Traces
The house was empty.
She knew it had been for quite some time. The presence of a pony leaves traces; afterimages that hang in the air for long after they leave. Olfactory ghosts, trace hairs on the floor, the tiny bit of the self left behind on a wall that found itself temporarily repurposed as a rather immobile crutch - they all combined to paint a picture, woven into the atmosphere itself. If one was skilled, or gifted with a particularly sensitive nose, they could trace the path an individual had taken during their stay in the house. Some could even make a rough estimate as to how long they’d stayed in certain areas.
She didn’t consider herself skilled. But when she was younger, back when the wells of energy that seemed to flow into her paws never ran dry, that didn’t stop her from trying to be. The first time she’d awoken to an empty house, when the traces of her family had long since faded and the not-barks that permeated the background hum of the world had been substituted for silence, true, empty silence, she had roamed the halls for hours, nose to the ground and tail between legs, searching for a sign of where they’d gone. Success was… limited. Occasionally, she’d pick up a trail, follow it happily, excitedly, and run snout-first into a closed door, one which no amount of whining seemed to open. Other times, it’d double back on itself, and she would realize that she didn’t know if she’d been following the movement forwards, backwards, or both ways at the same time. Scents would fade to nothing, or be obscured by something much stronger (and proportionally, much more useless), and she’d have to start from the beginning.
This routine would last for hours. On rare occasions, days. And in her youth, every second was an hour, every hour a week, and the emptiness grew with an exponential aggression. An outside observer would call it anxiety. But an outside observer wasn’t privy to the world she was, the enhanced senses she had, and as such, they couldn’t sense the growing void. They couldn’t smell the traces of her family fading, vanishing from the air, with no promise of a return…
There were two places where the scents didn’t fade. She had her bed, of course, but it was seldom used when the house was empty. The larger, softer beds that the ponies occupied; not only were they vastly superior (if only because they fell under the label of the forbidden), but the traces never faded from their sheets. Occasionally, they’d be stripped from the bed, and when they were replaced, the scent would be gone, replaced by a chemical stench, but it only took one night of rest to reinstill the traces. The linens didn’t hold a promise so much as they held a reminder, and when the emptiness grew too strong to bear, she’d hop onto one of the beds, nestle deep within the pillows, and breathe. If she tried hard enough, she could almost pretend her ponies were there, nestled on either side… but only for a moment. It was never more than a moment.
The other place was… less comforting. She avoided it, if she could. Because there was another place in the house where the trails didn’t fade, where the scents of a half-dozen horses blended together into one path, one defined path, and only a fool could miss the meaning behind such uniformity. This amalgamation took place in the most-trafficked area of the house. She hated that that happened to be its front door.
She didn’t consider herself to be skilled. But as she grew older, her tracking skills got better. A good portion of that came from familiarity; a young puppy only has a certain amount of exposure to the scents of her family, and as months passed by, it imprinted itself upon her memory with greater and greater strength. Trails that had once faded to nothing began to register hints of presence, and she soon realized they hadn’t actually faded very much at all. With every year that passed, the subtleties of each pony’s scent slowly revealed themselves to her nose, and it was striking just how little of the components actually came from the ponies themselves.
The eldest (and she wasn’t sure when, but at some point, the pony had crossed the line between eldest and elder) seemed to carry a constant aura of flour with her. If she focused, she could pick up hints of vanilla, milk, eggs, and a rather bitter scent she’d eventually learned was called cocoa. She was most accustomed to that scent being present on the youngest of the ponies. It always seemed to appear right after she put her hoof in a jar on top of the refrigerator, and right before she found herself being admonished by her parents. The parents themselves held traces of fruity sweetness on their fur, though it was generally masked by considerably stronger notes of dirt, cracked tree bark, and pony sweat. When their foals accompanied them out for the day, they’d often come back smelling the same, before being promptly banished to the bathroom, where the sound of running water would wash it all away. Usually, though, the children’s scents held paper, wood shavings, and traces of the food the elder prepared for them on that given morning. Each scent was unique, compound, and identifiable. And eventually, familiar.
