Real Sand on a Fake Beach
Delta Vee raised the beer can to her lips and took a long swig. Carbonated bubbles tickled her tongue.
“Sun goes up, sun goes down. Ponies follow.”
She set the can down. A trail of condensation clung to her hooftips. She traced a figure-eight into the lacquered bartop and felt the cold melt away into the hazy heat of late summer.
“That’s the way the world works. Nothing can change it. Ponies come and ponies go, and sometimes they come back and sometimes they stay gone. Sometimes they come back, but only in your mind. In your memories. They come and go, and sometimes they stay but most of the time they don’t. It’s back and forth, and... and...” Delta Vee looked beside her. “Hey kid, do you need some more juice?”
Delta Vee’s daughter, Apogee, sat beside her. She swung her legs swung back and forth impatiently beneath her. Despite being almost fifteen, she still couldn’t reach the bottom of the barstool. In her hooves was an empty plastic bottle of orange juice.
“Hey, bartender.” Delta Vee waved her hoof in the air. No one answered. She looked around and found they were the only two ponies in the bar. “Oh.”
If ever there was a bar to leave a customer like Delta Vee alone with all the booze, it would be the Sunshine Daydream. Wood-paneled walls melted into sagging booths and a single long bartop stretching the length of the building. The ceiling, once made of tin, had been replaced several years ago with mud and palm fronds. It leaked horribly in the rain, but Delta Vee knew which seats to avoid when the weather turned ugly.
There was only one wall, facing the street. The other three sides were open to a spectacular view of the Sunshine Daydream’s crown jewel: an outdoor lake the size of an olympic swimming pool, complete with eleven hundred lengths of fake shoreline, with white sand ripped straight from the scenic West Shoals coastline, and water pumped in from the sewers.
Delta Vee flicked on a pair prescription aviator shades and looked outside. “Where’d that bartender go?”
“It’s alright,” Apogee said, a patient smile on her face. “I’m not thirsty.”
“I’m not drinking alone.”
“I can’t drink.”
Delta Vee laughed. She spared one final glance around the bar before leaning over the counter and swiping a bottle of ginger beer. “There you go.”
Apogee sighed and cracked it open. “Thanks, mom.”
They were at the Sunshine Daydream bar completing a weekly ritual that had haunted them since Apogee re-entered Delta Vee’s life.
Every Friday, Delta Vee would pick Apogee up from school and drive to the bar. Sometimes, Apogee would run around on the beach chasing wary scavenger birds while Delta Vee sat at the bar and watched. Sometimes, it was sandcastles. Sometimes, it was stories of rocketry and crazy college antics.
Mostly, Apogee kept Delta Vee company at the bar, chatting about silly high school drama and doing homework. There was never a shortage of homework. Far more than Delta Vee ever remembered doing.
Of all the classes Apogee had, her favorite was physics.
Apogee sighed and cracked it open. “Thanks, mom.”
Delta Vee smiled and raised her beer. “To us.”
“To us.”
A line of foam lingered on Delta Vee’s upper lip. Hops and barley and fake seafoam mingled in a pleasantly numbing smell.
“So where’s your homework today?” Delta Vee asked.
“I don’t have any.”
“Not even physics?”
“No. Especially not physics. Our homework is to watch tomorrow’s launch.”
“Should be exciting.”
“No kidding!” Apogee bounced in her seat. “They’re sending a bunch of famous ponies up again. My teacher said each seat cost five million dollars, and you had to know ponies to get in the waitlist. I don’t have five million dollars, but I know ponies.”
“Oh yeah? Who do you know?”
“I know you, and my teachers, and my friends, and dad. I know a whole lot of ponies. So I’m basically halfway there.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“Go to the moon?”
“No, get famous and know the right ponies.”
Apogee shrugged. “I’d rather go to the moon. But the moon’s not even that cool. I want to go to Venus.”
“Venus? Why Venus? It’s pretty dangerous there.”
“Yeah, but it’s dangerous on Mars too, and we’re sending ponies there all the time.”
Delta Vee made a show of retreating deep into thought. “Venus’s surface temperature is nine hundred degrees. How would you survive that?”
“Easy. Don’t go all the way down. If we could install a floating base in the upper atmosphere like a giant hot air balloon, we could float there without having to deal with the weather on the surface. We can recycle gas from the atmosphere for the balloons, and the temperature wouldn’t be so bad, and the atmosphere wouldn’t crush us or make our bones all funny like they get on Mars. It’s so much better!” She rocked back and forth in her stool. “I should be in charge of EASA.”
Delta Vee frowned. “You will be.”
“Honestly, I don’t know why dad hasn’t talked to his bosses about it.”
A pinprick of hate snuck through the otherwise serene scene and pierced Delta Vee’s heart. She kept an even expression. “Who knows.”
