Hooves Scraping the Sky
The Bluesmare played.
In the warm, wet, cloying air of May flowers that stuck to every coat like a second skin, The Bluesmare’s melody was yet a third; a tangle of sweet, irresistible earcandy that invaded the body and drew the soul inexorably to it.
On foggy nights in Manehattan, when the particles of humidity could be seen clearly by the beams of streetlights, The Bluesmare always played. Her horn was a cry from everywhere, yet her location was always a mystery. As one famous musician once said, she had the power to sing you into paradise, or bring you to your knees. She could take a pony’s very soul and mold it like clay, intensifying joy or sorrow in ways the disinfected halls of the greatest magic academies in Canterlot could never hope to grasp.
A dirty white horse was in the streets. Her coat, sundered yet still gleaming with a color that had no place amidst the fetid vistas of the witching hour, both stood out and was ignored all at the same time. Some ponies raised their brows in recognition of her cutie mark, but none approached. Night-trotters worked their corners with enmity at her passing. Pimps and gigolos assumed she was just another copycat, who had doctored the tattoo of her own destiny to emulate famous horses she could never match. Drunks made unrequited catcalls. Soul savers, bedecked in garish finery, prayed for her to see their light.
Like Prospero drowning his books, she shunned her birthright and allowed the night to engulf her darkened horn wherever she went. So too did she shun the forlorn, obscuring cloaks and hoods that hid the prowling masses in a monastery of debauchery. This was the final leg of her penance - she would neither hide from it nor approach it in splendor.
In her mouth, she bore the burden of her charge - a serene thatched picnic basket, bunted with a lining that bore the pattern of the very stars above.
So many stars. So many nights.
She thought on the patience of the dark. Oh, the patterns churned along with the everpresent ebb and flow of seasons, but it was the dark patches of sky, in-between the lights, that truly moved her. The moody blue and Stygian blackness. As a filly, she would reach a small hoof to the heavens and feel both fascination and fear. Out of the corner of her eye, she always anchored the vista to some tangible terra firma, for fear that if she saw no horizon, she would be pulled into the nothing and vanish, falling at terminal velocity up and up; screaming along into the void until it enveloped her.
It used to terrify her. Now she found it soothing, for at the end of the terror, at the end of her journey, she knew there would be peace. The night, holding her in the weightless tendrils of its womb, would bid her to rest. It would take her warmth. Cool her fire. Forgive her trespass. Bear her on forever, through forever.
She looked away. The stars, insignificant against the ocean of night but still greater than her, jeered away; burned her coat with their accusations. She pretended to like them; singing on grandiose stages in so many cities about their light and life. But the truth was that when their love had turned bitter, she had grown to hate them. They were always watching - always judging. No matter how seedy her underbelly, no matter how deep her vice, her cries for them to stop looking at her were never answered. Even on the days she sought to end it all, they were always there to shame her and make her capitulate to the game of life.
Years ago, she had taken to wearing sunglasses to block them out. Since then she was almost never without the scant protection. Especially in the dark of night.
Around that same time, when she sought to see no evil, she vowed also to hear none. She bound the mischievous ears reaching out from the stylish scraggle of her cobalt mane in a prison of sound. Hums, drums, and beats as constant as her heart.
Not a prison. A fortress.
The less her eyes could see. The less her ears could hear…the deeper her rabbit hole became. Nopony she encountered felt to her as though they were really there. Nodding blankly through conversations, she filled their flapping gums with everything from compliments, to soliloquies, to her favorite song lyrics.
She made versions of the sounds she kept to herself for others to enjoy, and it had raised her to stardom. Gibberish sounds put to a beat like paint on a canvas; they became ‘music’, and she arranged them for adoring fans who screamed litanies of appreciation that would never reach her.
In this way, she found she could go on. Two bits became ten, ten a thousand, until she had far more of them than drops of water in the hot tubs of all her VIP penthouses. In those years, she broke out. Fled from herself. Did whatever she could to feel alive. Feel free.
To feel something. Anything.
