I wanted to try my hand at a story. Might fuck around and try something for the Helpers theme next, might realize nobody wants to read me talk about secretly abusing fictional horsepig creatures. Anyway, enjoy?
Fluffies.
Laszlo didn’t have much of an opinion on the ecological impact of releasing an opportunistic omnivore with the intelligence of a lead-paint toddler into the rich forests of the Adirondack Park. He couldn’t care less about the protests at Million Dollar Beach, townies and seasonal workers alike with signs protesting a flood of idiot tourists who kept leaving their fluffies behind. Last time he’d really tuned in to the ongoing ‘fluffy crisis’ was that shooting at the FluffMart in Albany - and even then, that wasn’t too out of the ordinary. People do awful shit to one another all the time, for any reason.
So no, fluffies weren’t on the foremost of his mind. There were more important things that had more of an impact on his life. That was, until his sister decided to get herself one of them.
Sister wasn’t accurate. They lived in the same house, they happened to have the same last name - Ward - and they were currently considered part of the same family for tax purposes, mainly. But Laszlo knew that once they hit that magic age of 18, or their foster mother got tired of either of their bullshit and had them sent to a new home…well. Blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, and they’d struck no deal when good old PINS put them under the same roof. Siblings? Nah, they were roommates. But that was alright with him.
And then she just had to go and get herself a fluffy. Fucking Nicki, ruining a perfectly good setup.
Now, maybe it wasn’t surprising. Neither of them had any friends, they didn’t talk to one another, and fluffies were quite literally made to love whoever decided to take them home. Laszlo remembered hearing the commercials. Fwuffies aw fo’ huggies and wub! in an obnoxious helium voice. For an isolated 14 year old, it was an obvious move. Laszlo couldn’t fault her for seeking something, anything, to validate her.
That being said…he hated the fucking thing. He knew he couldn’t stand it the moment she brought it inside the house, secure in a carrying box with air holes the size of half-dollars. Despite it being a bright, clear day, it was wailing and carrying on. Making these idiot huu huu huu sobs, between peeps and chirps, like an uncanny imitation of a cartoon character. It sounded like a baby crying in fear, but not. It sounded like an animal whimpering in pain, but not. It rose the hairs on the back of his neck and, for a moment, Laszlo had considered just grabbing the damn thing and hucking it right into the wood-burning stove.
That wouldn’t be smart, though. Laszlo was 17, looking down the barrel of life as an independent adult without a record. Giving in to impulse like that would undo all the work he’d done to convince people that he both understood and wanted to play by the rules they’d laid out. Easy does it. You gotta kill 'em with kindness, he reminded himself.
“Amelie won’t like that,” he said. “Too loud and it’s gonna make a mess.” Their foster mother was particular about those things. It wasn’t like either of them were netting her more than a few hundred a month, so they needed to watch themselves, keep house, and keep sweet. Laszlo wrinkled his nose. He could smell shit coming from the cardboard carrier. “Seems like it’s already made a mess.”
"It’s a new place! And she’s just a little baby. " Nicki held the box close to her body protectively. “And she’s mine, okay? My fluffy, my room she’s gonna be in, my problem. Not yours.” Her eyes narrowed.
Laszlo shrugged, meeting hostility with calm. “Just pointing it out, Nicki. Why are you getting so defensive?” He walked past, going to the fridge. He opened it, snagged a stray can of ginger ale inside, opened it, and had a sip. Nicki kept glaring at him. The fluffy kept crying.
“Leave her alone.”
Laszlo glanced over. By now, he was pretty good at pretending he wasn’t interested. Reshaping the disgust he felt was easy, and probably added to the authenticity. “Why would I want to play with your shitrat?”
Inside the box, there was an odd squeal, as if someone had stepped on a kitten’s tail. Nicki’s nostrils flared. Laszlo didn’t envy her in that moment. “Don’t call her that! You can’t swear around her, she’s just a baby.”
