As the Last Hope Is Doused, Laugh and Carry On
You can be my hero by not letting me down,
Not letting me down, and being around.
It is a warm July evening. The table is already set for the dinner. An oak-handled blade rests on the edge of the table. Like everything else in the household, it is plain and cheap, but cared for, razor sharp and cleaned until it shines.
It is resting at the edge of the table when Inkie spins to buck her father. He staggers, as much from surprise as the impact, and strikes the table. He falls, the knife falls, the whole world falls to pieces.
The blade strikes his chest, and his chest strikes the ground. The blade drives up into his flesh. Blood stains the freshly mopped floor.
Inkie stares at the thing she has done.
No! She didn't. It was an accident. It was an accident when you kicked him as hard as you could? No. It was an accident when you started arguing with him about your grades? No. Well, was it an accident when you set the table and placed the knife and cutting board for the bread on the edge? No.
Her father's blood creeps toward her like the tendrils of some undersea beast.
The last murder in their small town was over 200 years ago. The building where it happened is still commemorated with a mural of the unicorn, curls of smoke rising from his horn, standing on the opposite side of a poker table from the collapsing earth pony.
Her knees are as weak as when she first tried one of her sister's cigarettes.
When ponies are being gossipy, as ponies in small dying towns always are, they call Inkie and Blinkie "Trottingham Twins." That means Inkie was conceived during the foal estrus left in the wake of her sister. They are 11 months apart in age. Their favorite month is July, because in July they are the same age.
It is July, four years before her father will be found dead on the kitchen floor with his windpipe crushed and a knife jutting from his chest. Blinkie is sitting at the kitchen table, grumpily chewing her pancakes.
Inkie bounds into the room and throws a card on the table. "It's my birthday!"
The card left under her pillow will be the only celebration of the day, but it is her first and she has been anticipating it for over a month.
Blinkie only grunts in reply.
"Now we're the same!" Inkie clarifies, trying to force her enthusiasm on her sister.
The more mature sibling only responds by swatting at the nuisance. She is in a foul mood. Inkie was too old to share her parents bed, and there were only three bedrooms in their farmhouse, so Blinkie had to give up half of her room to the squirt.
It wasn't fair. She was just a couple months from entering school, and here she was being saddled with the baby of the family. Their father had built an extension on the house so the oldest sister could have her own room, why was she forced to bear this indignity?
"We're not the same. I'll be older than you again next month."
Two years later, it is a warm July night. Blinkie stands, alone, in the quiet church beneath the statue of Celestia. The Princess is reared up on her hind legs, her wings thrust out to either side. Along the edges of the room, there are nothing but shadows. There are no sounds, other than the tapping of her hooves as she stands. In the Reformed Church her family belongs to, a filly's first night of estrus is spent in prayer.
She will stand the entire night, reading the Book of Meditations.
Once, when the town was larger and faith was stronger, there would have been a group of fillies, two or three at least. Blinkie's mother still writes to the mare who stood the vigil with her. Shivering in the warm dark, forging a bond that has lasted for years.
But faith is not so valued anymore and the town has continued to shrink as first the railway station and then the dog food factory closed. Blinkie must stand her vigil alone. Shadows dance around her. Her body aches, her mind charges violently against the restraints of will. Her tail twitches in time with her brain; thoughts of the colt who sits behind her in class spasm from one end of her mind to the other.
Sweat over her skin, hormones under it. She must learn discipline. She must be like her parents. She stares at the page before her and forces her mind to know the meaning of sacrifice.
She wonders how her eldest sister withstood it, but Pinkie Pie was never alone. She probably spent the whole night rattling her machine gun mouth at the statue of Celestia, bouncing up and down in the spot where she was supposed to stand.
Blinkie could see it in her sister's eyes during services. Perhaps a bit irreverent, but her love was undeniable. If she'd stayed in town, she would have become a youth minister. The sort who irritate the older church-goers by convincing the pastor to let them replace the organ with an electric guitar every couple months.
Blinkie doesn't feel that love. She just feels alone.
Twenty-two months before her Estrus Vigil and two months after having her sister forced into her room, Blinkie leaves with her older sister for the school.
The building, like everything else in their town, is a ruin of past times. A line of ants crawls along the cracked window frame by her seat. Since she was born in July, Blinkie was just barely old enough to be enrolled, and she had fought her parents the entire summer to keep them from holding her back a year. The thought of entering school at the same time as her baby sister was unbearable.
