Mama wiped some sweat from her forehead, and smiled.
“There we are now, all better.” She said. Kumquat looked up, shivering from the coldness of the room-temperature air that was assaulting his sensitive, hairless body.
“M-m-mummah…” He whimpered. “Why t-take fwuff…?”
“Well what else would I need you for?” She said. Kumquat realised that her voice sounded different, she had been so gentle and loving before, but now… now she sounded mean!
“B-buh Kumquat nee’ fwuff… c-c-cowd…”
“Oh shut the fuck up.” She said, picking him up with both hands. Kumquat let out a quiet ‘eep!’ at the sensation, never having felt bare skin against his own bare skin before. “You shitrats are just lucky you’re good for at least one thing.”
She carried him through her home, but took a hard left from the door to the outside, and carried Kumquat deeper into the building. Finally they got to a door, which Mama pulled open, revealing a safety gate covered in mesh fabric that blocked the lower half of the doorway.
The room was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, casting a decent amount of light, but it still took Kumquat a few seconds to work out what he was looking at.
The floor of the room seemed to be moving, but it was all multi-colored, and some parts of it were bald, and others were…
Then it dawned on him.
The room was full of fluffies, some with their fur, others recently bald just like himself.
“Eep! Nu mama, pwease nu! Nu put in woom wif oddah smewwy dummeh fwuffehs! Kumquawt best fwuffeh ebah!”
“Quit whining.” Mama sneered at him, as the other fluffies in the room turned to look at him. “Hey fluffies, guess what, you’ve got a new friend!”
The fluffies in the room were just about as miserable as Kumquat was, and voiced their opiniosn immediately.
“Nu! Nu mowe fwiends! Pwease nu!”
“Nu mowe woom in woom!”
“Gu 'way! We fuww!”
But Mama ignored them, and under-arm tossed Kumquat into the room, letting him land on top of several other fluffies who were struggling to move in the suffocatingly small amount of space left.
“Let’s see, who’s next…” Mama said, looking over the group that were barely able to move anymore. There were fluffies covering the floor from wall to wall, all wriggling and writhing as they fought to get some space against every other fluffy doing the same thing, each one crushing each other with it’s mere presence.
“You’ll do.” Mama said, plucking out a fluffy with a deep purple coat covered in streaks of filth. “First, a bath, then the shaving.”
“NUUU!!!” The fluffy shrieked, noisily voiding it’s bowels on several fluffies below itself. “Nu wan shabin’! PWEASE nu take pwecious fwuff!”
“Don’t you get it yet?” Mama snarled. “The only reason any of you are still alive is because I can make money off of your fluff! It’s the only thing about you that’s worth a single damn! Now quit fucking crying or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”
Mama then carried away the purple fluffy, who continued to squeak ‘NU NU NU NU NU’ as she was carried away into the depths of the house, the door swinging closed behind them.
Kumquat looked around the room as best he could, taking in all the other fluffies. They were all in varying states of baldness. They all started out bald when they arrived, after having just been shaved by Mama, then once their fluff grew back, they’d be taken away for another shaving. And so on and so forth until they eventually died.
Which, frankly, didn’t seem like it would take very long. Most of the fluffies were old and sickly, and the confined space of the room meant anything that one got, they all got, and after living on the streets, they were all carrying at least one thing with them.
Even Kumquat was starting to sniffle with a slight cold.
“Huhu… Kumquawt miss fwuff…” Kumquat whined. “Miss home… miss toys… miss stoopid mummah n’ daddeh… Kumquawt wan’ gu home… wan fwuff… wan stoopid mummah n’ stoopid daddeh again… huhuhu…”
Twenty minutes later, the door opened again. Mama looked furious.
No fluffy spoke when they saw her, because they noticed she was covered in blood.
Before she said a single word, she held up something for them all to see. It was a blood-soaked corpse of a bald fluffy pony, which had, only twenty minutes ago, been covered in rich dark purple fluff.
“Do you see what fucking happens?” Mama hissed at them, the only other sound being the steady dripping of the corpse’s blood on floor. “Do you see what happens when you fuck around with mama’s business?!”
The corpse had been shaved bald, as per usual, but then it had been sliced all over in various places, with deep lacerations cut into the fluffy’s skin.
“Little cry-baby bitch here wouldn’t stop whining and begging and screaming and crying. So I put away the electric clippers, and I got out the straight razor.”
And with that, Mama withdrew the razor from her pocket, holding it high for the fluffies to see, noting it’s long, curved, sharp blade and the thin layer of blood that still coated it.
“That’s right, you stinking shit-filled pigs!” Mama snarled at them. “I went Sweeney Todd on that bitch’s ass, I shaved her bald and then I really let her fucking have it!”
The fluffies were still silent, transfixed by the sight of the bloody razor and the mangled corpse of their friend.
“And the next time any one of you thinks of fucking with mama’s business, you just remember who’s in control here!”
The door slammed shut, and the light went out, leaving the teeming mass of fluffies in the dark, as some began crying to themselves.
Kumquat was one of them, and he cried the loudest.
It just wasn’t fair!