Just a baby. Tough shit, people did awful things to human babies all the time. Why would a fluffy be exempt? But still…keep sweet. Honey and vinegar. Laszlo filed that bit of knowledge away for later and gestured to the box. “I’m pretty sure you aren’t supposed to keep a baby in its own shit. You should probably take care of that,” he added, ever so helpful.
“You’re the worst, you know that?” Nicki took her box and stormed off. “I hate your psycho ass.”
“You can’t swear around her!” Laszlo echoed. His answer was a slammed door and renewed, but muffled squealing. Laszlo had to chuckle at the comedic timing of it all, but the sounds that thing was making made it hard to cultivate that fickle fire of happiness.
Fuck, even through the door and walls, he could hear the fluffy. That wasn’t going to become a constant in his life. But he’d have to be smart about it.
Now that he had reason to care, the internet took care of the rest. Some research on fluffy forums netted useful information on the care and keeping of foals. Their dietary needs - multiple feedings a day, all-liquid diet, venting and burping the thing like a human infant. He didn’t know how old it was, not until he got a glimpse of it outside the carrier, and there was no way Nicki would believe any curiosity on his part would be innocent. Good for her, really. She was only 14, but already had a pretty good idea of what people actually were like.
So, in preparation, he’d done the research. Besides being fussy eaters and shit machines, fluffies were incredibly needy and fragile. Half of the injuries he familiarized himself with were accidental - unicorn fluffies lobotomizing themselves by bumping into walls, pegasus fluffies breaking limbs trying to fly, regular fluffies breaking their teeth on kibble. Apparently, these things were stupid enough to drown themselves in water bowls. Too bad Nicki probably wouldn’t make that mistake.
Information abounded on how easy it was to maim, kill, or psychologically torture fluffies, but all the methods Laszlo was finding were too obvious, too traceable. Nicki was a smart kid, she’d notice if he smothered it with a ‘stuffy friend’ or overheated it to death with a heated blanket in its ‘nestie’. She wasn’t going to let him tamper with its ‘safe room’, and she’d be checking it for injuries whenever she…what did people even do with these things when they were babies? Hold them? Make ba ba noises at them?
Laszlo didn’t care enough to look it up. Instead, he kept researching…and that was when he found it. While watching an abuse livestream of an obstacle course involving fluffies and deadly traps, he noticed the chat talking about a past entertainment involving fluffies with something called ‘SBS’. Sensitive Baby Syndrome - failure to thrive, but also failure to just fucking die as it turns out. Laszlo watched a clip of a fluffy foal twice the size of the others in its litter wriggle useless arms. Its face was so fat that its cheeks forced its mouth into a pursed dot where wheezy, needling peeps escaped. The other foals were waddling up to the camera, babbling questions at it, but the fat one? The Sensitive Baby? It just…laid there. Laid there like a lump of flesh.
Laszlo considered what it’d feel like to grind the little fucker to pulp under his heel. Start at the legs, then slowly apply pressure. Steamroller the tumor to death, squeeze it like a toothpaste tube until its fat-choked guts unspool from its mouth. But no, no. Too obvious.
Too much effort, too. Imagine the fragility of a typical fluffy and then double - no, triple it, and you had a good idea of what owning SBS fluffies was like. Oftentimes, he read, they got so obese from their inbuilt limitations and fatty diets that heart attacks or positional asphyxia took them out. Laszlo skimmed a hugboxer forum thread of owners trading low-fat, healthy milk alternatives for their foals. Amusingly, advertisements for ‘Mega Mummuh’ foal-fattening feed were stretched across the sides of the webpage.
Through the wall, he heard Nicki giggling. That was fine - he wasn’t Amelie, he didn’t care if she laughed - but then the fucking fluffy foal picked up on the cue and started making gurgling noises that were probably supposed to be giggles. Soon after, a recorded melody started playing out of a tinny speaker. It sounded like the tune of ‘Shortenin’ Bread’.
