(Our setting is a wooded area near a lake in some affluent suburbs. There are jogging and biking trails nearby, but the woods are a fair distance away on a slight hill. Sometimes families stop to feed the ducks from the picnic area across the lake. Children walk and ride bikes along the path and soccer moms can be seen jogging in the afternoon. A serene, idyllic place.)
In these woods, hidden from the view of passersby, we find the Fluffy Mare Jellybean. She is a mint green mare with lavender mane and tail. She is here because her owner tossed her out for becoming pregnant with a feral stallion. Before dumping her in the lake, he forced her to call her ‘speshul fwiend’ into a trap, and he broke the stallion’s spine in front of her. He then locked her in a closet with the dying creature. It took almost two days of twitching and moaing and gurgling before the broken creature finally gave out.
Those two days were filled with horror for Jellybean, she tried to ‘gib huggies’ to make her friend better, she tried to tune out its suffering and horrifying twitches and the look on its face. It stared right at her with bloodshot, pain-filled eyes. It stared at her and she could hear the words her ‘daddeh’ spoke just before he grabbed the stallion and gave it ‘wowstest owies’ with a sickening wet snap.
“This is your fault Jellybean, he is going to suffer because of you, and you are going to watch! This is because of you!”
Her special friend couldn’t talk anymore, but she knew that is what he was thinking, “Dis becawse ob 'OU JEWWWYBEAN!”
Some time later, her daddy had put her and the stallion’s corpse in a bag and taken them outside. She was frozen in fear and was in the bag for what seemed like forever until she felt herself spinning and could not tell up from down. Suddenly there was a loud noise and cold water covered her up.
Miraculously, her panicked thrashing managed to free her from the bag and she, by sheer luck, floated to the shore instead of drowning. In a sudden, terrified rush she gasped for air as she woke. Filling her lungs with air, she was overcome by adrenaline and survival instinct and ran for the only hiding place nearby, under some bushes in a small thicket on top of a slight hill. Here she sat shaking from both cold and fear until she went to sleep for the first time in almost three days.
It is now afternoon, and Jellybean has been sleeping for almost 14 hours. Some teenage boys are meandering along the lake’s shore idly poking at frogs and lilly pads with sticks. We see that they are now not far from where Jellybean is huddled under a large holly bush. They have noticed the dead stallion floating near the waters edge and are trying to fish it out with their sticks. Their voices carry over and wake Jellybean.
Jellybean wakes from a long sleep filled with sadness and fearful nightmares. She hears human voices that she does not know. Her eyes have a hard time adjusting to the afternoon sunlight that is spilling in between the leaves of her hiding place.
“Wh…Whewe am Jewwybean?..why am scawdy and cowd?”
It comes back to her, the joy she had at making a ‘speshul fwiend’ and how excited and happy she was to make a family and have babies to love, how she could hardly contain herself waiting to tell her daddy the good news… Then, she begins to shiver and feel sick to her stomach, her daddy was mad. More mad than she had ever seen…
“Speshul fwiend huwty wif wowstest owies and fowevew sweepies, Jewwybean am aww awone now.”
She notices the boys laughing and playing with something at the edge of the lake (she does not have any idea what a lake is and calls it the ‘scawy cowd wet pwace’ in her mind.) Her first instinct is to run up to them and ask for help, but the fear that she still feels makes her wait.
“Hoomans can hewp Jewwybean. Why scawdy? Need hooman to gif Jewwybean new homey and nummies and wub… But stiww scawdy of hoomans…”
She watches them, trying to work up the nerve to go ask them for help, then she notices that they have fished something out of the lake and are laughing and poking at it with the long slender things they are holding. Things that look a lot like daddy’s sorry stick…
“Speshul fwiend! The hoomans hab speshul fwiend! Mawbe hoomans can fixies fowevew sweepies!”
She hears what the boys are saying now:
“Hah, its just a stupid feral that probly drowned itself trying to fight its own reflection! Fluffies are so fucking dumb.”
“Yeah, check it out, its guts are coming out when I poke its stomach!”
“Haha! Its too bad the stupid thing is already dead, my brother says you can feed them cherry bombs and they are so dumb they eat them and blow up!”
“Shit, that would be awesome!”
The boy who was poking the stallion with the stick stomps on the thing’s stomach, making guts explode out of its anus and mouth with a loud SPALRRRTTT! then kicks it back in the lake and the boys walk off laughing.
Jellybean begins shaking and sobbing.
