A gentle breeze dances it’s way through the cool autumn air, lifting honey and amber colored leaves as they gracefully dance along the concrete sidewalk down the quite suburban street of Ridgeway Avenue. A quite little neighborhood nestled away just outside any major city limits where folks and families peacefully live out their day-to-day lives alongside their neighbors and friends. Fall was in full swing, turning the trees of Ridgeway into beautiful array of warm golden colors that somehow made this little street feel even more welcoming and inviting.
2 miles just outside of this perfect little neighborhood, a lone squatter is being arrested and placed into a patrol car by a burly police officer just outside of an abandoned gas station that he once called home. The land around the is barren. Dry. Sage brush, cacti, and weeds as far out as the eye can see. A few small shells of long since forgotten buildings are all that remain of a long since forgotten mining town, inhabited only by the echo’s of their long lost inhabitants and those crazy enough to take refuge from the harsh landscape within their hollow walls.
The man sits silently against the police car, glancing up only one time at a small pair of ruby red eyes staring back at him from behind a cracked dirt stained window. Inside the gas station, a young cream colored alicorn filly bangs it’s squishy little hooves with all it’s might against the dirty window.
A bad person came and took her daddy away, saying mean things like his housie wasn’t his housie and calling her mean things like shit-wat and a vew-mane! She didn’t know what that was, but she thought her mane was the prettiest mane ever! It gave her the worstest heart hurties, but so did having her daddy taken away!
The officer puts the squatter in the back of the cruiser before pulling away in a large cloud of sand and dirt. The filly can do nothing now except soak her already sopping wet cheek fluff with more saddie wawas as she daintily lowers herself down from the window to the staind, dirt covered rug that covered the cracking cement floor. She continues to quietly sob to herself as she shuffles her way to her litter box tucked away in a dusty corner of the gas station bathroom, right next to daddies stacks of dirty nummie plates and daddies red trashie-can where he puts his pointy med-sin sticks. She didn’t like when daddy took his med-sin. It smelled not pretty or made him take sleepies for lots of forevers. She squats in the sand filled box and scrunches her face. She makes good poopies in her litter box, daintily kicking some sand over the steaming mound of absolutely putrid shit she just dropped behind her. She hops out the litter box after insuring everything was clean and tidy and heads for the kitchen, tears leaking like a broken faucet.
Her daddy cleaned her litter box every day after taking his no smell pretty med-sin and yelling at the housie because it kept the stingie-hurtie things (scorpions) away from the housie. Now she’d have to scare them away herself! The filly contiued huu-huuing as she slowly made her way passed daddie’s nestie where he kept all of his not-fluff things he called “thweads”. He had a lot of thweads, but he always kept the piled on top of his nestie because he didn’t like giving them licky-cleanies when the started to smell not pretty. He was always trying to fix the cleanie-box for his not fluff, but he could never really do it after taking all the funny not-toysies out of it.
The filly sighs as she passes the front door, a broken glass door with plywood hastily nailed and taped to fill the holes, and enters into the kitchen. The stove had a broken heat plate resting on top of it, a few random ramen rappers strewn about on the floor. The filly sniffles and huus a bit more before slowly approaching one of the ramen block. The block of ramen had barely been touched, the seasoning packet poured into the pack with the block of dry ramen but never consumed. She sniffs it a bit, her tears falling onto the block of ramen causing the seasoning to melt into a mushy liquid on top. She sniffles once more before taking the block of ramen in her mouth and slowly bringing it to her nummie bowl.
Her nummie bowl, an old cooking pot that the handle had broken off of, sat in the corner of the rarely used gas station kitchen. Dust, mud, and no smell pretty stains the filly couldn’t identify littered the cold tile floor under her tiny squishy hoofies as she shuffled toward her bowl. In the bowl lay random bits and bobs of food scraps and a small pile of broken kibble crumbs. She carefully lifted the block into her bowl before sighing and digging into tonights dinner. The salt from the seasoning packet dried her mouth out and made her cough, the dry crunchy ramen hard to eat without without coughing up some dry bits or taking lots of sippies from one of her wawa bowls. THere were multiple bowls of liquid spread along the floor of the kitchen. Some had water, some had mtn. dew, some had various unknown liquids that made the filly feel silly and dizzy.
After finishing her meal, the filly slowly looked around at the now silent home she had grown up in. Now nothing but silence and a dry wind blowing through the broken windows boarded up windows were left to keep her company. There was nothing left to do except hunker down in her nestie and go to bed for the night. Nights get cold when daddy isn’t home, so she had to make sure she had her special stuffy friend and her super softie blankie friend.
The filly sniffles one last time before nesting down for the night. It had barely started to get dark and the temperature was already starting to quickly drop. She had cried herself to exhaustion, then cried some more until she had no more tears left to cry. She carefully steps into the small room her daddy had made her nestie in, pulls the small door shut and pushes a small wooden block down to lock the door just like her daddy had taught her.
She slowly wraps up in her blanket, making sure to wrap her stuffy friend up with her before sinking down into the pile of old pillows and cushions her daddy had thrown together in an old broken safe as a safe nesting area for his little fluff. She closes her eyes and slowly drifts off into a restless sleep, hoping when she wakes up this terrible sleepy time picture will be over. Before finally drifting off, she whispers softly to her stuffed monkey
“Is gon’ be otay mistuh’ stuffybum. Fenty’ pwotect hew’ hewd jus wike daddeh.”
Her speech trails off as she slowly drifts off to fluffy dream land. The cold night air silently floats by, frost building on the tips of the weeds and an exposed surface unlucky enough to be out in the freezing night air. The stars and moon slowly cross the sky overhead, as another quiet night passes by.