You are a foal. A scarlet-colored unicorn colt, to be precise.
You and your five bruddas and sissies enter the world in the usual way. Your mummah gently licks you clean and sets you on her teat to nurse, all while singing a joyful mummah-song. You drink milkies until you are sated, cheep happily to express your love, and then fall asleep while snuggling her soft fluff.
Life is good.
For a while, this is the sum total of your existence. Milkies, huggies, and mummah’s love. It’s all you know, and all you could ever want. You don’t think life can get any better than this. But as it turns out, life will prove more complicated that you initially thought.
One day, many forevers after you were born, your eyes open for the very first time. You get a glimpse of your mummah, a white unicorn with a dark red mane, whom you promptly decide is the most beautiful fluffy in the whole wide world. You can also see your siblings alongside you in the fluffpile, and they all have pretty colors too.
But everything seems so…bright. The light is giving hurties to your eyes, and you aren’t sure how to cope with it. You let out a distressed chirp, which your mummah immediately responds to by picking you up and nestling you against her chest fluff.
“Shhhhh…it otay, widdew babbeh” she coos. “Nu cwy, mummah am hewe”
You feel safe again, and close your eyes as you listen to her heartbeat.
More forevers pass. Your vision gradually adjusts to the light, and you are able to fully take in the world around you. Your family is living inside a pen, with tall wooden walls in all four directions that block any view of the outside. Inside the pen, there are food & water dishes, a litterbox, a blanky, and even a cheap plastic ball. It’s a small domain to be sure, but it’s familiar, and that makes you feel at home.
Even more forevers pass. You grow a pretty indigo mane, and you & your siblings start to stand up and walk around - at first just wobbly little steps, but soon enough you can all run around and play with each other. You still prefer to stay close to mummah’s side, though. She loves it when you dance for her, and says that “mummah’s widdew dancie babbeh gibs mummah biggest heawt-happies”, which makes you swell with pride.
Hoomins walk past your pen many times a day, occasionally stopping to refill the food dish or empty the litterbox. They look pretty big and scary to you, but mummah tells you that hoomins are nice, and you trust her. She also tells you that one day, you would live in a housie with a hoomin mummah or daddeh. Your Hasbio-programmed instincts tell you this is a good thing, but somehow you think you’d prefer to stay with mummah instead.
Eventually, your bruddas and sissies begin saying their first words, becoming “tawkie-babbehs”. Talking is something you never really get the hang of. Occasionally you try to mimic something your siblings say, but it seems like you can never manage to form the words in your mind in order to say them aloud. Eventually you give up on attempting to talk entirely: you can still peep and chirp, and your mummah understands what you mean, which is good enough.
You find comfort in feeding, staying latched to your mother’s teats long after the other foals have gotten their fill. While your siblings love to play huggie-tag and chase the ball around, you find that they are too loud and play too rough, which makes you feel scared. You prefer to stay with mummah while they run around, suckling her “miwkie-pwace” and kneading it with your tiny hooves. She doesn’t mind, there are plenty of milkies for everyone.
At one point, a hoomin tells mummah that her babbehs need to start eating kibble. Most of your siblings are weaned fairly quickly, but you refuse - why would you want to eat kibble when you have milkies? Eventually, after much convincing, your mummah persuades you to try some. You take your first bite of kibble, and immediately chip one of your soft teeth. It takes a good thirty minutes of mummah consoling you before you finally stop crying after that. She never brings up the topic of kibble again.
You begin to pack on the ounces as you keep sucking down milk. You soon weigh more than twice as much as the other foals, with thick rolls of fat engulfing your body, neck, and legs. Eventually you become too heavy to dance for mummah anymore. You’re too heavy to climb into the litterbox as well, but this isn’t a problem: whenever you need to make peepees or poopies, you make some special chirps that tells mummah to pick you up and carry you over to it. When you are done relieving yourself, your mummah always makes sure to tell you how proud she is of her “widdew sensitibe babbeh” for making good poopies
Life as mummah’s sensitibe babbeh is good. All your siblings are eating kibble now, so you don’t have to share her milkies. You could drink milkies all day long if you wanted. Mummah tells you over and over again how much she loves you, and you feel safe and comfortable by her side. You believe that you’ll stay by her side forever.
Then, without warning, everything changes.
