Fin.
PART FIVE: ACCEPTANCE
The kitchen was immaculate.
The horror behind was somehow made worse with the sight of freshly mopped floors and a shining chrome refrigerator. Smiley had spent hours and hours in here, perched as Little Mummah tried to show him how to prepare her delicious meals. The lessons were never retained but were always delightful.
Vomit on his cheeks, blood in his eyes and horror in his soul, he stumbled forward.
Through his misery, he could see the enormous white Door that lead to the Big Outside. He knew he wasnât supposed to go there, but he also understood that he didnât have a choice. As he passed the place where Little Mummah washed her âdishies,â he heard a peep. Exhausted and terrified by whatever fresh new horror heâd find, he ignored it. There was nothing alive here: there couldnât be.
The trek across the kitchen to the towering door took only a few waddling minutes. Smiley dimly comprehended that the same distance from the stairs to the kitchen had not only taken much longer, but had come at the cost of two very best friends. It⌠it just wasnât fair!
Life was so hard when you were little and soft!
There was a cacophony of screams, sirens, and other horrifying noises outside. Terrifying shouts thundered.
Once upon a time, the previous owners of Katieâs home had kept cats. The Big Outside Door held a memory of that: right down nice and close to the floor, as convenient for a fluffy as it could possibly be, was a swinging pet door. While the concept and practice of such a thing was much too abstract for a simple fluffy mind to comprehend, the little black animal was intelligent enough to instinctively push against what amounted to a small coloured square in the middle of a large rectangle.
The small coloured square moved.
Mind numbed by the horrors heâd watched his friends fall to, Smiley struggled to understand.
âDoow? Wet fwuffy out?â
Door remained silent.
He pushed again. The pet door flexed gently.
His little heart kicked up a notch. The noises outside were very scary, but getting to the Humans meant safety! All he had to do was squeeze through and heâd be out of this horrible nightmare!
Excited, he didnât notice that the blackened ceiling above him was splitting open.
-â
Watching your home burn down is certainly an experience.
Katie was out of tears. The fire was everywhere. It had eaten walls, shattered windows, and blustered filthy black smoke into the starry sky. She could actually see into her bedroom: soft pastels and gentle decals had been replaced with flat, emotionless nothing. Her bed was a dim inferno in a sea of gray.
Her father watched as the town firefighters blasted pressurized water in controlled sprays around the exterior of his property. Theyâd given up on trying to save the structure almost from the beginning: protecting the pleasant neighbourhood had quickly taken priority. The home heâd made for his family wasnât just gone: it was being eaten. It felt obscene to watch.
His daughter was inconsolable.
Six years old was a brutal age to learn about death. Any age was, really, but at six it bit hard into your ideas about the universe. When you could actually watch frantic prayers fail as your earliest memories caught fire in front of your eyes, it made you think twice about the existence of higher powers. When you knew, naive as you were, that tiny, innocent creatures in need of rescue were miles beyond your aid, itâŚ
Your soul remembers those things.
When the pet door shivered, Katieâs father didnât really think much of it. The second floor windows had recently exploded: the roof was engulfed and the walls were licking hungry flames towards his neighbours. His attention to detail was⌠somewhat lacking.
Katieâs wasnât.
âDAD!â she howled, desperately snagging the sleeve of her fatherâs bathrobe. âDAD, ITâS SMILEY!â
He knew it wasnât. Years later, having carefully reviewed why heâd said what he did, he stood by this: the little black fluffy couldnât have been at the door.
âHoney, Smileyâs gone. He went away in his sleep. Come here - â
âNO DAD! I CAN SEE HIM!â
Sure, the pet door cut into the kitchen egress had fluttered: that came as no surprise as his home collapsed. Heâd carefully immobilized the damn door (those ridiculous animals his daughter loved so much spent most of their lives trying to figure out how to die, after all), but it wasnât airtight. The heat inside: the cold outside: it was physics.
Kate pulled away from him. Hard. You protect your children from these things, right? A home, on fire, abandoned by first responders, and your little one is fighting to reach it? Only one response.
âCome here, my little love. Theyâre gone.â
-â
She could actually see Smileyâs soft little hoofsie poking through the pet door. She knew it was him: none of her other babies had his beautiful charcoal fluff. It scrabbled and waved and tried to get her attention.
âHE NEEDS ME, DAD!â
Why wouldnât he listen?!
-â
Why wouldnât she listen?!
Heâd heard Little Mummahâs cry. He couldnât see her mad push to rescue him, but heâd recognized the love in her voice. She wanted to save him! She wanted to save all of th â well, those of them that were left! Cosmo and Puffy were sleeping forever, but that still left Lemon, Lime, and their beautiful foals! Why wasnât she storming her way upstairs to their rescue?
Even with his new understanding of what horror was: even comprehending that the natural world was filled with cold, uncaring, neutral evil, it seemed extremely unfair that the ceiling would choose this particular moment to fall on him.
He didnât roast against a door like his alabaster friend did. He didnât spill his guts onto the floor like his lavender friend did. His right weggie simply broke, nice and clean, as a burning chunk of something ugly smashed through him. Crash, snap, and he was down on his stomach, unable to breathe.
It was interesting: his friends had screamed while they were going to the forever sleep, but he didnât. He could only look at the twisted stump of his weggie and be sad that his time was finally coming.
-â
Katie wouldâve been injured in the porch collapse if her father hadnât been physically holding her back. The entire structure, fire-weakened as it was, came down thunderously with almost no warning whatsoever. A glut of greasy black smoke expelled itself into the cold sky.
-â
Smiley closed his eyes and hoped that death wouldnât hurt much more than it already did. He settled down onto his tummy and waited for the forever-sleepies to kick in like they had for his friends. Seconds ticked by. His broken leg pulsed hot agony through his body, but darkness didnât come.