How much fire had she swallowed from bottles or inhaled from mirrors just to feel it burn? How many stallions had she allowed to ‘bask in her greatness’? How many mares had done the same? She had given up counting long ago, and why should she? This was her life, and who were the stars to judge what she did with it? She was finally feeling. Finally living. There was nothing wrong with standing on the backs of valets, or making images for the tabloids from her balcony while she told off the sky, if the result was her freedom. The terrified, cocooned filly she once was could go straight to Tartarus. And so could the stars she reached out to.
From everywhere, The Bluesmare spoke. The white horse’s thoughts turned to the days when it all began to end.
One time. One concert. One inebriated embarrassment on stage was all it took to remove her likeness from the binders of schoolfillies and the bedroom ceilings of all but the murkiest of colts. Once they paid her to sing. Then she had to pay them. When the drops in her foreclosed hot tubs ran dry, she paid them with everything else she had that a pony in springtime might want.
She had resented the tiny, fatherless colt at first. He had entered her life without planning or permission - weakening and slowing her, turning her thoughts compulsively to the nest she could no longer afford to build. But the day she met him in a cold, impure back alley clinic and looked into the vermillion exuberance of his innocent eyes, she found her fortress breached. Without the walls she had built, she was naked and helpless against the specter of herself. The heliotropic shades no longer kept the stars at bay. The beats in her ears no longer blocked out the saccharine call of The Bluesmare.
For a time she thought perhaps she could rise again; fly without wings as she had done before. But she had sold herself cheaply, and found that there was no gruel remaining among the tar-streaks left at the bottom of her spirit upon which for him to nurse.
In the present, she turned from the swirling melee of prizefights and street corner junkies, the basket swinging in her teeth. She had one reason left not to join the guttersnipes who left their hooves to waste away on the sidewalk.
The Bluesmare played.
She could hear it clearly now through the haze. The ethereal presence tickled her ears, playing at the nape of her neck. She glanced at the stars, and for the first time she found mollification gathering in the cracks between their spite. She closed her eyes, letting the dampness of the night breeze cleanse her from muzzle to dock. She sighed when it kissed her lovingly in every place she could feel all at the same time.
At length, she found the stairs to the ramshackle brick building that was her destination. It was a runt in the face of its mighty steel brothers all around - its grass overgrown and its swing sets creaking in the breeze. Within though, she could see the light of paradise. Climbing the pitted, welcoming concrete, she stood before the sagging, yet somehow slightly pearlescent gates that she could never cross.
Perdition waited for her. She could feel it in her veins. Every day she felt weaker. Smaller. The days of her life receding back into the earth to be reclaimed by some visceral mistake among the many that she couldn’t remember making.
It was judgement, and she accepted it. But he didn’t have to suffer.
The stars waited in peaceful cessation. Even The Bluesmare fell into quiescence, allowing the dirty, gleaming white horse and her charge their moment. She sat the basket on the porch and pulled back the drape of down-soft quilting she had fished from a dumpster with her teeth.
This small hoof didn’t reach for the sky. It reached for her.
Lighting her horn for the last time, she let him giggle and marvel at the glow before levitating her once cool shades off her face and setting them in the basket beside him. The headphones were long since pawned. It was all she had left to give.
She felt old beyond her years. Emitting a raspy, unclean cough, she turned the eyes that matched his away until his gurgle and the soft brush of his hoof on her muzzle brought her back to him. In a derelict voice, she sang.
It was a tune she had always known. That he too, now, would always know--
“Goodnight, somepony,
Goodnight, my love,
Sleep tight, somepony,
Sleep tight, my love.
Our hooves are scraping the sky tonight,
For goodnight, my love, for goodnight.
Sweet days, be yours, dear,
All days you see,
Each day will carry you closer to me.
I wish you’d stay, for just one more night,
But goodnight, somepony, goodnight.
My love will trot with you all through your life,
Though we may be parted this day,
But I will remember the scent of your mane
As long as my heart doesn’t know your new name.
Sweet days, be yours, dear,
All days you see,
Each day will carry you closer to me.
I wish you’d stay, for just one more night,
But goodnight…somepony…”
“Good--”
He cooed. He smiled.
Rapping her hoof on the gates heavily enough to be heard, she turned and fled, alone, back down the short path of the rest of her life at full gallop. She would kick up the blighted dust until she outdistanced her tears. Even if she had to run forever.
The Bluesmare shared her passion with the night.