One morning, you are happily suckling at your mummah’s teats while the other foals are playing a game of hide-and-go-peep in the background. You don’t pay attention the two hoomins who have been looming over the pen for the past ten minutes. You aren’t listening to what they are saying, and even if you were, you wouldn’t understand the words they are using. Words like syndrome and defective and mistake. You are blissfully preoccupied with guzzling more of that warm, sweet milk.
Suddenly, a hand reaches down and grabs you by the scruff of your blubbery neck, abruptly yanking you away from your source of comfort. This is the first time a hoomin has ever picked you up, and it is utterly terrifying. You immediately start crying and flail your limbs about in a panic, bellowing out alarmed cheeps and chirps to your mummah. A load of scardey-poopies shoot out your rear end and fall into the pen below, some of it splashing onto your siblings.
Your mummah immediately attempts to come to your rescue. “NUUUUU! Pweeze gib widdew sensitibe babbeh back tu mummah!” she begs. “Sensitibe babbeh nu wike upsies! Dey nee’ tu be wif mummah ow dey get wowstest scawdies and cwy! Pweeze nu take widdew babbeh!”
But the hoomins don’t listen to her. She gets up on her hind legs and tries to grasp you, but you are too high up. The hoomins drop you inside a little metal cage and walk away as she continues to cry out for her “sensitibe babbeh”.
You are unbelivably frightened. You continue to make frantic peeps and chirps while looking all around for your mummah, but you can’t see her. Eventually, you can’t even hear her. Why isn’t mummah coming to save you?
After what feels like forever, one of the hoomins sets your cage down and opens the door. You cower in the corner, trying to scrunch up into a ball, but his hand grabs you all the same. You squirm furiously in his grip, trying impotently to free yourself while huu-huuing and making more scardey-peeps. The hoomin tells you to calm down but you can’t even hear him over your own cries.
Apparently unwilling to deal with your antics, the hoomin opts for Plan B: he picks up a syringe with his other hand and jabs it into your neck. You let out a loud “CHEEEEEE” as the needle pierces your flesh, but soon your voice falls silent as a peculiar wooziness washes over your body, quickly causing you to fall asleep.
Benjamin Bernthal stepped out the back door for a smoke, long after the rest of his staff had gone home for the day. The office he managed was located in the corner of an old, half-vacant strip mall; the section they occupied had previously been a laundromat, before it was hastily subdivided into office space. Lighting up a cigarette, Benjamin watched the sun set over the rolling countryside, the fields of which were dotted with huge, warehouse-like buildings where thousands of fluffies were being raised.
Bernthal, a New England city boy, was distinctly out of his element here. He had started work with the Fluffy Industry Association of America about five years ago, rising up the ranks as a junior executive at the FIAA’s headquarters in Boston. That is, until he made a fatal mistake: while attending a company banquet, his boss, who was trying to impress some FluffMart executives, made the offhanded remark that seafluffies were fish. Benjamin interrupted to correct him, stating that seafluffies were in fact mammals. His boss had seemed to take this embarrassment with good humor, but a week later, Ben learned that he was being “promoted” to manager of an FIAA Regional Outreach Office - the region in question being Bumfuck Nowhere, Appalachia.
Fluffy mills were big business out here. A decade ago, broilers had been the top agricultural commodity, but after a devastating pandemic of avian flu wiped out their chicken flocks, most of the farmers switched over to raising fluffies instead. They certainly kept Bernthal busy, given that three-fourths of the mill operators in the region were FIAA members. Many breeders came in several times a week, seeking advice on fluffy husbandry or a listing to sell their stock through an accredited broker. Or occasionally, to drop off a very particular sort of foal.
Chuck Raines had been one of them, walking into the office today with a small cardboard box under his arm. Farmer Raines was one of the few mill owners out here who bred fluffies on a smaller scale to sell as pets - er, biotoys - rather than raising them in bulk for research labs or dog food processors. He had a reputation for high quality product, something he guarded fiercely. So when Chuck brought in a defective foal this afternoon, he was very concerned about the possibility of faulty genetics in his breeding stock.