Familiarity meant she get better at tracking her ponies, but as she grew better, her tracking habits subsided. Though it took almost a year, she eventually learned that the times when the house was empty happened on a cycle. A seven-day cycle, for some unholy reason, but a cycle meant regularity. Slowly, waking up to an empty house lost its surprise, and with it, its worry. Yes, the scents were slowly fading, and yes, she was alone, but she knew that her ponies would return. An empty house no longer meant hours upon hours of frantic pacing, searching for traces. Instead, it meant the arrival of a few hours where napping could happen without interruption, and oftentimes, that’s exactly what she did.
She got better at predicting the irregularities within the cycle, too. When she trotted downstairs to find her food bowl had been filled with multitudes more kibble than it usually was, and her water bowl had been replaced with a large mixing bowl, one of the ones the eldest seemed to spend so much time hunched over, and her ponies were running around in a rush, opening drawers and closets and pulling out their big, zipper-able boxes… she knew she’d be alone for several days. It was never pleasant, and she wished that they’d give her more warning than a water bowl, but… it was still routine, in a way. And every time, the middle foal would approach her, rub her head, give her a little kiss, and say something with her not-barks that she could never understand.
Or rather, she could never comprehend. Not consciously. The explicit meaning would never be decipherable. But on some level, she understood.
It was a promise. They’d be back for her.
The scents would fade. Eventually, they’d barely be registered. But she wouldn’t panic, not like she used to. She wouldn’t spend hours trying to track their trails anymore, even as the last vestiges evaporated under her nose. She’d still sleep on their beds (because who wouldn’t sleep on a bed meant for someone five times their size? The fact she wasn’t allowed to do so normally was just extra encouragement), but the fear? The need to pretend they were nestled on either side of her? It was gone.
The middle foal made her a promise that the family would return. In response, she made a silent promise of her own. To wait. To trust.
And eventually, she understood that that was love.
As she got older, the promise evolved, too. Shortly after arriving at the home, her ponies had presented her with a contract. She hadn’t recognized it for what it was; a youthful rebelliousness had clouded her senses of judgment, and in the early days, she flagrantly violated her bond with abandon and ease. Each time she did, she was admonished - but never punished. The terms of the contract were simple - to learn to recognize patterns of not-barks. They each corresponded to a certain desired action, and if said action was reproduced, the compliance was rewarded. At first, the rewards took the form of small, delectable kibble, and she still got those every now and then, but that had been tapered off as her compliance got more and more consistent. She was angry the first time she noticed it happening. It didn’t last long.
The true reward came in the form of a completely empty house. No longer was she relegated to solitude for hours upon hours at any given time; instead, sometimes, they’d take her along. She’d never forget the first time it happened. The parents had brought her out on a tether, and she’d walked with them as they journeyed into a vast forest. It was filled with a single kind of tree, growing in remarkably orderly rows, and it seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon. Expanse upon expanse, tamed with the skills of a master and carefully maintained. When she’d been walked before, she’d been taken into the town; never into the forest.
She watched the way that the parents walked, after a while. When the vastness of it all had been taken in. From the moment they left the house to the moment they turned around to go back, it didn’t change. And that was when she understood - this place was theirs.
And then the tether came off.
She’d frozen, for a moment. The tether had been a constant presence on excursions, a reminder to keep close to the planned path and stay calm. On more than one occassion, it’d become an active annoyance, as a desired object sat just out of her allotted reach. It hadn’t been easy to make peace with the reality that the tether would always be there, but she had - and now it was gone. She had looked back at them, confusion in her gaze - and the matriarch had giggled. So she ran.
They didn’t try to stop her. The pair of ponies simply watched as she ran laps around them, chasing anything that moved and discovering most of them were simply shadows. She ran until her throat had gone dry, her pants were deep and heavy, and her limbs trembled with every step. It was exhilaration. Freedom. A level of exploration never before afforded to her, and she was going to make every second of it count. Trees streaked into blurs. A quick pause to examine the trunk of one revealed two hoof-shaped divots, pounded into the bark by a repeated and forceful impact; and then she looked up, saw the red fruit hanging from the branches, inhaled, registered the sweet, fruity scent, that smelled just like the matriarch, and she understood. The periods of absence from home were not just cyclical, they were explainable, and that lessened the fears around them even more. They’d left the house - but the ponies were still home.
