The walk back to the farm’s clinic from the woods felt like an eternity. Every step Dylan took made him feel like his feet were made of lead. Neither he nor Emrys spoke as they walked. The only sound that broke the silence, aside from the normal noises of the farm after dark, was the occasional chirp or peep from the eight foals Dylan held cradled in his hands. The hands, he thought to himself, that held their tiny lives within their grasp. He looked up from the colourful bundle to Emrys’ back, and then down to his hip. Emrys was a few steps ahead of him, lighting the way with his flashlight and carrying the corposes of the two ferals by their tails. The way their limp bodies swung to and fro with his gait make it seem as though he were carrying nothing more than a pair of stuffed animals and not the living creatures he’d killed only mintues ago.
Everything felt wrong. Was he in a state of shock? Maybe. Was he mortified? Absolutely. This was how people dealt with feral fluffies outside of urban areas? No shelters, no adoptions, no relocations, just outright extermination? It made sense, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier of a pill to swallow. He wondered if he could have done the same thing in Emrys’ shoes and quickly decided he couldn’t. He could have at least poisoned them, perhaps, or put them down humanely. He wondered if Emrys actually care about his own fluffies or whether he’d just made up an excuse so he could use their movie night as a means to an end? To fool the ferals into thinking he was friendly so he could get close enough to… to do what he did?
They carried the foals and dead ferals back to the clinic. Emrys dumped the bodies in a bio-waste bin. “Put them down on the exam table and we’ll have a look at them,” he directed Dylan as he turned on the light above the table.
Carefully, Dylan set the eight down and watched while Emrys worked. Each foal was picked up and wiped clean of the crusting layer of urine and excrement matted into their thin layer of fluff. Emrys turned them this way and that, performing a visual inspection of their condition. “Hm. Oddly good. Not starved.” He commented as he made his way through their colourful ranks until all eight had been cleaned and inspected. He scooped them up afterwards and put them into an empty pen, then started to mix up a batch of formula for the automatic feeders.
“What are you going to do with them?” Dylan asked.
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll make a call to the AFP tomorrow and see what they say, then figure it out from there.”
Dylan nodded. The AFP would probably take and euthanize them. At least they’d probably be humane about it. More than most would, anyway. He turned and walked over to check on Frost, stopping at her pen. Didn’t Emrys tell him that he’d moved her foals to a feeder so he could work? Why was the black one still with her and what was that sound? He looked to the audio player at the side of the pen and picked it up, putting it to his ear.
The audio track was faint and sounded like a mare singing a mummah song but the words were… different. Dylan was familiar with the usual mummah song fluffies sang to their offspring. This song made a lot of references to bestest, prettiest, smartest babbeh and other, dummeh babbehs. What. The. Fuck. Slowly putting down the player, Dylan looked at Emrys’ back. He was still facing the counter, mixing foal formula.
“Emrys? Where are the rest of Frost’s foals?”
“They’re a few pens over, in the one with the auto-feeder.”
Dylan walked along the row of cages until he found them, all snuggled up together on their faux-fluff mat near the auto-feeder, each of them catheterized and plugged. “Emrys, can you do me a huge favor?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Can you explain to me exactly what fuck you’re doing with these foals?” He demanded, perhaps a little too loudly. Frost’s chirpies started peeping in fright, shitting into their waste collectors. From a few pens down, the feral foals started their own terrified cacophony of chirps and flood of shit.
Emrys stopped dead in the middle of what he was doing and looked over his shoulder. “Can we talk about that later?”
“Fuck later. You’ve got the black one over there listening to fucking… I don’t know what. Smarty songs? You’ve got the rest of them over here with tubes up their asses. What the fuck is going on here?” Dylan gestured as he demanded answers, his raised voice further terrorizing the foals.
Emrys pressed his lips together into a thin line. Shit. He’d been so focused on the dealing with the ferals, he’d forgotten about Frost and the others. This isn’t how he wanted to have this conversation. Listening to the frightened chirps, he gave Dylan a look, set down a half-mixed bottle of formula and motioned for him to follow as he walked towards the door. “Outside.”
Once they’d left the clinic and the door was shut, Emrys turned and pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing it and dropping his hand to his side. “I told you I’d moved Frost’s foals to the auto-feeder so I could keep working. The plugs are just so I don’t have to run back and clean them every five minutes or leave them wallowing in their own shit. It’s perfectly safe. Better, even, than the stuff they hook canned foals up to.”
“Real nice,” Dylan quipped sarcastically. “And the black one?”
“The university that helps pay my bills needs black foals for their research. Their prep guidelines are to leave him with his mother and the audio player. It’s just until he opens his eyes, so another week, tops. When he’s ready, I’ll rehome him in the research barn and move the others back in with Frost.”
“So you sold him to this university without even asking me about it?”
“They needed a black foal and I need their financial support. Running a farm takes money. Supporting my herd takes money. Paying you takes money. Hell, paying for the vet that came out for Frost’s birth takes money. That one foal of hers helps support all of this and us. I had to take advantage of an opportunity. Black foals are hard to come by around here.”
“I get that. What I don’t get is why you went behind my back and didn’t tell me about it, first. Maybe I would have been okay with it, yes. Maybe I would have told you to go fuck yourself. You fucking knew how I felt about Frost and her foals. Did you not think I’d be pissed about this because of them being a fucking payday?”
“I figured you’d be upset, yeah. You’ve been obsessing over that retarded mare and her spawn for weeks. That’s why I’ve been helping you with the hands on shit for your cert; so you could adopt the damn things. I was even planning on taking in the green one if you didn’t want her.”
“You figured I’d be upset? I’m beyond upset. I spent a week looking after those foals. I’m still exhausted from looking after those foals. I just followed you out into the woods and watched you blow the fucking brains out of a fluffy and stomp another one to death. I am tired. I am stressed out. I am seriously wondering what the fuck is wrong with you. I am seriously wondering what the fuck is wrong with me since I’m still here. What really, really pisses me off, though, is that I fucking trusted you to help me out with Frost’s foals and, yeah, you did. You fucking broke that trust.”
Dylan was shaking. The stress from everything and the argument had dumped a heavy dose of adrenalin into his system and it was all he could do to keep himself from punching Emrys. Fucking asshole. God knows he wanted to and maybe Emrys deserved it. Dylan felt like he wanted to smash his fucking face in for a moment, but he reigned it in. He wasn’t a violent man. He was angry, sure, but not angry enough to do the kinds of things to Emrys that reminded him of the things that Emrys had done to those ferals. That set them apart.
“Fuck this. Fuck you. I’m going home.” Dylan said. “I need to rest after all this shit. I need to think. Try not to sell any more foals before I get back, asshole. All right?”
Emrys stood quietly for a moment. A second or two passed before he nodded. “Okay.” He said nothing else. He only met the hard stare Dylan gave him before walking to his car, climbing in, and peeling out of the driveway, sending its gravel flying.
Once Dylan’s taillights had disappeared into the night, far down the range road, Emys relaxed and took a deep breath.
“Fuck.”