Was she going to keep that on all the time? Laszlo decided he’d give it five minutes. That was fair, wasn’t it? He was browsing the internet anyway, it wasn’t too much of a bother -
Coo~ coo~
When fluffy foals were feeling safe and content, he’d read, they announced as such to the world by making a warbling call like a lobotomized pigeon. Hearing that sound with his own ears made Laszlo want to call it in right there. He was taller, stronger. He could just walk in, pluck it up out of whatever overpriced bed she’d put it in, and wring its little neck. He’d even be doing it a favor, letting it go in its sleep. All huggies and wub and heart happies and then - crack!
He was getting too caught up in this. Laszlo decided that was enough research and, more importantly, enough time in earshot of the fluffy. He throughily wiped his cache and history - Amelie liked to randomly check both when it pleased her - and then spent the rest of the day hunting wild turkey out back behind the house. After all this fluffy business, it felt good to just cleanly and honestly kill something. By the time he’d bagged one and walked back to the house, he had a plan.
Laszlo ended up waiting over a week to enact his plan. Much longer than he’d have wanted.
True to her word, Nicki hadn’t involved Laszlo in anything related to her new pet abomination. There’d been an argument when their foster parent got home - how dare Nicki take advantage of all the hard work she does, if it makes a mess you’re going out the door with it, etc. etc. - but it was nothing Laszlo or Nicki hadn’t heard before. Amelie went back to ignoring them both, and the new normal was here. Laszlo was hoping to avoid the establishment of a new routine. That caused people to be upset when it was disrupted, and he honestly just wanted that fluffy fucking dead. Nicki could live her life however she wanted, so long as that fucking fluffy died.
His foster sister made it hard, though. Nicki kept the fluffy in her room, cleaning it whenever it messed itself, feeding it with bottled formula she’d gotten as part of a package deal with the foal. It was still summer, albeit the end of August, so she didn’t have to go anywhere. She seemed perfectly content staying shut up in her room with her pet fluffy, making noises at it and laughing when it did whatever it was a useless sack of flesh did. She barely left, except to get herself food or use the bathroom. All the while, Laszlo could hear the fluffy from the other room. Even when it was quiet, he knew it was there, and a dark fire would burn in his chest.
People did terrible things - to animals, to humans, to inanimate objects - for any reason, any reason at all. Sometimes, simply existing was enough for someone to hate you. Laszlo hadn’t been on the other end of this feeling before, and found it intoxicating. Not only that, but he didn’t have to work through the potential implications or interpretations of his actions, which let him enjoy it. Most people wouldn’t bat an eye at him killing a fluffy. Some people would even cheer him on. It was just…human nature, he supposed, to want to destroy. Why else would people legally classify something that bleeds, that fucks, that’d call you ‘mummuh’ or ‘daddeh’ as inanimate?
But in his current situation, he had to be careful. A violent act on his record would follow him into adulthood, or else have him put under legal pressure some other way. He’d have to take it slow and leave no trace. Kill 'em with kindness.
But, eventually, Nicki had to leave her room. Her fluffy didn’t, obviously, but that was fine. Laszlo would start having free reign once school started and her bus left forty minutes before he did. Sure, she’d hide anything important, and it’d be suspicious if the fluffy died with just him in the house, but that was just fine. It wasn’t like he would pick it up and put it in the microwave while he played Metallica, just to maximize the sensory overload.
For this to work, Nicki needed to be with the foal long enough to notice something was different, and it would have to be during a time where she couldn’t pin it on him. Heh. So Laszlo waited until his foster sister was sat down by Amelie for the annual if you get bad grades, they’ll send CPS talk to strike.
Practice with his own, nearly-identical bedroom door meant that he could open it without the hinges creaking. As soon as he entered, he was met with the sight of anime posters all over the walls and the smell of shit. Under the largest poster of some guy with thick eyebrows and flame hair sat what honestly looked like a bassinet. The anime character smiled down, as if acting as a guardian. Too bad that wouldn’t work.
Laszlo checked for the sound of voices in the other room and then quickly made his way to the bassinet. In one hand, he held a long sewing needle. The other hand was free - he needed to keep a careful grip on the foal’s head for this part.