She didn’t realize until much, much later that she never strayed far from where the two ponies sat. A self-imposed, unconscious circumference. Because she had all the freedom in the world, all of a sudden - but without her ponies, there wasn’t a world worth exploring.
Hours had passed by the time the patriarch raised his voice. The not-bark was one she recognized, a request to return to where the two sat. As she cantered back over to the pair, the nature of the contract clicked, clicked in a way it hadn’t before. The kibble was not the true reward, this was. An ability to leave the house with them, to run free, see the world as she desired to see it - but only if she listened to the not-barks.
She never saw the tether again.
From there, the cycle had evolved. The house became empty at the same times it did before, but occasionally, she had been allowed to come with. Discoveries followed - lingering traces of pony scent soon became matched to those who lived within the town. It quickly became evident that the forest was not the only place that the family went when the house was empty - the town had its number of regular destinations. There was a small, dainty little house near the center that reeked of the pencil shavings that the foals so often came home carrying; it became a frequent morning destination as the parents brought their children to reside there for the duration of the day. At times, they’d stop by other buildings; there was a rather flat one they frequented that she found almost nauseating in its aromatic cacophony, with rows upon rows of shelving hosting a universe’s worth of trinkets and doodads. Another, significantly less frequent stop was the mansion. It was three stories tall and three times as wide, with a red cross-shape above the door. She was never allowed inside that building; not that she wanted to be, of course. A sickening mixture of chemicals and decay wafted out the front door. She even found herself at a tree that put the entire orchard to shame in its grandeur.
And one day of every week, they’d all leave the house. They’d go to the center of the town with a wagon, filled with the red fruits from the trees, set up a small, wooden structure, and spend the day interacting with the ponies. She hardly cared for the small, golden circles her family seemed so happy to obtain. The attention of the town’s foals was enough for her, and it never seemed to run out.
Such outings were wonderful. But they were temporary. At the end of every one, the return not-bark would be called out, and she’d lead her ponies back to their home, following the fading scent of their hoofsteps from hours before.
The house was never empty for long.
She never thought that would change.
Her world was, fundamentally, one of isolation. She saw others of her species on the outings, but for the most part, she was surrounded by her ponies, lived with them, defined her life by their presence, and that came with consequences. The most obvious was the communication vacuum, but there were… others that ran deeper.
When she’d first arrived at the house, brought back by a much-younger middle foal, there had been five. At that time, the middle was still the youngest, and in that sense, they made an excellent pair. The two would oft find themselves still playing and running around far after their guardians had fallen behind. A foal’s energy and a puppy’s are not dissimilar, nor destructive in their interference. For the time that they spent in that state, they fed off each other, and neither could ask for a better partner in fun.
She had aged, though. Grown from a puppy into an adult, and while maturity was still a fair ways off, the foal… hadn’t followed. She found herself pausing for breaks, to rest for just a moment, while her companion played on with reckless abandon. The matriarch, who had been undergoing a rather concerning abdominal distension at the time, returned to her normal appearance, and suddenly, there were six. Youngest was now middle, and yet, the foal’s youthful energy had not faded. She watched carefully as the newest addition to the family developed, growing larger, her mane growing into its proper length over the scale of months.
It took eight months before the baby walked on her own. For her, it had been less than one. And the middle foal hadn’t seemed to grow very much at all.
The realization that her ponies lived on a timescale beyond her own was a conscious one, but not an uncomfortable one. She no longer had to worry about the permanence of the promise to return for her, as they’d still be around after she wasn’t. Her existence was but a fraction of their ultimate lifespan, but they had brought her into their world, raised her, fed her, and even when they left her behind, they always came back. The idea that they would outlive her didn’t bring sadness, but instead, joy, because she would never have to face the day that she was all alone. The day she woke up to a truly empty house.
