“Larry, Dude! This fluffy is worth its weight in gold and I’m only asking ten grand!”
“Fuck you Shane, that thing’s all over the news, the billionaire you shot wants his fluffies back BAD. I already think I’m too involved just knowing you! Now piss off and leave me out of it!”
Shane sighed before putting his phone away. He wasn’t having any luck with elucidating Pistol’s secret, not that Shane knew what elucidating meant. Counting Larry, he had called up five different potential buyers, and had been harshly shut down by all five.
“Fuck it, Morphine time!”
Earlier that day:
Shane had slammed the ‘safe’ room door open around noon and had roughly grabbed Pistol without a word. He had ignored the fluffy’s questions as he carried it to an old barn on the property. Like most of the property, it was in dire need of maintenance, except for the repurposed horse stall where Shane tortured fluffies.
Pistol did not like the look of the barn as Shane carried him in, holding Pistol awkwardly by the scruff of his neck like one might hold a kitten that had shat itself. At the door, Pistol smelled decay in the air, faint at first but rapidly becoming overwhelming. There were other scents too, the metalic smell of blood hung in the air, alongside a mix of sorry poopies and scaredy poopies. Humans couldn’t usually tell the difference, or even care that there was one, but to a fluffy they represented very different things. Sorry poopies indicated defiance and even victory, whereas scaredy poopies represented anything from alarm and fear to torture and death. Smelling them together was bad, suggesting failed resistance and terrified fluffies. Add in the smell of blood, and Pistol was sure this was not somewhere a fluffy wanted to be.
In the stall Shane wasted little time, dropping Pistol into a leg-immobilizer board before walking around to face the stallion. Pistol could see that there were three other fluffies in the room, legs immobilized and mouths duct taped shut, and although their huuhuuing was muffled, it was still there, . Each of them were alternating between fearful glances at Shane and looking away from him. None of them still had eyelids.
“Okay Pistol, no more Mr. Nice Shane, I need to know how to fix a smarty, and these three smarties are here to help you show me. I took the liberty of getting them warmed up before bringing you here. So, how do I fix them?” Shane said, twirling a scalpel between his fingers as one might spin a pen.
Pistol, by this point, was terrified. Shane had already killed one of the foals to punish Pistol, at least that’s what Pistol thought had happened, and now he was demanding that Pistol solve a fools errand.
“Pistow nu no! Pistow onwy hewp widdwe babbeh! Babbeh nu smawty den, su Pistow made tawkies and stowy tewwies an widdwe babbeh den nu wan be smawty anymowe! If dese big fwuffies am smawties den Pistow nu can fixies, dey tu owd an’ been smawty tu wong an’ don wissen. Nu can make fwuffy change wi’ tawkies ib fwuffy nu hewe tawkies at aww!” Pistol tried to explain to Shane yet again, panicking further as Shane continued to demand the impossible.
“That’s not what I heard. I heard that you can talk smarties out of being smarties, so I’ll give you some time to think about it while I ‘play’ with this one.” Shane said as he donned hearing protection before pulling the tape off of a smarty’s mouth.
“Found this one yesterday, and this morning he had the nerve to complain that the barn was cold at night… I think I’ll warm him up, a little at a time.”
Shane reached into one of the toolboxes and extracted a soldering iron. He plugged it in and while it heated up he walked back over to Pistol.
“For your benefit Pistol, that is what humans call a soldering iron. The tip gets extremely hot so that we can melt metals together. Lets see if it’s warm enough yet.”
He grabbed the hot iron and prodded the smarty’s ear with the tip. The loud screech thus produced seemed to suggest that it was indeed, warm enough.
Shane started at the smarty’s rear left leg, tracing a path of burnt skin and melted fluff as if he was drawing with a crayon. The smarty screeched almost continuously save for short breaths as Shane drew a gradually larger and more complex picture on the fluffy, every now and then going back to ‘correct’ some imagined error. After ten minutes, all of the smarty’s legs were covered with what could be mistaken for intricate scroll work, had it not been attached to a now very horse sounding tiny horse. When he was satisfied with how the legs looked, he looked back to Pistol, who said nothing, so Shane just turned up the heat on the soldering iron and started actually writing on the fluffy’s back. The first line was “Plans for my money once Pistol stops being a stupid twat” and went on to describe purchases and even a few hits he’d like to put out, including no less than four different teachers from when he was a kid. By the time he was done, the fluffy’s mouth hung open, motionless save for it breathing, with eyes glazed and unfocused.
“Oh dear, I hope I didn’t break it!” Shane said ‘playfully’ as he rummaged around for a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol. The smarty, covered in burns promptly screeched louder than ever as every burn on his body was covered in sharp, stinging pain. There was then an odd sound, as if someone had ran the fluffy’s screeching through a guitar amp, but had turned the distortion way up as they turned the volume down until it was dead quiet. Shane was familiar with this sound- the fluffy had torn its vocal cords, and had kept screaming until they were completely dissevered.
“What’s wrong buddy, did you not like that? Do you want me to take you inside the house and give you sketties? All you have to do is tell me yes and I will.” The smarty desperately flapped its mouth as it tried to use severed vocal cords to make sound, to no effect. It then violently nodded its head will still trying and failing to make any sound at all beyond that of raspy breaths.
“You don’t want sketties? Just say nothing at all if you want me to keep ‘playing’ with you” Shane taunted the mute smarty who renewed its efforts to communicate to Shane, who walked over and pulled it out of the leg restraints. He dropped it in a clear plastic storage tote.
“If you really want to keep playing, I’m sure I can come up with a new game for you.” Shane said mockingly as he gathered seemingly random items. Some assembly later, he was ready.
“All right buddy, everything’s ready. That there is a little fluffy sized water pump. You have to step down on this part to pump the water out of the plastic tote that you’re in, but then you have to step on this other part to refill the pump with more water and then you press the first part again. It’s very easy.” Shane dropped the end of a hose into the tote while pouring salt in as well. “OH NO! I accidentally dropped a hose into the tote you’re in! And there’s water coming out of it. You better get pumping.”
The mute smarty started stomping away, and initially was keeping ahead of the hose with ease, but over the course of ten minutes, he had exhausted himself and was now struggling to work the pump. As the water rose, the salt stung at his burns, distracting him further. In his tired confusion he sometimes just stomped one part or the other several times until his brain caught up with him and he would then go back to alternating. As he tired further, he kept looking up pleadingly at Shane for help that would never come. He started missing the pump altogether with his tired stomps, and soon the water was up to his chin.
When he felt it there, he was filled with renewed vigor, but it didn’t last. Twenty minutes after the hose had turned on, the fluffy drowned, still trying to operate the pump even as the water covered the top of his head until he finally just stopped moving and went limp.
“He did better than I expected, but the ending’s always the same” Shane muttered before starting to burn Pistol’s front left leg with the soldering iron.
“SCREEE!!”
“I’ll ask you again, how do I fix smarties!”
“PISTOW NU NO WHA TU SA! BURNIES! SCREEE!”
Shane kept drawing on him for half an hour until all four legs were covered in swirling designs.
“Whelp, that was productive, but I’m hungry now, so we’ll have to continue this tomorrow.” And with that, Shane unplugged the soldering iron, turned out the lights, and left Pistol and the two surviving smarties restrained in the dark, cold barn.