Blinkie is the only filly who enrolled this year. Pinkie tries to help her sister fit in, but her obliviousness to sarcasm or hostility of any kind makes her less than useful.
When Blinkie is let out after lunch, first year students only take half days, she disobeys her parents orders to wait in the playground for her sister. The thought of sitting there for three hours, of knowing the other students are staring at her through the windows is unbearable. Instead she walks home by herself.
She enters the room she now shares with her sister and throws her saddlebag at the wall. The reading book falls out, reminding her of how she'd stumbled over a simple passage and nearly cried in front of all those eyes.
Her legs collapse under her, but she can't break eye contact with that stupid, smiling filly.
Inkie says nothing to her sister. She rests her chin upon the grey shoulder of her older sibling and exhales slowly. Blinkie feels the warmth spread through her like the July sun.
The next July, Blinkie is standing in the sitting room, staring at a shattered vase. There aren't many nice things in their house, as much due to the dourness of their family as their finances. This particular vase had been a wedding gift from their Ponyville relatives.
Guilt and fear start in the pony's legs, crawl toward her stomach, itch the back of her nose, and finally seek release from her eyes.
Inkie follows the sound of sobbing to her sister. She reaches a hoof out to stroke her sister's mane and whispers, "don't do that."
Blinkie has eyes only for the destruction in front of her, "I didn't mean to, it was just … Father said no more playing in the house … but I … I'll be grounded forever."
Inkie's ears dip. Then, she turns away. Slowly, her leg stretches out toward a lamp beside the couch. The sisters watch the limb move, as if it were an alien creature. A force neither of them could hope to control slides the decoration toward the edge.
The lamp shatters on the ground. Bright red glass dances for an instant against the sunlight coming in from the window. Inkie smiles even as she hears the stamping hooves of retribution rushing toward them.
"See? Now we're the same."
They are grounded for the entire month of July. Their favorite month is July, because in July they are the same.
The next July, they are different. Blinkie restlessly stamps as she reads. The darkness of the church is barely illuminated by a flickering candle. Her thoughts, barely contained, are interrupted by a separate set of hooves. She turns her head to see the dark gray mane of her sister emerging from the shadows.
"You're not supposed to be here," Blinkie hisses.
"I couldn't sleep without you in the room, and you can't sleep here, so I figured we may as well not sleep together."
"But it isn't your time yet." There was an age, gray and faded, when the word unclean would have been applied, but that time is past. This is now just another rite of passage. It was only Blinkie's desperate, embarrassed pleading that kept Pinkie Pie from inviting the entire town to an Estrus Vigil Party.
Soon, Blinkie will heed the urgings of her body and leave home. She'll settle down away from her sister. They will forge separate families and write to each other, like their mother and her friend who haven't seen one another in almost two years.
The distracted thoughts of the older sister are interrupted when Inkie slams into her. She rubs her fur aggressively against her sister's pheromones. The sensation is strong and strange, and Blinkie has to fight the urge to bite or kick her sister in protest.
"See?" Inkie says, her body now reeking, "Now we're the same."
They spend the rest of the night together, trading the stupid, insular jokes that define religious communities and arguing about which boy is the cutest. At the prodding of dawn's blood-red hooves, Inkie slips out the back doors of the church and into the July morning.
Before throwing her first party, Pinkie Pie had bought the phonograph and a few records. Their parents weren't against music, they just didn't see any use for it. Fortunately for Pinkie, there wasn't much in their rural town to spend her small allowance on, so she had enough stored away. This was before the harvests had gotten scanty, and allowances had started to dry up.
When she left for Ponyville, she took her music and enthusiasm with her. A single record had been left behind. "Fight Like The Night," an awkward song, hardly fit for a party.
Without a phonograph, the remaining Pie sisters had been forced to improvise. A roll of paper, a paper clip, and a hoof-crank. One sister turns the record while the other dances.
It isn't an easy song to dance to. The sisters practice for months, finding the complex weave of the chords and the stuttering rhythm of the drums.
You fight like the night; weakness is my guide.
I'm walking a dark road; I'm running out of time.
Their father doesn't like the song, but he never says so openly. Instead, he mutters about nihilism under his breath and continues his steady, plodding march through the life that began in the master bedroom he now shares with his wife, and will end on the kitchen floor.
Blinkie looks "nihilism" up in the dictionary, and it soon becomes her favorite word.