It took a bit longer to understand that the house had its own history, and it was one she could barely comprehend. Age has a characteristic scent of its own, and it presented itself with abundance within the confines of the old home. She’d been locked into the small space underneath the counter before. Her own fault, of course - slipped in while her ponies weren’t looking, and without any consideration of the fact that a door that spent most of its time closed would probably be returned to that state with some haste. In the dark, she found herself rather cramped. The space was used for storage, and the objects within hadn’t been touched for a good while. They carried age on the wind, but also traces. Ones with familiar notes that could be matched to her ponies, but not… quite. Some were strong - one object smelled particularly like the elder. Others had faded to the point of unconscious recognition. The echoes of the previous occupants. Of a family she hadn’t been born in time to see.
After that encounter, she briefely revisited the tracking habits of her youth. The purpose, however, was new - to find more traces. They didn’t present themselves in scent, though. Her first big clue came when the oldest foal - his red coat perhaps the most distinctive amongst the family - suddenly began to grow. He quickly surpassed the height of his parents, and every month or so, they’d all go into the house’s washroom with a pencil. From there, he’d stand flat against the wall, and the parents would make a small mark on the paint to mark his growth. She’d watched this ritual, barked to match his excitement, and when they’d left… she’d walked closer. The wall was adorned with columns of these marks. Dozens of them. His, at the time, only had a few marks to boast. Some of them had upwards of twenty.
Other clues quickly presented themselves. The picture of the house on the mantle, upon further inspection, was off - the roof shingles had since been replaced, the paint was now cracking in ways that hadn’t been captured by the photographer, and the ponies were not ones she recognized, aside from the elder. Her many wrinkles had yet to form - she almost looked like the middle foal, in a way. She began to acquaint herself with photo albums, and the sheer width of some of them indicated the visual fruits of multiple of her lifetimes. At one point, a faucet within the bathroom broke, and she watched as ponies she’d never seen before came in, replaced it with a new one, and left. The new faucet didn’t match any of the old ones - and she realized that they had all been matching at one point.
There was a divot in each of the stairs. A smooth groove, sloping inwards towards the center. It took her a long time to realize how it got there. That it wasn’t there when the house was built. And when she did, she had never felt so small.
Her ponies never treated her like she was small, though.
The cycle moved on, as it had moved on for eons before she’d arrived. A heptad revolving door of days, one with variance, excitement, disappointment, but at the end of it all, a promise. A promise that the six would return no matter what, because they had chosen to bring her into a slice of their lives. No matter how long she waited, she could rest easy, because the house would be full at the end of it all. The house never stayed empty for long.
But the house was empty now.
And a pair of scents had been fading for a week.
It didn’t truly register that something was wrong for days. It began with a knock on the front door, one that she’d completely and resoundingly ignored. The elder had responded, and then… suddenly, she was running. She’d never seen the elder run before, and the wince that came with every pounding hoofsteep was a far cry from subtle. As her head popped up from her bed to watch, she cried out. It was a not-bark, but strained. Frantic. A sound she’d never heard come out of the elder’s mouth before.
One she never wanted to hear again.
The eldest foal was little more than a blur as he raced down the stairs. When she jumped up to join him, tail wagging at the prospect of a run, another not-bark had been tossed her way. The one that meant remain. It carried itself with such force, such power, that she’d frozen in her tracks, ears slamming back against her head. She later registered that the outburst hadn’t been directed at her, per say, that she was an outlet, but… the emotions carried on it stung. They’d never said anything like that to her, not with that tone, but before she could move, approach, see if she could make up for whatever she’d done to cause that outburst, they were gone. The parents had gone out for the day earlier, taking the youngest with them. The middle foal had gone away with a friend. And suddenly, the house was empty.
This time, the worries returned. And for the first time in years, she found herself pacing.
