Healthy School Lunches
Apple Bloom woke up and the sun was melting. The pungent aroma of singed, sizzling flesh tickled her nostrils. She blinked, smiling despite the tears curling from her ducts and flowing off her face in wisps of steam. The knowledge of her own mortality was rooted more greatly in her heart than ever, for in mere hours she would feel the prominent, cancerous crispiness from the sun’s sizzling overtake her once and for all.
Her bed was also on fire, but nopony cared about that. She casually ejected herself from her bed, the fresh cries of a thousand suffering souls wafting through her window. Bits of her skin snagged and tore off in the wood of her floorboards. And that was okay. The skin was but one other reminder of this mortal coil. It would grow back. Her unraveling epidermis, so slimy and shining with her own slow-cooking innards produced the achingly rancid snap crackle pop of her own skin.
There was nothing better to help her wake up in the morning. Her melting forelimbs aided in her shuffle across the floor, bit by bit of her being severed in her zombie-like trance. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, the flesh dripping and dropping from her entire skeletal system. The sheer violation of any rightful natural looks for a beast of flesh and bone made Granny Smith look kind of okay, I guess.
Her eyes, wide, puffy, and swollen did not blink back at her. They had not blinked in ages. Their glazed, unholy orbs returned her blank, trance-like stare. The sockets were visible around the droopy, hideous spheres. Their dark pupils were an enigma; they should have been a weepy slush of tissue and other goodies long ago. Her shuffle ensured they made a slurpy-ploppity noise like jelly within her own fleshy prison.
Apple Bloom left her bedroom.
She craved the orange juice.
---
Apple Bloom entered the kitchen as a spectacle of decay. Marking her paths were clumps of her mane, falling to the ground with a burning sizzle like spaghetti that had fallen upon a stove’s surface. These clumps were blackened and grody. Somepony should clean that shit up.
As Apple Bloom turned her head toward the icebox, her loose gums wiggled delightedly, freer than the flap-thingies that some dog breeds have on their faces.
The near-lifeless forms of her family had coalesced into a single form long ago. The joint flesh-beast of Granny, Big Mac, and Applejack quavered most blob-ily. The shared sets of eyes had surpassed the stage where agony could be felt and death was still a yearning.
They hoped for nothing now. Their teeth had long since been plucked by Apple Bloom, who craved that calcium and cocaine and whatever weird shit they put in teeth these days. The after school snack nutritional value of those things was pretty decent.
In previous lifetimes, this amalgamation of a once-loving family had begged Apple Bloom to spare them another day of torment. Now, there was nothing except gaping cavities where mutual mouths had swollen, scabby tongues that lolled out, bearing Apple Bloom’s school supplies with the obedience of a drone.
Beneath layers of salvia was a sticky brown paper bag that would bear the sacred school-time lunch: apple slices, peanut butter arranged in strange symbols, a single pretzel, and thirdhoof kidney stones beneath layers of rubber bands and pre-chewed gums. The local forecast also predicted that a juice box would be in there too; kids love those things.
Apple Bloom shook her jowls and squealed gleefully, her shrill shriek making the family-blob quaver in fear, and the very air vibrates with bad energy. Would their offering be punished this time? From the black maw of Apple Bloom, a thick and vile tongue flopped out, wrapping around the greasy sacrifice with an unnatural prehensile might. Deep within the remaining shards of her soul still tied to this vessel, Apple Bloom could sense the surprise snack packed for her delight within the bag: the scent of pre-chewed bread wads overrode the pungent fear of the beast that her family had been. The acidic stench of so much spit could not mask the uniqueness of long-stale bread made moist with eldritch slobber.
An orange juice appeared through means they could not deduce.
She took that too, the little shit.
---
Apple Bloom trotted to school and only bones stuck out were her legs had been. But those would grow back. They always did. Beneath the thick, rancid slime her blood had become those fragments ached worse than the world dying all around her. Even Apple Bloom’s tongue, which dragged in the dust and flaming surface of the world behind her had lessened torment.
The schoolhouse awaited. Apple Bloom burst in with a howl, mouth unhinged and ready to swallow all that was left of the world and more. Her jowls were slack and a-flapping with the strongest emotion she had felt since this all began. They did not stop shaking long after she entered.
