In some alleyway, in some city, in some country, a fluffy mare sits with her foals piled up beneath her, trying to keep the worst of the chill off them. Her hooves shake as she adjusts herself, trying her best to cover her foals with her fluff but not suffocate them. She looks forlornly out into the rain outside her tiny cardboard home.
Does she hope for a special friend to return? An owner that promised to come back? A nice human to come save her and her offspring from their fate?
As the rain drips through the soggy cardboard, does she wish she had a warm home to shelter in? Does she even know what a home feels like? Can she comprehend what a privileged life could be, or does she only know of suffering and loss?
Did she dream of motherhood, of the joys and rewards, or did she dread it with every bit of bulk she put on? Did she know what she was in for? Could she have known that she would be stuck here, alone in the rain, praying that her tiny body was enough to keep her foals warm?
There’s no way to know.
She sighs as she settles in, watching the streetlights turn on one by one as the sun sets somewhere behind the thick cloud cover. The cardboard above her gives way, sending a stream of water down her back. She gasps but doesn’t move, letting her absorbent fluff protect her foals.
In the morning, when the streetlights turn off and the rain finally lets up, she will be long dead. Any traces of heat will have leached from her body and into the puddles that form on the pavement around her. Her foals beneath her will suffer a similar fate, their downy fluff far too thin to provide any protection from the elements. They will be nothing more than garbage to be discarded, any remnants of this tiny family bundled up in the wet paper that surrounds them and thrown unceremoniously into a dumpster. They will be one of a thousand similar corpses, brightly colored shells that once held hopes and dreams and memories piled among the rest of the discarded waste a city generates.
Tonight, she silently pleads with the rain to ease up, to give her a moment’s rest. She begs for the hopes of one more day.
She will not get it.
