“Daddeh, Tuwip wan hab babbehs!”
Richie lowered his newspaper and sighed. It had finally happened.
He’d had Tulip for a year now, and she’d already been a filly when he got her. He’d known it was only going to be a matter of time before she started asking for ‘the B word’, and he’d been dreading it every single day.
“Tulip, hon, this is a tiny apartment, I can only afford to keep one fluffy pony. I couldn’t afford to keep you and your babies.”
“Siwwy daddeh…” Tulip said. “It gon’ be Tuwip, Twuip babbehs, and Twuip speshul-fwiend too!”
Great. He thought. Even more of the fuckers.
“Tulip, the answer is no. I can’t handle any more than one fluffy pony, and that’s the end of it.”
Tulip looked at daddy’s stern, glaring face, and did the only thing she could think to do.
“WAAAAAH!!” She wailed, stomping her hooves on the kitchen floor. “TUWIP WAN HAB BABBEHS! BABBEHS BABBEHS BABBEHS!!!”
Richie was just about to tell her to shut up, when he heard it. A solid thumping against the floor coming from below… his landlord banging his walking-stick against the ceiling again.
“Sorry! Sorry, Mr Giuseppe!” He called through the floor, while clamping a hand over Tulip’s mouth. He heard a staccato burst of Italian, probably a rather colorful variety of curse words, and finally all was quiet.
Mr Giuseppe had a right to be upset. This was the third time this week Tulip had thrown a tantrum over something, and it was getting worse. At first she just didn’t want to go to bed, and started crying and shouting only after pleading and begging hadn’t worked. It was only 8pm, but Mr Giuseppe had banged on the ceiling that night after Tulip kept screaming and crying for a full five minutes.
In the end the only way to shut her up had been to let her stay up and watch more FluffTV until she passed out in front of the screen.
That, Richie now realised, had been the mistake.
Because he’d shown weakness.
Following that, Tulip wanted spaghetti for dinner, which he didn’t have any of in the house. He told her to just eat her kibble and, faster than last time, she broke down screaming and crying, demanding spaghetti.
Mr Giuseppe banged on the ceiling again, but Richie had little in the way of options. Tulip would not be quiet, so in the end he managed to borrow a can from one of his neighbours, promising to replace it with a new one the next day.
And now Tulip had decided it was time for her checkmate move: she wanted to have babies.
And Richie knew, no matter how much she screamed, cried, shouted or shit herself, he was never going to give in to this demand. Tulip was on thin ice with Mr Giuseppe as it was, at any moment he could simply come upstairs and demand she be tossed out… or hell, he could even just toss Richie out. He’d been reluctant to let her stay in the first place, and all her recent tantrums weren’t making things better.
Richie looked down at the tear-soaked, wriggling creature in his arms, one hand still muffling her wails and shrieks, as he tried to think of what to do.
He didn’t just need her to be quiet, he needed to make sure she never asked for babies again. Anything else, Richie could handle, but not babies. Not that. Not in his tiny apartment, not on his shoe-string budget.
And then, as he looked around his sparsely-decorated kitchen, he caught sight of the solution to all of his problems.
“Alright, fine, you can have babies.” He said with a weary sigh. Tulip immediately lit up, her muffled shrieking being replaced by sing-songy babble as he gingerly removed his hand from her mouth.
“Yay! Tuwip wub daddeh again, cos daddeh wub Tuwip again!”
“Okay, we’ll go and get started right now. You get yourself ready, I’ll prepare your bed.”
“Ooh! Whewe speshul-fwiend?!” Tulip asked, flicking her head around to try and spot another fluffy. Richie looked at her with an expression of phony confusion.
“What do you mean? What special-friend?”
“Tuwip nee’ speshul-fwiend fow hab babbehs, daddeh!” Tulip said condescendingly. Richie tilted his head to one side.
“Who told you that?” He asked, sounding stunned. “Hang on, just where do you think babies come from?”
“Uh…” Tulip began, suddenly unsure about the biological facts imprinted on her pre-programmed brain. “Da stawwion put him no-nos in da mawe’s no-nos… den hab speshul-huggies… den mawe get tummeh-babbehs! An’ den, when tummeh-babbehs weady, dey come out of tummeh and be weal babbehs!”
Again, Richie looked at her as if she was talking complete horseshit.
“Tulip… that’s not how it works at all.”
“Wh… wha?!”
“Yeah, that’s… that’s completely wrong. What idiot told you that?”
Tulip didn’t answer, as it had been printed on her brain since birth… meaning the idiot was her.
“Den whewe babbehs come fwom, daddeh?” She asked. Richie took out his phone and pulled up a video on Youtube, meant for children’s education, which talked about the life-cycle of chickens.
“Look,” He said, showing Tulip the phone. “See the mama chicken?”
“Yus! Chicky-chicky!”
“See that thing that just came out of her? That’s an egg.”
“Eggy nummies?”
“Yeah, you can eat them, but they’re also for babies. Look,” He said, as the video spooled on and showed a cartoon x-ray of the tiny baby chick inside the egg, growing larger with time, until the egg cracked and the baby chick was ‘born’ from it.
“So Tuwip’s babbehs wiww come fwom… fwom eggys?” Tulip asked, somehow knowing deep in her DNA that this was wrong, but lacking the wisdom required to realise she was simply being lied to.
“That’s right, just like the video said. Every animal does it, you were even born in an egg too.”
Again, this knowledge just felt wrong somehow, but to be fair… Tulip couldn’t remember much of being a chirpy-baby, her eyes were closed for most of it… or had she just been trapped inside an egg? She remembered being somewhere warm and wet for a long time… had that been inside of an egg…?
As Tulip was lost in deep, deep thought, Richie carried her through to the safe-room, setting her down in her bedding in such a way that her rear was exposed.
“Okay, now make sure you stay like this, and try to lay your egg!” He said, turning her away from the door so her rear was facing it instead.
“Buh… buh Tuwip nu knu how to way eggys!”
“Tulip, you said you wanted babies.” Richie said with a huff. “Now if you really mean it, lay an egg!”
And with that, Richie turned and left, leaving Tulip alone in her safe-room with the door open so he could still see her. Every few minutes he saw her snap her head around to look behind her… only to see nothing but empty floor, as she glumly turned her head back… only to then snap it around again, looking for an egg, finding nothing, turning back…
Richie watched her for several minutes as she wore herself down, laughing inside of himself the entire time.
Eventually she fell asleep, and Richie had originally planned on simply moving on, intending to convince Tulip that she would have babies as soon as she laid an egg… which would obviously never happen.
But then that black mark upon every living soul, the sensation of sadistic joy at the expense of someone else’s misfortune, reared it’s ugly little head and whispered something in his ear.
So Richie went to the kitchen, opened up his carton of eggs, and took one out, a perfectly normal chicken’s egg with a smooth white shell.
He carried it quietly into Tulip’s room and placed it on her bedding directly behind her rear, almost touching her fluff. It looked just like it had plopped out of her back-end somewhere.
Richie grinned as he left the safe-room, closing the door for the night.
Things were about to get very interesting.