Cheerilee was giving a math test! That means Apple Bloom was late! Oh no! She took her seat, right next to Sweetie Belle (who waved), Scootaloo (who was smiling), Diamond Tiara (who was existing), and Featherweight (whose third eye was not quite open yet, but that’s okay he was trying). Apple Bloom could sit next to as many ponies as she wanted, at any time, and at all hours. That was how seats worked in Ponyville’s schoolhouse. This was the heart of where everything had collapsed.
Things were going to be okay.
Cheerllee rolled her eyes in the way she did when she knew that foals would be foals. She told Apple Bloom to remember not to be late again. But Apple Bloom never remembered.
Things were going to be okay.
They had to be.
Apple Bloom could not close her mouth. Her tongue spilled over the desk like a carpet of deformed taste buds, their pus belching forth even as the dead-eyed Apple Bloom kept it wrapped tightly around the lunch bag.
It was going to be hard to reach her pencil, but she tried anyway.
Cheerilee sat at her desk, humming softly to herself. Sweetie Belle nibbled at the edge of her pencil. Scootaloo did Scootaloo things, and Silver Spoon was still a real pony that existed.
---
Lunch was upon them all, and the students shuffled outside to the playground. The day was sunny. The remaining grass was still green. Cheerilee was also there because she was a single, middle-aged mare who lived a tormented existence. It wasn’t because she was a single, middle-aged mare who had already resorted to dying her gray hair. It was because of the children that surrounded her everywhere. At least the boogers that Truffle Shuffle stuck under all the fillies’ (and Cheerilee’s) desks could be removed.
But removing children was illegal. And that meant that nothing bad could happen to them. Not by Cheerilee’s hoof, anyway.
All the children milled about, sitting with their fellow students and laughing gayly. Apple Bloom and the other Crusaders were being completely normal. Not a single one of them was currently on fire. Instead, all three of them were burning, the eyes of Sweetie and Scoots filled with terror. However, they were being so quiet that Cheerilee knew they could be ignored. She slipped a thick, swirly straw into the clear jar she pulled from her own lunch tote, slurping up all the mayonnaise battery acid she had brought to eat delightedly.
Apple Bloom was so courteous to keep her friends’ screams muffled by wrapping her tongue over their mouths, pressing the life from them gradually before the teeth in her ears’ interiors bared themselves hungrily. In went the limp, dazed forms of Sweetie, Scoots, and other assorted students. Even the grinding of their bones was done with the utmost delicacy, and what parts of them weren’t devoured fell to the ground as pinkish, red, and gray chunks of slippery slurry splats.
Eventually, Apple Bloom wiggled her tongue again. She let it flop around upon the ground and writhe on over to where Cheerilee was slurping her concoction. She wrapped up her teacher with the mighty constriction of the salivatory organ and dragged the helpless mare into her dripping, gaping, slobbery maw. Her gums flapped madly around as she chewed into the mulberry bone and crunched her sinew, shredding it messily in her mouth.
The other students screamed as Apple Bloom corralled them with her tongue, scooping them into her mouth one by one. She chewed them mercilessly, until every one of them was nothing but mash in the maw, being gargled alongside Cheerilee backwash. Then, she spat out the greasy, bone-bit infested mess onto the greasy slob that she was given for lunch by the family she had left. The moist flesh of her classmates poured the proto-bread and squeezed and squelched as she squished it between the two slices.
Apple Bloom bellowed for the peanut butter to her genocide.
There was one other pony on the playground. Bulk Biceps was the biggest kindergartener in Apple Bloom’s class. He sat in the back of the class when he showed up at all. Bulk Biceps only communicated in bellows. Every day he brought the same lunch of protein powder and salsa. He never brought a spoon; he just mixed them together because he was fucking retarded.
Apple Bloom’s tongue seized him; she constricted the incredibly buff colt with her flailing tongue and dragged him into her range of attack as he screamed. Her ripped tongued seeped into his pores, tearing his skin that was so well-cooked by the dying sun. Once the stallion was properly flayed alive, a positively pulpy mess of pain, Apple Bloom sent her tongue into every place that his skin tried to hide, carefully carving up all the peanut butter stored within, past blood and bone.
When she was rewarded with the pleasing condiment, Apple Bloom gulped down the last of the young infant, Bulk Biceps. She stretched her gaping maw around him and slurped him down, crunching and chewing his softened remains the whole time.
She couldn’t wait for school tomorrow!