Curse Apogee’s intelligence. She could see right through Delta Vee’s facade. “You okay, mom?”
“Never better.”
“Are you upset cuz I think Venus is cooler than Mars? I didn’t mean it, I’ll take it back. Mars is cool too.”
“I think it’s great you think Venus is cooler than Mars. When you grow up, you tell those EASA nerds what you told me. You’re tougher than them. They’ll listen.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
The summer heat and the beer combined to play tricks on Delta Vee’s mind. The drone of the fake ocean fell away, replaced by the familiar thrum of a car’s engine.
Apogee heard it too. She turned her head towards the door.
An older man, tall and broad with a salt and pepper buzzcut, strode into the bar.
Apogee leapt off her stool. “Dad!” she shouted, and careened into him at top speed. He hardly wavered, picking her up and spinning her around until she shrieked with laughter.
“You ready for tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yesyesyesyes!”
“I’m technically not allowed to say this, but I hear your Venus proposal went over very well with my boss.”
“He looked into it?”
“No, but he liked that you looked into it.”
She blew a raspberry. “That doesn’t count.”
“It counts for more than you know. Trust me.” He set Apogee down and took a halting step towards the bar. “Delta Vee.”
“Jet.”
“She shouldn’t be in here.”
“There’s no harm.”
“You said we were gonna meet at your place. I waited there for half an hour.”
“Oops.”
Apogee bit her lip and backed towards the door.
“Oops isn’t okay. This kind of behavior won’t fly if we’re going to make this work.”
“Oh, my behavior won’t fly?”
Jet ran his hoof through his hair. “Have a good night, Delta Vee. I’ll have her back on Monday.”
Delta Vee took another swig of her beer.
Jet Stream took Apogee’s hoof and together they walked towards the door. Delta Vee watched them out of the corner of her eye, swirling her beer at the bartop, trying to pick out the smells of hops and barley from the dry air. The beer was going flat by now. Soon it would be undrinkable. She’d wait until they left and make her way over to the fake beach and pour it into the sand and watch it clump up and kick the clumps and watch them fly apart in mid air like tiny pieces of an exploding rocket and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t care one bit. Not. One. Bit.
But before she could do that, she noticed Apogee pause by the door. She whispered something into Jet’s ear. He said something back and nodded.
He continued out the door while Apogee ran back towards Delta Vee. She wrapped her up in a big hug, all but knocking Delta Vee out of her stool.
“See you Tuesday, mom.”
“See ya, kid.”
“Love you.”
“...Thanks.”
“Can I ask what was wrong earlier?”
Delta Vee looked forlornly into her daughter’s eyes. “Kid, I’m just jealous you’ll get a better view of the rocket than me.”
Apogee looked over her shoulder uncertainly. “Dad could get you a ticket too. We could all be there together and watch the rocket go off. Just the three of us.”
“Never in a million years.”
“I really want you to go. Dad and I already talked this over. Please?”
Curse this heat. Delta Vee looked out towards the fake beach and saw the sun beginning its descent towards the horizon. It glowed like an afterburner, burning fuel, spilling fire. Pushing her.
She turned her attention back to Apogee. “They’re sending ponies to Mars all the time now, right?”
“Right.” Hope bloomed in her eyes.
“Let’s wait ‘til another launch.”
Apogee sulked back to Jet’s car, a sleek black Cadillama sedan with chrome finishing, and slumped into the passenger’s seat.
“Sorry, kid,” Jet said. “Maybe next time.”
“Dad, does she hate us?”
“Of course not. She just needs you to be patient with her. Did you say I love you?”
“Yeah.”
The car came to life with a sophisticated roar. Apogee knew dad liked that sound, but to her it wasn’t quite as impressive as the sound a rocket made.
“There’s another launch next month,” Jet said. “Think you can wear her down by then?”
“I’ll find a way.”
Jet leaned across the console and kissed Apogee on her forehead. “You always do.”
Just like she was afraid of, Delta Vee’s beer went flat. She took the remainder out to the fake beach and dumped it into the sand.
She stood there for awhile, staring up into the sky. As the sun dropped lower and lower, a few stars peered out from behind the early twilight veil.
She wondered what it would be like to be one of those famous ponies with five million dollars and lots of good connections. The ones who didn’t have any special talents other than perhaps being beautiful and likeable, the ones who divorced the right person or invested blindly at the right time. By this time tomorrow, they would see the sky as it truly was. Black and white. No colors. No summer haze. Just endless black, and light.
She wanted to be up there. She wanted to fly. She wanted to shed a light on all the dark things she couldn’t reach.
If Delta Vee could hang a light on every regret borne out of love and every love borne out of regret, her canvas would be like the sky at night, and Apogee would be the moon.