The sedated foal inside the box was grossly obese, with a layer of body fat so thick that the ribs underneath couldn’t be palpated. Farmer Raines said that the unicorn colt was still drinking milk long after its siblings were weaned, and that it never talked, only chirped like a newborn. To Ben, it looked like a textbook case of Sensitive Baby Syndrome. He reassured the farmer that SBS was a relatively rare disorder, that it wasn’t hereditary, and that the rest of his stock wouldn’t be affected - although he did advise that the foal’s mother was probably too old for breeding and should be culled.
The FIAA had a program to collect SBS foals for genetic research, so Ben took the colt off the farmer’s hands under that auspice. In truth, he had zero intention of turning the foal over to his employer. The next FIAA courier wouldn’t be able to arrive until Friday, and he had little interest in bottlefeeding a retarded crap-chick in his office for the next two days. Instead, he simply wrote in the records that the foal had died shortly after arrival, then called up a buyer to make a little extra money for himself on the side.
Harlan Culpepper pulled up behind the strip mall in a rusty old F-250 pickup. He was a lanky middle-aged man with a seedy mustache, cleft chin, and beady little eyes that were always darting around. The wife-beater he wore was stained with egg yolk and dip spit. Ironically, he was probably one of the better-adjusted members of his family; of the seven Culpepper children, Harlan was currently the only one who wasn’t dead, in prison, or addicted to substances.
Of course, that wasn’t to say that he didn’t have his own vices.
Harlan stepped out of his truck and walked towards Ben, who was still standing by the back entrance. He was well aware that the Yankee boy regarded him with contempt, but he didn’t care. He wanted his fix, and this was one of the few places he could get it. As he got closer to the door, he could hear the faint sound of distressed chirping coming from the other side, which only made his murder-boner stiffer.
"Evenin’, Ben. Heard ya had something I might wanna buy?’
“Yeah” Bernthal replied, taking a drag from his cigarette. “A red colt with full-blown SBS, just as you like them. Total mama’s boy. Fat little fucker, too. It can be yours for fifty dollars.”
“Oh, come on now” Harlan said with a creepy grin. “You and me both know that one of them ‘sensitive’ fluffs wouldn’t sell for half that price on the market. I think thirty-five bucks is a more than fair price.”
“Fifty” Ben reiterated.
“Fourty” Harlan countered.
“Fourty-five, that’s my final offer.”
Harlan muttered something along the lines of “greedy kike bastard” under his breath, but pulled out $45 in small bills from his pocket and handed it to Benjamin. Ben briefly went back inside the office, emerging again with a cardboard box in his hands. The redneck’s malicious smile grew wider as he possesively grabbed the box and gave it a little shake, setting off a new round of frightened peeps within. Music to his ears.
“Pleasure doin’ business with ya”, Harlan said as he walked back to his truck. Ben only rolled his eyes in response.
You are a foal. A scarlet unicorn colt with an indigo mane & tail, to be precise.
You are more scared than you’ve ever been in your short life.
The last thing you remember before you fell asleep was a hoomin giving owwies to your neck with something sharp. When you woke up, you were trapped inside a dark box, all alone. Sometimes the box would shake and make you fall over, giving you worstest scardeys. You chirped over and over again for your mummah, but no matter how loudly you cried, she never came.
It doesn’t take long before you tire yourself out. You’re hungry and want milkies, but mummah’s miwkie-pwaces are nowhere to be found. You’ve never been separated from her before, and don’t know what to do without your source of comfort. Eventually, after thinking long and hard about it with your stunted little brain, you finally get the idea to suck on your hooves. It takes some work - the girth of your body restricts the range of movement for your limbs- but you manage to drag one of your hoofsies into you maw. It doesn’t give you any miwkies, but suckling on it does calm you down a bit.
You curl up in a corner and suckle your hoof in the darkness for a long time. Then, without warning, the darkness vanishes. You look upwards, and see that the lid of the box is gone. In its place is the face of a hoomin staring down at you.
The hoomin smiles with crooked teeth. “Well hello there, little buddy!” he says with a thick drawl, then reaches inside. Before you can react, he quickly pulls you out of the box and sets you down on a plywood shop table.
If you were to look around right now, you might notice that you were inside the spare bedroom of a double-wide trailer, which has been converted into a “workshop” of sorts. You might notice the nasty looking metal intstruments hanging off the walls. But you don’t. Instead you start crying and chirping again, letting out some scardey-poopies onto the table as you rock back and forth.
