Chad and Kyle rode their BMX bikes up to the country reservoir. Their town was small, under 1000 people, and their primary source of revenue was a mill that sold Douglass Firs. Logan’s Farms. They made excellent lumber and firewood, but a special patch of trees was reserved as Christmas trees. Since the land was reserved for Christmas trees, they never grew tall, and created a low hanging tree canopy perfect to protect fluffies from predators while still letting ample sunlight through for low growing greens.
“Huwwy Hewd! Sabe Babbehs!” The gray smarty called out. The sound of chainsaws to their rear nearly drowning out his cries. They had been startled awake. He began to grab his foals and place them on his special friend’s back. With the last foal deposited he let out “WUN!” He heard a cracking noise as a tree trunk began to fall, he turned to look at the sound as his mate and foals escaped. The last thing he saw was the trunk of a tree slamming into his face.
The boys arrived at their favorite spot. Because of the shape of the mountain as it sloped down, there was a dry riverbed that naturally herded the fluffs to the reservoir close to where they stopped. Their friend Sam had arrived with her friends. “You excited?” She asked. “Wouldn’t miss it!” Chad responded. They dropped their bikes haphazardly and began to inspect the pile of stones they had begun to collect since last year. They heard the chainsaws in the distance. The entertainment would arrive soon.
“Huwwy fwens! Ged tuu wawa!” Flower was a bowl fluff with a pretty pastel yellow coat. Her special friend and smarty, Pebble, told her to run and so she did. He was a good smartie and took great care of their herd. It had gotten so big since spring that they needed two smarties to watch over all the fluffies. She ran and ran, she still heard the scary vroomy noises, but they sounded further and further away, she saw other fluffies in front of her running down towards the wawa too.
She reached the shore and plopped down in exhaustion. All around her were other bowl fluffs crying in fear. She couldn’t count that high, no fluffy could but she had a gut feeling that most the herd had escaped. She felt a sigh of relief. “Ged in wawa! Munstahs nuu can fowwow fwuffies!” The other smarty called out, Stone was a gray bowl like his brother Pebble. They met eyes and he rushed over to her “Fwowah, wewe am bwuddah?”
She looked down. “Huu huu… Nuu am nyu. Pebbwe sed tuu wun. Nebah am see pebbwe agaiwn.” She looked back up at him as an idea came to her. Hope flashed across her face. “Stown am gud smawtie! Guu bawk an fiwnd Pebbwe!” He looked away. “Sowwy fwowah. Nuu am sawfe. If pebbwe am sawfe den pebbwe wiww fiwnd hewd.”
He ran back to the shore and began helping the mares place their foals into their bowls. Flower walked to the water’s edge and began to take her foals off of her back. Her grey foal was missing. She panicked for a second but then realized that her special friend must have stopped to save their foal. He couldn’t run with a foal on his mouth. “Am otay chiwpy babbehs! Daddeh wiww be hewe soon!”
Chad, Sam, Kyle and the others watched the swarm of fluffies begin to embark into the reservior. One of them raised their hand to throw but Chad barked “Wait!” He looked back in the distance making sure they hadn’t heard him. Fluffies had excellent color vision but could not see very far. Their hearing was more sensitive, but in the moment they were making too much commotion to hear the children across the water. “Wait till they are all in, they’ll just scatter in the woods if you spook them now.”
At the shore, Flower watched the chaos. Many stallions were climbing on their backs and getting in the water without helping their special friends. Others were helping the mares place their foals in their bowls. One older mare with a dull rose-pink coat, began to panic and dug into the ground as several fluffs dragged her towards the water. “Nuu Wawas! Wawas Nuu Am sawfe!” Stone ran over and gave her a sorry hoof right across her mouth. “Stuwpid Mawe! Yuu am scawing dah babbehs!”
She looked at him in terror. She knew what was about to happen but didn’t have the words to describe it. The rock mustahs. The drowning fluffies. She was just a foal last year with her first coat of bowl fluff when it had happened, but the memories had come flooding back to her now. For the fluffies that survived it was not much better.
Without nests or saved up nummies to survive the winter they would need to go out in the cold to forage. The other side of the was filled with wingy and barky munstahs that would pick them all off one by one. Eventually the surviving foals would make their way back to their nests, now trampled with all the safe trees gone, eaten by the monsters. They would find another patch of trees and make their nests again. A gut feeling overtook petal. This would repeat next cold time too.
She consigned herself to her fate and got in the water. She survived last year. She would survive this year too. She called over two of the bigger colts. They were too big to fit in his mother’s bowl with all her other foals but too young for his first coat of waterproof bowl fluff to have completely grown in. “Dewe dewe bebbehs. Nuu cwy. Pedaw am keeb yuu sawfe.” She stroked their manes and pushed off from the shore with her rear hooves.
The teens watched anxiously from the shore. Soon the herd had all entered the water, there were almost a hundred excluding the foals in their bowls. The last had been a gray one that stopped to look back up the hill towards the sound of chainsaws. As they got a ways out into the water, Chad wound up his arm. He was the star pitcher of the high school baseball team. The rest of them waited for his ceremonial pitch. He let loose and his handpicked stone skipped across the water.
