she levitates her quill, dips it into the bottle of ink, and writes it down in her journal. In the adjacent room irksome voices, her parents want something from each other once again.
“You just don’t understand her like I do, she has a heart of gold. “
Her mother’s act is very complicated: the world, of which she fears, is used as a whip on her husband, but from her cringing attitude she would seem to an outsider to that of the one being whipped. The stallion takes the role of the aggressor as penance for the fact, the incessant shame fact, that she is the one who wrestles with the real world while he stays indoors, at home. Only by convolution have they accepted the roles in which society has made for them. They continue to argue and bicker, their daughter tries not to listen, but when he cannot block out them, images of what is part taking storms his mind: the two antagonists, circling each other, surrounded by out of date furniture, while docile framed photos of past generations hang on the wall.
This matrix of pain that bores her, she feels as if she is floating above it, spread out on the bed, writing down songs that comes to her head, contemplating the view from her window, waiting and hoping for tomorrow when she can trot off to school, yearning for the bell that will call her to homeroom, for the excitement of class, for the day she becomes famous for her musical work at the Grand Galloping Gala, for the opportunity that will carry her away, out of this, out.
She returns from her paper-delivery route and finds some Hearth’s Warming Eve presents arranged out on the table in the kitchen. Without opening them she knocks them off with a single swoop of her hoof and knocks them to the ground, and lays her head on the table and within minutes falls asleep. She must have been consciously dramatizing her plight: Her mother was sick, bits were scarce, she had to work, to get food for the family, even though she was still a child. She mourned for the next Summer Sun Celebration which was the 937th when apples were at the lowest of prices.
While in her dismissal of Hearth’s Warming Eve, she touched a nerve: her love for anarchy, her distrust of social contract. She treasured these moments of revolution; but why remember such bitter memories and confide to her daughter many Hearth’s Warming Eves later? She had a teaching instinct, though she would later claim that life she lived miscast her as a schoolteacher.
I suffered in her classes, feeling the confusion as a persecution, but now wonder if her rebellious heart did not court confusion, not as the Crystal Imperials once did, as Sombra’s order, but, more radical still, as an end pleasurable in itself, as truth’s very body. Yet her handwriting, though one of an Earth Pony’s, is considered legible, and she was sitting up grading school work the morning of her death.
And letters survive from that yet prior daughter, written in brown ink, with the elegance of a unicorn, home to her father from the Appleoosa worship of Celestia and Luna seminary where she was preparing for her vocation. The papers date back to the Summer Sun Celebrations of 912. Nothing much happened: She missed Canterlot, and was teased at a worship social for escorting a widower. She wanted to do the right thing, but the sheets of faded penscript exhale a dispirited calm, as if her heart already knew she would not make a successful worshiper, or live to her elderly years.
Her daughter, my mother, when old, took a train all the way to Appleoosa to visit the town from which those letters been sent. Strangely, the town had not changed; it looked just as she imagined, from her mother’s letters: tall wooden houses, stacked on a bluff. The town was a sepia postcard mailed homesick home and preserved in an attic. My mother cursed: Her mother’s old sorrow bore her down into depression. My father claims her decline in health began at that moment.
She is wonderful to spectate, flying around with wings extended at the maximum wingspan. My daughter twists, turns, flips, and maneuvers gracefully through the air trying at her fullest capability to win the race. When another pegasus slams into her, she tumbles off course into the clouds getting her mane mangled, and messing up her number she wears to represent herself in the race, in an ecstasy of falling.
I am envious. Never for me the jaunty pride of a number, the solemn ritual of the coach’s pep talk, the camaraderie of shook hooves and clopped backsides, the shadow-striped hush of a late afternoon and last lap, the solemn vaulted universe of official combat, with its cheering mothers and father, and the bespectacled time keeper alert with his claxon. When the girl passes the lead pegasus and wins the race, she flies to her fellow teammates with hooves outstretched and her face alight as if blinded by triumph. They cheer her name, What spirit! What valor! What skill!
Her mother, watching from the sidelines, inwardly registers only one complaint: She feels the girl, with her talent, should be more aggressive.
They bussed across the Commonwealth of Equestria to hear their daughter’s orchestra in Canterlot, but when their presence was announced to the audience, they did not stand; the applause groped for them and died. My father said afterwards he was afraid he might fall into the next row if he tried to stand in the dark. Next morning was sunny, and the three of us searched for the house they once shared. They had been happy there; I imagined, indeed, that I had been conceived there, before my parents could no longer afford to live in the luxurious capitol due to sickness of my mother, fear gripped my family to move away to Hoofington.
We found the library where my father used to read the most famous of poets and authors, and the little park where the bums slept close as paving stones in the summer night. We trotted to a tree my father claimed to recognize, the sooty linden tree he would gaze into from their house windows. The branches, though thicker, had held their pattern. But the house itself, and the entire block, was demolished to create a chain of stores and such. We stood on the crowded walkway and laughed. They knew it was right, because the railroad tracks were the right distance away. In confirmation, a long train pulled upped around the curve from the east side, its great weight gliding as if on a river current.
We stood on street side, where something once had been, beside the tree still there, and were intensely happy. Why? We knew.
“No,” Mother said to me, “ The Worship of Celestia and Luna ministry isn’t a job you choose, it’s a vocation for which you have to receive a call.”
I could tell she wanted me to ask her. We rarely talked much, but we understood each other, we were both sacred devils, not like you and the kid. I asked her, had she ever received the call. That was a terrible thing for her to admit, and I was the only one she told. As far as I knew she never admitted it to anybody, but she admitted it to me. That was all we ever said about it. That was enough.
She had made her younger sister cry, and justice must be upheld. A mother in this household must be the one to enforce justice. I corner the rat into our bedroom; she is holding a broom in her mouth like a sword. The challenge flares white-hot, I roll my weight towards her, and knock the weapon from her magical grasp. She smiles, because my facial expression is silly? Because she is glad that she can still be overpowered by an Earth Pony, and hence is still protected?
I do not hit her. We sit there a second, mother and daughter, and then, as nimbly as in the air passing a fellow racer in a race, she flaps over me. The gush of wind she created flying down the hallway slams her door shut. She shouted obscenities all throughout the hallway while retreating to her room. Our moment of smilingly shared silence was the moment of compression; now the explosion, the whole house rocks with it. Downstairs, her siblings and father come to me and offer advice and psychological analysis.
I was too aggressive. She is spoiled. What they can never know, my grief alone to treasure, was that lucid many-sided second of her smiling and my relenting, before the world’s wrathful pantomime of power resumed.
As we huddled whispering about her, my daughter takes her revenge. In her room she levitates her bow and viola and begins to play. She has greatly improved this winter. She has found in the viola, an escape. She plays a depressing song that begs of the day she will leave this "place."
The notes fall, so gently she bombs us, drops feathery notes down onto our perked up ears, our visitor, our prisoner...
