Like most suburban fluffy stories, this one began with a knock on the door. tap tap tap George was enjoying the long holiday weekend and expecting guests, but not for another few hours. But he went to check nonetheless.
Upon opening the door, no one was there, not even a Blamazon truck driving away that mixed his address up with a house the street over constantly. The hot summer Florida sun shone into his eyes and so he didn’t initially see what was at his feet.
“Hewwoo!” an exasperated and partly desperate voice called up to him. Oh poop, George thought. He was making lasagna for his dinner party later and they must have smelled the sauce from a mile away. These things were like sharks but with tomatoes instead of blood.
He looked down and beheld a relatively clean yellow and purple unicorn. The combo just didn’t work, and it made sense he was a stray. Behind him, tapping their hooves on the hot sidewalk were a few other fluffies, colorful mares with foals on their backs and the male enforcers of the herd, George assumed. “What?” George said with the same enthusiasm as someone who had just hiked up a mountain in flip flops.
“Jus suu dummeh hoomin knu, dis yawd am smawtie’s wand nao! Stay owt!” George looked out over his barren rockscape yard designed for minimal maintenance. Why a fluffy would want this as his territory was a mystery to him.
All his neighbors had installed low fences around their front yards to keep strays out. Across the street was a big yard overgrown with exotic plants and flowers with sprinklers going in clear defiance of the watering ban for their tenth successive year of drought. No fence but there was a low voltage electric fence surrounding the perimeter which was more than enough to keep any fluffy out if the water didn’t dissuade them.
“Sure thing bucko.” They would all leave quickly and he might shovel up a pile or two of poop but he never dealt with a yard invasion before and had no experience.
“Weaww-” George shut the door before the smarty could finish expressing his disbelief and went back to cooking. He hadn’t even asked for skettis. It was a veritable National Garfield the Cat Day Miracle.
A few times the ferals scratched at his door but the fume hood fan above his stove was running on low at that point and drowned any noises out.
Soon it was time to expect guests and so George tidied up the kitchen while the pasta casserole cooled in the microwave. A proper knock came at the door, one that could be made be a human, or perhaps a particularly enterprising dog.
He opened his door to see the disgusted looks of his friend John and his wife Eliza. George himself was taken aback as he took in the spectacle and horror, this would take more than a hand shovel and a disposable shopping bag to clean up. All around the lawn were dead or dying fluffies who had not had the sense to leave. Hooves little more than ruptured blisters from second degree heat burns.
At the end of his driveway was the cause, the smarty was dragging himself back and forth herding any survivors back into the yard. “nuuuu … weab … smawteh … wand.” Clearly dying of heat exhaustion himself with hooves blistered from walking on the pavement instead of finding a cool place to wait out the day.
In the smarty’s mind he had found some place another smarty wouldn’t want and fight them for. After all, being driven from a green paradise by a larger herd was what had put them on their current exodus. Not that anyone beside the smarty would ever know now.
There were long trails of runny feces winding across the gravel that marked his yard, each trail leading directly to a fluffy’s asshole. Whether they mistook it for a giant litterbox or not was a debate for the next national election or perhaps the comment section below.
Two dead mares lay at the base of his cactus pear tree, they had tried to eat the green ‘nummies’ and instead had dozens of inch long needles impaling their cheeks. The larger foals, old enough to eat solids had also tried to eat the cactus but went for the base to avoid the big needles.
A few managed to poke their eyes out anyways and the rest had experienced the magical wonder of cactus hairs, aka tiny thorns that were like fiberglass and burned like hell in the skin, even more so in and on their sensitive mouths and lips.
Another had somehow gotten it’s foals on top of a granite boulder that sat squarely in the center of his yard, perhaps thinking it would save them from the hot gravel. She died reaching up to call them back down. The foals themselves had cooked alive as the black stone easily reached 140F in the sun.
Nearest his house, he had a few ornamental plants enjoying the slightest shade of his roof overhang that the toughie and a few mares tried eating after witnessing the horror of the cactus. An aloe plant that was to leathery for them to bit into which also tasted like ‘burnie wawas’ when they did break the aloe plant’s skin.
The other plant was more insidious, a King Sago Palm, a purely ornamental false palm made of pure poison. A few bit into the pointy leaves only to spit them back out and notice the rash forming on their face.
The nursing mares soldiered on, even gnawing on the soft brightly colored nuts that grew at the base of the plant, trying to make milkies for their chirping foals. The toxins quickly made their way into their milk and despite the mares protesting “nuu feew guud” and the kneading of the chirpies bruising their teats due to the poison.
All these dead mares lay in pools of bloody excrement, tongues bloated and red, skin bruised and jaundiced. The chirpies themselves lay motionless in pools of their own bloody milky vomit and diarrhea having consumed the same poison from the milk.
George walked out to the last surviving stallion, an orange and black earthie. He was meekly crawling past the smarty, who managed to die in the thirty seconds since George last looked at him, towards the water across the street draining into the gutter. He scruffed it and lifted it up to his face. “Why didn’t you leave?”
The toughie drew in a long and tired breath, too exhausted to protest his bad uppies, and probably welcoming death at this point. He forced out one final sentence before succumbing to the heat: “Fwuffy … hate …. Mundays”