Four ponies returned to the house that night. Six should have. The eldest foal, usually boisterous and outgoing in his speech, flooding any room he was in with an outburst of not-barks, was silent. The middle was trembling, her eyes sparkling like fresh-fallen snow. Wailing from the youngest, cradled in the embrace of the elder, was the only sound any of them produced. While the youngest wailing wasn’t uncommon… it sounded like she hadn’t stopped for hours. There was a hoarseness to the cries, one which she’d never heard before, and set every hair on her body on edge.
The elder’s change was, in her eyes, the most drastic. While nothing outwardly appeared to have changed, the way she walked did. The lifting of every hoof seemed to take the effort required to pull a cart, something she hadn’t seen the elder do in years, and when they came back down, the weight of the world seemed to follow. She trotted slowly, methodically, like every step took the effort of a team to pull off. It looked like she’d aged ten years in a single day.
And every single one of her ponies had a new addition to their scents. Salt.
The parents did not return that night.
For the next couple days, the house was the furthest thing from empty. Ponies she’d met before, who’d stayed in the house for a week or so on their own, began flooding in, and they brought their own salt. It began to permeate the house, seeping under doors, finding nooks, crannies, and making itself thoroughly inescapable. Not-barks became a constant background, and most of them wavered in a way she hadn’t heard before. She made herself a constant presence, weaving underhoof carefully and pressing herself against the ones who seemed to be the most unstable. Affection for her wasn’t lacking, not in the slightest, but every hoof that glided across her back seemed to tremble, and it never seemed like they were focused in the moment.
The parents did not return the next night.
She dragged her bed to sit next to the front door. She didn’t know why. She hated the front door, the amalgamation of scents that meant her family would be away. She stayed anyway. And every time a pony saw her sitting there, it brought a fresh wave of salt.
The gravity of the situation didn’t set in until well into the third night. The house had quieted as the rest of the ponies went to bed. She had positioned herself by the front door, waiting, though she knew that the parents wouldn’t return that night. Hours passed, or minutes. She didn’t know. At some point, though, she heard a faint click, and a small amount of light began to shine from the top of the divoted stairs. It seemed to pull her, and before she knew, she was standing in front of an almost-closed door. The light shone through the edges. Inside, there was silence.
She nosed the door open.
It was the middle foal’s room, and though she should have been asleep, she was not. Her posture, in any other setting, would have been perfect. She sat at the head of her bed, pillows askew, staring at the blank wall in front of her. The gaze was unsettling, haunted, almost - it was like the foal was looking at something beyond the walls. She barely even spared a glance when the door had opened, let alone when she walked in.
For a moment, she watched this spectacle. Her tail stopped wagging. And then, she did the dumbest thing she’d done since she was a puppy.
Jumping on the bed was routine, back then. Being kicked off and scolded, even more so. But the middle foal didn’t scold her, nor try to push her off the bed. She broke her thousand-yard stare to meet the gaze of her former partner in youth, paused… and pulled her in close.
The salt reached her nose at the same time the moisture reached her skin. And that was when she realized that something was truly, horribly wrong.
The parents did not return on the fourth night.
By the fifth day, she could no longer detect any traces of the pair. Usually, the scents lasted longer. But the house was full, full of ponies she’d met before, ponies who’d never been here all at the same time and she could scent them all, the air was full of their scents and their not-barks and their salt- and no trace of the parents.
The house was full. But it was also empty.
Empty, in the way that she hadn’t felt since the first months after being brought home. The void began to gnaw at her, gnaw in a way she hadn’t known in years, and suddenly, she found herself pacing. Tracking. Searching. For a target that had been drowned, drowned in the scent of something stronger. She could no longer scent the pair, and the emptiness’s growth began to mirror the eldest foal’s in terms of exponential nature.
There are two places where the scent doesn’t fade. She couldn’t bring herself to sit by the door any longer.
She reached the bedroom at the same time the elder did, and slipped in behind.
Jumping on the bed with the elder in the room was a risk that she couldn’t take, so she contented herself with sitting by the side. And the scent was there, but it was faint, so faint, not like she remembered from her puppyhood, and she couldn’t get enough, but the elder was there. So she watched, instead, tracking her every painful move with the hope she would leave.