“There there, don’t cry”
The hoomin takes his pinky and gently strokes your cheek with it. You freeze. His touch is strange, but it feels nice. Instinctually, you turn your head and start trying to suckle on his fingertip. He chuckles as you close your eyes, watching you desperately cling to anything that provides even a modicum of comfort.
And then he plunges a sewing pin into your left eye.
Your right eye flies open, and you let out a muffled “SCREEEEEEE!”. In a panic, you inadvertently bite down on the finger in you mouth. The hoomin doesn’t seem to feel anything at all, but you crack several of your soft teeth on his bony knuckle, sending another shockwave of pain through your tiny nervous system.
The hoomin bellows with laughter as he holds you still with one hand, using the other to repeatedly stab and gouge your eyeball with the pin. Blood & vitreous humor pour out of your ruined left eye, while tears stream out of your right as you screech in agony.
After a long time, the hoomin sets the pin down. He lets you lie there on the shop table for a minute, listening to your screeching until it eventually degenerates into quiet little peeps and sobs. Then, suddenly, he pinches one of your ears and hoists you up into the air while singing in a strange, off-key voice.
“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,”
You start screaming again. The entire weight of your prodigious body is being suspended from a single ear.
“From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.”
The hoomin swings you from side to side like a bell. You can feel the soft cartilage start to deform, then tear.
“Summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,”
Blood trickles into your ear canal, muffling your hearing. You feel incredibly dizzy and nauseous.
“It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide!”
The outer ear finally separates from your head. You fall face-first onto the hard table, managing to crack a few more teeth on impact. The hoomin doesn’t even wait for you to stop screaming this time; instead he immediately plucks you up by your other ear and starts swinging you about again.
“But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow…”
Harlan cackled with glee as the colt’s second ear tore off, sending the pudgy foal careening towards the table again. He had gone far too long without getting to torture a coddled “widdew sesitibe babbeh” like this one. It was a degenerate habit, to be sure, but he would always defend it as a far healthier means of stress relief than his siblings’ chosen methods of booze and OxyContin.
He had gotten his start as a teenager, mutilating newly-hatched chicks on his uncle’s poultry farm. It had been fun at first, but eventually he got bored with it: there were only so many ways you could torment a chicken before it got stale. Harlan abandoned it for a time after entering adulthood, only to enthusiastically pick it back up when fluffies first hit the scene. Everything about them - their artificially adorable bodies, their blind trust of humans, their preprogrammed desire for “huggies an’ wub” - made them irresistible targets for his “hobby”. He preferred to abuse foals, and he especially loved SBS foals, who were even more stupid & naively trusting than the average fluffy.
Most foals would have mounted an (ineffective) attempt to run away from an abuser by this point, but the red colt didn’t even seem to have the sense to do that. Instead it just curled up into the fetal position, snot dripping out its nose as it continued to bawl noisily. Harlan flipped the foal onto its back, then grabbed a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool rack and placed the jaws around one of its back legs before clamping down hard. The femur snapped like a toothpick, eliciting yet another “EEEEEEEE!” from the little unicorn. He continued to work over its limb with the pliers until the bones inside had been reduced to splinters, then did the same with the other hind leg.
Harlan picked up the foal by the scruff of its neck and held it upright, then began bouncing it up and down against the tabletop. “Look, yer a lil’ dancin’ baby now! I bet yer mama would be so proud!” he laughed.
The colt squealed with pain each time its shattered legs collided with the wooden surface. After a few minutes of this treatment, it finally seemed to remember that it had front legs as well, and managed to stuff one of their hooves into its mouth. “Aww, ain’t that cute” Harlan remarked as he watched the foal suckle on its hoof while making muted huu-huus to itself. “I think I’ll let ya keep them front leggies.”
Then he brought his pliers up to their stubby little horn. “This, on the other hand…”
You are a foal. A scarlet unic…well, you used to be a unicorn. You don’t even know what you are now that your pointy-place is gone.
What you do know is that this has been the worst day of your whole life.
Your mummah told you that all hoomins were good & nice, and you believed her. But today a hoomin came and took you away from mummah, and now another hoomin is giving your the worstest hurties ever. This is incomprehensible to you. How could your mummah possibly be wrong about anything?