It is ten months before Inkie's father will die beside the kitchen table with a knife jutting from his chest. Inkie waits in the playground for her sister to get out of class. Students in their final year of school have an extra half hour tacked onto the end of the day for Social Values. The prosperity brought to Equestria by the guidance of the Princess, the importance of harmony, unity, and all the other background noise of existence.
Blinkie comes out, waving goodbye to a few friends. The elder sister already has a cigarette dangling from her lips. It is rare for non-unicorns to smoke, most find the challenge of manipulating lighters with their hooves and drawing the cigarette straight from the pack with their teeth too difficult. Blinkie has never backed down from a challenge, however.
Only last month, she had reached the age of majority. The last hurdle before she is a mare looms: Graduation. Then marriage or moving away to a distant city, following in the wake of their eldest sister.
Inkie is still underage, she and her sister will not be the same for another ten months, but she takes a cigarette anyway. She doesn't like the irritation in her throat, and coughs. The smoke makes her feel light-headed and makes knees wobble, as if her legs might give out and her body, instead of falling down, would drift up into the sky.
She doesn't like it, but they are the same.
It is the year after Blinkie's Estrus Vigil, and the year before Inkie will murder her father with a kitchen knife. Inkie and Blinkie had always shared the same room, until Pinkie Pie left. As Blinkie's birthday present, they gave her Pinkie Pie's old room. She would never have to share her space with her sister again.
Inkie has never slept alone in her life, and spends the entire night crying. Blinkie paces aimlessly, uncertain of her new cage.
Their parents are inflexible. It isn't right for a growing mare to be crammed into the same space as her sister. Their father had built the extension on the house because he had been forced to grow up crammed into the same room as his brothers and sisters. Their mother had known similarly tight spaces, being forced to smell the individual reeking of all five of her siblings until she was old enough to marry out of the one room shack she'd grown up in.
So, the second night Blinkie slips into her sister's room with a sleeping bag. She lays on the floor. The next night, Blinkie sleeps in her sister's room. It is their secret, that they are the same.
It is a warm July night, probably the last July the sisters will be the same. Inkie retrieves a pot from the top shelf and rests it on the stove. She has taken over the responsibility for dinner while her mother is in the market. Hard years have forced her mother to start a stall there, trying to push homemade trinkets off on passing ponies.
The father enters the kitchen, sweat still shining on his body from a day in the fields. He spits a report card out onto the table. Inkie's penultimate year is there, writ large in a consonant language of D's, C's, and a single F.
A shouting match begins. The report card is the subject, but it is simply an excuse for both ponies to unleash their frustration at something, anything.
"If you want to be ignorant, you can work in the field and be productive!"
"It's a rock farm! How hard is it to find fucking rocks?! Rocks don't even grow!"
He takes an outraged step forward, "How dare you. How dare you." This last insult is too much to bear. He has never struck his daughters before, but he can feel his hoof rising, and then it happens.
He wins. He forces his hoof back to kitchen floor. He grinds his teeth as he resolves to give the matter of punishment over to his wife's cooler head.
Unfortunately, as soon as he stepped forward, Inkie had spun. She can't see her father backing down, only hears his hoof strike the floor behind her and knows he is in range. Her back hooves crash into his chest. He stumbles. The knife, which has been patiently awaiting this moment for six years, falls.
When Inkie turns back around, she sees her father laying in a spreading pool of blood. Anger clears from her head as she watches him gasp. She should go to him, try to help him.
Her knees are weaker than when she smoked with her sister, weaker than when she was a foal. She collapses to the ground, and the red spreads across the floor to reach her. It stains her gray fur and mane while she sobs.
Blinkie enters the house and hears her sister sobbing. She follows the sounds to where sister is kneeling before the destroyed father.
Her hoof reaches out to touch her father's mane, to move it out of his eyes. They twitch open. Blood leaks from his mouth and he gasps to speak, but can make no words. His eyes are rolling back into his head. It is too late to go back now.
Slowly, her leg stretches out toward his exposed throat. The sisters watch the limb move, as if it were an alien creature. A force neither of them could hope to control compresses the throat, squeezes the last remnants of life from it.
Between ground and hoof, the father's throat breaks. His legs spasm in the air, like a bug at the end of summer. Blinkie smiles at her sister as tears brim in her ears.
Then he is gone.
"Don't cry," it is the eldest's first time to say this. She sweeps her hoof through the blood pooling on the floor, and rubs a streak of it across her forehead. "See? Now we're the same."
The sisters play the record one last time before fleeing into the fading, July sun.
You can be my hero by crawling into the rut
Crawling into the rut with me, and holding my chin up.