The elder, for her part, barely seemed to notice she was there. She was fixated on the bed, a strange, harrowing look on her face. For the longest time, the elder was known to be very particular about the ways the sheets on the bed were arranged. It was a requirement that when the ponies left the house, they left the bed neat. But the sheets were mussed. Mussed, like they’d been for the past five days, and she hadn’t fixed them. There was a steel in her eyes, tempered by the water that seemed ever-so persistent now, and for a while, she just… stared.
She watched as the elder inhaled, let out a shaky sigh, and moved for a bottom corner on the mattress. Pulled at the sheets, until they came unsecured.
And then she was on the bed and she was barking, barking louder than she’d ever done in her entire life, as the elder backpedaled quickly with eyes wider than saucers, the not-bark that meant get off was shouted, and returned by a snarl, and she’d never snarled before, not at her ponies, they were HER ponies, she shouldn’t be doing this, she’s never done this, but the scent doesn’t fade in sheets unless the elder takes them, and when she takes them they come back scentless, with a chemical replacing the traces and she can’t scent the traces anymore, there’s only ponies and not-barks and salt and she can’t scent them anymore and if the elder takes the sheets there will be nothing, she can’t have nothing, they haven’t returned in five days and she has nothing, and she barks and snarls and growls like she’s never done before ever, not ever, not for anyone, she hears pounding in the hallway, and then more ponies are there, and their ears are backed flat against their heads and she feels terrible because she’s doing this to her ponies but she doesn’t stop because if she stops she will have nothing left and the emptiness is clawing away at her heart and she can’t have nothing-
One of the ponies from outside the house laid a hoof on the elder’s shoulder. Said something softly. She can’t understand it. She can never understand it. But the elder’s eyes widen again, a grimace formed on her face, she motioned for every other pony to step out, and then she approached. Re-tucked the corner of the sheets. Salt splashed on the wooden floor.
The elder stroked a trembling hoof along her back. And then, she left.
She nestled herself in between the pillows. Breathed. And if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend that the parents were nestled on either side, and that everything was okay, it would be okay…
But only for a moment.
It was never more than a moment.
No ponies told her to get off the bed for the rest of the day.
The parents did not return on the fifth night.
She didn’t move from that spot for the duration of the sixth day. Her food and water bowl were moved to beside the door, and she begrudgingly ate. Hate filled her mind, at the fact she had to get down, that she had to eat, fulfill the basic bodily needs that dictated her day to day and she never thought about, not like this, but they were keeping her away from the bed. The traces. The sweet fruit, the dirt, and the sweat.
The parents did not return on the sixth night.
By the seventh day, she made her way back downstairs. The house was still full, but the not-barks were gone. A somber atmosphere had taken over, and even the paint on the walls seemed to have dulled. She watched as her ponies turned back to the closets. Opened them. Reached in deep. And for a moment there was hope, hope that they were going out for a couple days, that they were joining the parents and the house would be empty for a few days but they’d come back, they always came back, and this time, there would be six, not four-
They did not pull out the zipper-able boxes. Instead, they pulled out clothes. Dressed. Slowly, somberly, and this time even the middle foal was walking like the elder had that first night. Air currents shifted, and she could scent the clothes. Age carries its own unique trace, and these clothes had them in spades. She watched as the elder donned hers and started to shake. As a scent familiar to her own drifted into her senses. Not quite hers, but familiar. She watched, slowly, and the emptiness surged inside.
No not-barks were exchanged. No barks, either. But she wished she could talk to them, she wished she could make them understand, she wished they knew how wrong it was to see them dressed in black…
The emptiness surged again. Clawed at her insides. She turned around, walked back up the stairs, back to the room, the room with the traces, the room that had been so horribly empty for a full cycle, a full seven day cycle…
She didn’t know when she fell asleep, surrounded by the traces of the parents. But when she woke up…
The house was empty. It had been for quite some time.
Is empty.
And somehow, Winona knows that it’s never going to feel full again.