“Hoomans am bad, bad wowstest munstahs! Huuhuuuhuuu…No hewp Jewwybean! Huuuhuuhuuuu…Wan huwt fwuffies! Huuhuu…Why huwt fwuffies? Huuhuuu…fwuffies am spostd to be fow wub an huggies an happy times…huuuhuuuhuu…”
Jellybean crawls further into the shrubbery, terrified now of being seen by any of the people that pass by. She nearly cries herself back to sleep, but begins to feel hunger pains gnawing in her stomach.
“Tummy owwies! Jewwybean so hungwy… No daddeh to gib nummies… Huuhuuuhuuuuu…Jewwybean so scawdy an hungwy an cowd an hate daddeh an huuhuuuhuuuuu… hate munstah bad hoomans… Jewwybean miss speshul fwiend… aww awone am su scawdy.”
Jellybean waits until there are no people nearby and cautiously pokes her head out of the bush to eat some clover flowers that are growing at the wood’s edge. They don’t taste as good as the ‘sketti nummies’ that her daddy would sometimes give her, but the flowers taste better than the fluffy kibble she was used to eating, and they didn’t hurt her teeth with gritty sand like the kibble either.
“Gweenie nummies am good fow Jewwybean. Daddeh nevew gib gweenie nummies becaw daddeh am bad munstah an nevew wan Jewwybean to hab good nummies, jus dummeh teefy huwty kibbwe. An…an sketties… sometime daddeh gib sketties…miss sketties an nicey daddeh an wawm beddies an toysies an…huuhuuuuuhuuuuuuhuuuuu…Jewwybean so stoopid, am Jewwybean fauwt daddeh mad, aww Jewwybean fauwt speshul fwiend am fowevew sweepie…huuuhuuuuuuhuuuuhuuu…”
No longer hungry, Jellybean crawls back into the thicket and cries herself to sleep in the dead leaves on the ground.
(The days begin to pass, all in a similar fashion, Jellybean hides and cries and eats, and cries and sleeps and eats, and eats and cries and tries to sleep again. She tries to sleep all the time, but it does not help. The nightmares are there everytime she closes her eyes, and the loneliness returns as soon as she awakens. We find her now in the morning time eating her breakfast of clover flowers and berries.)
Jellybean ate slowly, she was getting tired of the ‘gweeny nummies’ but that was all that there was to eat other than bitter, sour tasting berries that grew on some bushes. She missed her saferoom and bed, she didn’t like the ‘bitey bugsies’ that flew around her in the evening, and most of all she was lonely.
“Gweeny nummies am good fow Jewwybean, gweeny nummies am tasty.” She told herself in a sing-song voice “Gweeny nummies gwow on gwound and go to Jewwybean tummy.”
Her tummy had been hurting a lot lately, and she was always hungry and tired. Despite that, boredom began to overcome her fear and she had started to explore her new habitat a bit. Too far into the woods was too scary for her, it got dark, and she could hear things moving on the ground and in the trees, but did not always see them. The things that looked fluffy and climbed trees were harmless, she figured out, but they startled her. She tried to make friends with them but they did not like her and ran away up a tree anytime she came near.
“Fwuffy taiw fwiends nu wike Jewwybean. Pwobwy dey can teww Jewwybean am bad fwuffy, am bad fwiend and nu wan tu pway wif me. Miss speshuw fwiend an miss daddeh. Wish fwuffy taiw nu wun way.”
She avoided going too deep into the woods, but found a small clearing hidden in the bushes that was not too far into the trees. There was plenty of clover, and pretty butterflies that she liked to watch and chase. One time she came close enough to one to try and hug it…
“Jewwybean nuu mean tu huwty wingie fwiend!..Huuuuhuuuuhuuu…Jewwybean weawwy am wowstest munstah…”
Her tummy started to hurt really badly all the time, Jellybean had trouble moving now, but mostly stayed in her nest of leaves and fluff that she had made under some bushes by her clearing. Through the edge of her hiding spot, she could just see the walking path by the lake where people passed by.
Sometimes when people went by she felt an urge to crawl down the hill and ask for a home, and food, and love. A combination of residual fear, and the hurting in her tummy when she tried to move, kept her from leaving the safety of her hiding spot. She knew that no human would want a bad fluffy like her, and they would hurt her and her soon-babbies.
Since she could no longer move around very far without pain and exhaustion, she spends her time now watching the humans and daydreaming about a new, loving home, with food for her and her babbies, she watches the young humans play and laugh, and misses when she used to have toys and a safe room to play and laugh in too. This thought gives her biggest saddies.