Inside the ‘nestie’ his sister had constructed for it, the foal slept. It was about the size of a kitten now, its sausage-like body covered in downy fur. It reminded him of peach fuzz, both in color and its sparseness. It was asleep, but something that Laszlo must have done must have awoken it, some disturbance of air or faint smell, because it stirred. Its eyes were barely cracked, plugged with a disgusting rime of mucus. Its legs were hardly that, more feeble stumps on its fat little body topped with things that looked more like deformed fingertips than proper hooves. It wriggled on its back and, after much exertion, managed to tilt itself slightly to one side as it peeped.
P-peep? Peep…
Best to get this over with quickly. Laszlo scooped a hand under the fluffy foal to turn it onto its stomach before shifting his hand to hold it still. This part was going to be tricky, working delicately and quickly while not squashing the foal in his desire to keep it still.
The foal wasn’t having this. Immediately, it shit itself in distress, but Laszlo stretched out his pinky and used it to pin the foal’s mouth shut before it could make another peep. With his other hand, he used the tip of the needle to lift up the curled membrane of its left ear. Quickly, but gently, he pushed the needle in about a half-centimeter.
The foal immediately siezed, legs shooting ramrod out, more shit and now piss leaking out of it. Laszlo took the opportunity to shift his grip, bring the needle around to the other side of its head, and jab the needle in through the right ear. The foal twitched again, little snout moving helplessly under his finger. It’d be so easy to crush it’s worthless fucking head -
Which was why he used his pinky. There wasn’t enough force, not the way the tendons worked and the way his hand was held. Laszlo reached behind his ear and withdrew a Q-tip already dabbed with Flufftech healing gel. A quick dab to either ear canal, a wipe, and there wouldn’t be any blood or leaking brain fluid to let Nicki know he’d just lobotomized her pet. Laszlo checked his surroundings, made sure his hands were clean, and left the room as quickly and quietly as possible, Q-tip and needle in hand. He’d throw those out in the neighbor’s garbage later in the evening.
Once he was back in his room, he made sure his door was closed, sat at his computer, and quickly put on his headphones. He shoved his hand in the half-eaten bag of Takis next to his monitor, wriggling his fingers to get as much of the dust under his nails as possible, then opened a long-form video essay and skipped ahead about twelve minutes. Nicki saw him go into his room around that long ago. At ease for now, he popped some Takis in his mouth and let them dissolve on his tongue.
A few minutes later, he heard the squeak of hinges as Nicki’s door opened and closed. Laszlo ate some more hot chips and waited for the inevitable.
“What’d you do to my fluffy?!”
Laszlo ignored her, instead focusing on the presenter talking about introducing kudzu to America during the World’s Fair. Well, wasn’t that interesting?
Nicki batted the headphones off his head. Laszlo paused the video, looking over at her with genuine irritation. “What?”
“You did something to my fluffy.” Nicki crossed her arms. “She’s crying.”
Laszlo rolled his eyes with practiced ease. “I don’t care if she’s crying.” That wasn’t a lie. He gestured to his monitor. “I’m watching videos, so leave me alone.”
In his peripheral, he could see her check the time on the video. Probably she was doing the same mental math he’d just done, counting back twelve minutes and checking details. She visibly wanted to argue, but Laszlo instead picked up his headphones. He looked at her.
“Do you need something, or are you gonna leave me alone?”
“Ugh. Screw you,” Nicki said, and left. She slammed the door behind her, which amusingly made the fluffy even more upset. Laszlo pressed play and leaned back in his seat.
That was it - now all he had to do was wait. If he’d done his research right, the parts of the foal’s brain he’d just disabled would control speech and fine motor control - no talkies or walkies for this baby. Imagine how surprised his sister is going to be when her fluffy never grows up fully, but instead stays stuck as a wordless lump dependent on milk, unable to toddle around and make a nuisance of itself. A Sensitive Baby - which, as everyone knows, is notoriously hard to keep alive by even the most well-meaning of owners.
So far, so good. Laszlo was interested in seeing how this developed in the days and weeks to come.
Too much setup? I hope not. Next chapter will feature more of the foal and its ensuing escapades.