The stone disk skipped gracefully across the water, after about five skips it slammed cleanly into the side of the mare with the largest litter. She did not have time to process as her ribs cracked. She felt the wind knocked out of her and saw booboo juice spray out of her mouth with her oof all over her pretty foals as they all began to … fly? She began to roll over in the water as momentum spun her over. The pegasus she understood but the earthies and unicorns? The last thing she saw before her face went under the water and everything went back was her wonderful flying babies.
“Nice one!” Sam laughed as the litter of foals were launched into the air like confetti. The teens let loose their volley. A dozen rocks skipped across the water, most reaching their targets. More foals were propelled into the air. The sound of flying chirping foals in the air began to set off the herd and panic set in. Some fluffs instinctively righted themselves to run away as the call of “munstahs” went out.
More stones collided. None as well as Chad’s pitches. They mostly just capsized mares or bounced just over the mares to strike foals in the head to knock them overboard. More mares rolled over to grab their dead foals, the impact immediately causing massive hemorrhage to their tiny brains. The capsized mares doomed themselves and other foals to join the watery grave.
The herd thinned and soon the teens had to aim as they were no longer guaranteed a hit by aiming for center mass. The fluffies had made it two thirds of the way across the water and the pile of stones had been exhausted.
Stone arched his neck back. Watching as his herd was struck by the rocks. He finally understood what Petal was afraid of. This wawa wouldn’t be safe anymore for the herd he would make sure to keep the survivors away from it he thought. Then he was winded. One of Chad’s famous curveballs caught him in his shoulder, and he flipped over in the water. He failed, he was the worst smarty ever, in his last moments he wished Pebble was with him, he would know what to do. As he sank to the bottom he was greeted with the most terrifying sight. The lakebed was littered with fluffy skeletons. He no longer held his breath trying to scream in terror. Water filled his lungs.
As Flower made it to the far shore she felt as something like a sorry hoof hit her flank, she spun around in the water and saw as her foals went tumbling in the air. She saw a few of them land in the water and the few fluffs that had begun righting themselves ran out into the shallows. She gasped and sputtered trying to force out words. “Sabe bebbehs!” was all she was able to get out as she flailed. Her head dipped below the water and only bubbles came up.
Petal closed her eyes and pulled the colt’s heads down into her bowl. She kicked her legs knowing it would get her across the water. She kicked and kicked. She heard fluffies from the shore behind her calling. “Awmost dewe! Huwwy!” She smiled. She had survived. Then nothing. A stone collided with the side of head killing her instantly. Her two adopted colts had been thrown from her bowl but were able to stay buoyant long enough to reach the shore, with the aid of the stallions brave enough to run back out dragged them ashore. Petal sank to the shallow bottom with an expression of peace on her face.
The teens watched the remaining twenty or so fluffs begin to walk off into the trees with a much larger number of foals in tow. They returned to the farm in smaller groups, and some were smart (or traumatized) enough to walk around the reservoir, so the first logging of the season was the only day to get a show like this.
They all began to congratulate each other on their skill. Kyle called out, “Chad’s High Score! Undefeated!” Sam walked over to Chad congratulating him with a kiss. They all got back on their bikes and returned to town to get celebratory pizza. If this were a movie some cheesy Eagles or Journey song would begin to play as they rode off into the sunset.
For the Bowl fluffies this would repeat every year. The lumber farm was a perfect environment for their population to explode. Unbeknownst to both parties the children helped cull the fluffies to the point they wouldn’t experience a colony collapse by exhausting the undergrowth of the woods. The farm was aware of the herd but as they didn’t damage the inedible crop, their numbers never got bad enough to warrant an exterminator. Because of the unique conditions of the cull and the subsequent winter, few bowl fluffs ever lived longer than a year and so they never learned to avoid the reservoir as a whole. This winter would be a nightmare for the surviving herd.
At a seasonal pop-up parking lot tree store, a father and daughter walked around the brightly colored tent. “What about this one honey?” The father asked, pointing at a five-footer. “Nuh uh! Too small!” Their living room had a 12-foot ceiling where the roof came to a peak. There was no attic there. The father hated decorating giant trees, but he loved seeing a smile on his little princess’s face every Christmas. “Ok fine, is this ok?” Now indicating an 8-foot tree. “It’s perfect daddy!”
Her judgement wasn’t the best, but she remembered last year the tree was so tall that the angel on top leaned sideways as it pressed against the roof. The father paid the store attendant, and they loaded the tree into the back of his pickup. The girl looked at the top of the tree and saw a tuft of grey fluff hanging off a branch. She plucked it from the branch and climbed into the passenger seat.
“Daddy, can I have a fluffy for Christmas?” His made his best poker face and responded, “I don’t know, a pet is a big responsibility. If you are a really good girl then maybe Santa will bring you one.” She let out a squeal of excitement and tucked the fluff in her pocket. Unbeknownst to her, her mom and dad had decided to get her a fluffy since she was finally old enough to be left unsupervised with a pet. Dogs and cats could bite and scratch but a fluffy was perfectly harmless.
They picked out a white filly with a red mane that had just begun to come in and paid the deposit to reserve it. They would pick it up from the breeder on Christmas eve. This winter would be a dream come true for his daughter and the lucky fluffy.
So this story was fun. I initially tried to write a single page story which is apparently impossible for me. I wanted to try something that contained explicit abuse. I also wanted to figure out how bowl fluffs figured in my universe.