The meanie hoomin leaves your sight for a little bit, leaving you lying in a puddle of your own scardey poopies while you suckle on your hoofsie. When he returns, he’s holding a glass eyedropper between his fingers. The hoomin nudges your front leggie away from your mouth, then pushes the tip of the eyedropper into your maw.
Hunger and a desire for comfort override any fear of danger you might have. You immediately start sucking again, expecting milk. What you aren’t expecting is a mouthful of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Fire. Your one eye goes wide with shock as the amber fluid stings your tongue, and you try to spit it back out. The hoomin doesn’t let you, however, and forces the rest of the whiskey down your throat, leaving you choking and spluttering once he withdraws the eyedropper. Bile starts rising up your throat as the burning liquid hits your stomach, and even more poopies spurt out your rear end.
"Damn. They don’t call y’all crap chicks for nothin’ " the hoomin quips as he flips you onto your back again, using you like a sponge to wipe up the shit, piss, puke, and blood from the tabletop. The splintered plywood surface snags your mane as he rubs you against it, ripping out strands of the pretty indigo fluff. Once your coat is fully saturated with the disgusting mixture, he carelessly drops you inside a glass Mason jar. Then, as a final touch, the hoomin retrieves a styrofoam cup and tips it over into the jar, sending a waterfall of brownish saliva and clods of tobacco falling onto you.
A lid with a few air holes is screwed onto the jar before you are picked up and moved into a closet. “See ya in the mornin’, retard” the hoomin says as he closes the door, leaving you alone in the scary darkness.
You peep pathetically inside the foul confines of your glass prison. You are cold, hungry, frightened, and miserable. Every part of your body hurts. You need huggies and love more than ever now, but your mother still hasn’t come to save you from the meanie hoomin. You can’t understand why she would abandon you. Eventually, you curl up in a puddle of dip spit and cry yourself to sleep.
“Christ, yer still alive? Thought for sure you’d be dead by now.”
The meanie hoomin is back. After leaving you in the jar overnight, he’s now holding it up to his face, shaking it a little to wake you up. You whimper and chirp weakly as fresh bolts of pain shoot through your broken body. Your fluff is coated in a crusty brown sludge, and pus is seeping out from your left eye socket, making you smell very not-pretty.
“Well, it don’t matter. I got an idea for what to do with ya.”
The Mason jar starts moving as the hoomin carries you outside, placing it down on the patio of his trailer. He roughly pulls you out of it and dabs your body dry with an old rag. Next, he takes a length of cheesecloth, douses it with charcoal lighter fluid, and wraps it around your midsection. He then place you inside a clean jar before pouring a little excess lighter fluid into the bottom.
You sit up on your rear and start crying & peeping again, hoping that your mummah will finally come to her senses and appear from thin air to rescue you. The sound of a match being struck above you goes unheard by your damaged ears, and you don’t notice the little burning stick that falls into the jar until it hits the bottom.
“SCRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
A orange fireball blossoms upward from the bottom of the jar, engulfing you in flames in the blink of an eye. The excruciating pain you experience is simply beyond description; you shriek your little lungs out, trapped inside a foal-sized version of Hell. In doing so, you inhale thick black smoke - superheated and laden with hydrocarbons - which inflicts third-degree burns to your nose, mouth, and throat.
The fire burns through all the lighter fluid in a matter of seconds, but that doesn’t stop it in the slightest. The physics of the wick effect may be beyond your comprehension (granted, Harlan doesn’t really understand it either), but that won’t keep you from getting a first-hand demonstration. As your pudgy body burns, the searing heat melts the layer of Crisco-like adipose tissue under your skin. The melted fat soaks into the cheesecloth wrapped around your belly, feeding the flames with a continuous supply of fuel.
You expire fairly quickly, spending your final moments in horrific agony before finally going forever-sleepies. The flames don’t care if you’re alive or dead however, and keep right on burning. Your fatty corpse sustains the inferno for a good fifteen minutes before it eventually dies out. In the end, all that’s left of mummah’s sensitive babbeh is a few charred bones and a greasy, sooty stain at the bottom of a jar - along with the distinctive fragrance of burnt deep fryer oil.
Author’s note: Inspired by a comment from @ThatsWhy on this post. I might use some of these characters again in a future story.