âeeâ
There it was again. What an annoying noise. Didnât they know he was trying to go to the forever-sleep?
âeeâ
Sighing heavily, he raised himself onto his three good limbs and tucked his shattered right foreleg against his flank. Exhausted in every way that a creature can be exhausted, he forced himself to move towards the thin, reedy peep.
âeeâ Hardly a noise at all.
Somewhat surprised in spite of his stubbornly lackadaisical death, he hobbled to a halt and stared at the pastel blue sink cabinet.
âFw⌠fwuffy pony hewe?â he asked tentatively.
âeeâ
Annoyed, he stepped forward. Why did it have to be so hard for a good fluffy like him to join his friends in the forever-sleep? Must it be so pointlessly noisy? How silly!
âSmiwey hewe! Siwwy pony otay?â
Before he could ask if the silly pony needed anything else, the voice of an almighty god thundered a response.
PLAYING âPINK PONY CLUBâ BY CHAPPELL ROAN
This meant several things. First, that the firefighters hadnât yet kicked the homeâs master breaker, because the Siri in Katieâs kitchen had spent the entire horrifying evening diligently listening for input. Second, that âSiriâ was very close to how fluffy ponies pronounced âsilly.â Third, that just when you think things canât get worse, they can get much, much worse.
I KNOW YOU WANTED ME TO STAY
âEEEâ Smiley shrieked, hot bile squirting out of his nostrils.
BUT I CANâT IGNORE THE CRAZY VISIONS OF ME IN LA
âEEE!â he reiterated.
AND I HEARD THAT THEREâS A SPECIAL PLACE
A big fluffy shouldnât shit himself like this, yet here he was.
WHERE BOYS AND GIRLS CAN ALL BE QUEENS EVERY SINGLE DAY
Smiley pawed frantically at the dishie cabinet door and managed to creak it open: anything to escape that hideous roar.
IâM HAVING WICKED DREAMS OF LEAVING TENNESSEE
âeeâ
HEAR SANTA MONICA, I SWEAR ITâS CALLING ME
The little black fluffy boggled at what he saw as agony thundered in his ears.
WONâT MAKE MY MAMA PROUD, ITâS GONNA CAUSE A SCENE
â'uppie⌠'ake?â Smiley whispered, voice utterly crushed by the monstrous howl.
SHE SEES HER BABY GIRL, I KNOW SHEâS GONNA SCREAM
A scorched, roasted foal looked up at him plaintively. Its eyes were gory voids.
GOD, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
âhewp 'uppie 'ake.â
YOUâRE A PINK PONY GIRL
Cupcake had made it downstairs after all. A crippled shade of the happy, energetic foal that had delighted her herd lay ruined and plaintive.
FUCK YOU, SMILEY
What?
AND YOU DANCE AT THE CLUB
Huggies made everything better, right? Even when things couldnât possibly get any worse? Even when your family was burning as they slept their forever sleep?
OH MAMA, IâM JUST HAVING FUN
His unbroken foreleg gently embraced his little friend as he climbed into the sink cabinet.
FUCK YOUR FAMILY, SMILEY
ââŚ'uppie 'ake haf owwiesâ she whispered to him.
ON THE STAGE IN MY HEELS
âSmiwey hewe, babbeh.â he replied. âSmiwey wuv yu.â
YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL
The filly shivered softly in his arms as she died.
HA
âGuâ nighty night, 'uppie 'ake. Sweepie tight.â
When the cabinet door swung shut on its spring hinges and hid the horrors that had happened and the horrors that were yet to come, Smiley was too buried in his tiny friendâs blackened flesh to care. When the air went from comfortable to warm to hot to owwie owwie owwie he didnât make a peep. He hugged the dead filly tighter and thought as hard as he could about what it was like to dance and sing and play and giggle in their happy little safe room.
After all, isnât that what we all do in our final moments? Try to find our happy place and hold on as tightly as possible?
His last thought was one of water.
-â
It was almost seven in the morning before Katieâs parents dragged their screaming child away from the blaze that had reduced their home to scorched timbers pointing weakly into the night sky. Constant streams of pressurized water had kept the damage from spreading to the neighborhood, but their property was obviously a total loss.
âJesus tapdancing fuck,â a big man in a black sweater grunted. âThat place went up like the fuckinâ Hindenberg.â
âAyuh,â the older man smoking a cigarette next to him replied. âThese new builds do that. They make 'em out of shit, plastic, and more shit. Iâll be goddamned if we donât all end up with the cancer from inhaling the fumes. Oh hell!â He butted his cigarette angrily. âLook at that stupid kid!â
Stomping forward, he waved his arms angrily: âWatch out for hot spots, Singh!â
A young man in full kit nodded in response, backed up a step, and continued carefully sifting his way through the blackened remnants of what had been a quite lovely modern kitchen just hours prior. His rebreather hissed as he pushed detritus aside in the search for the embers that were so eager to rekindle the inferno. The window above the kitchen sink had shattered from the heat, but the sink, counter, and cabinet beneath it were almost miraculously undamaged.
The big man strutted forward confidently and kicked the cabinet open. He boggled at what he found.
âWell fuck me sideways, my Punjabi compadre, thatâs a first!â
Singh clenched his eyes shut at the sight. His coworker had no such issues.
âDid we actually just find two fluffy ponies that managed to drown in the middle of a house fire?!â John roared. âDave! Darryl! You gotta come see this shit!â
The story became firehouse legend. As a truly epic inferno engulfed a suburban home, a gaggle of brave fluffies had somehow managed to escape the death trap of their safe room, trek across a horror-filled gauntlet, avoid an entire gamut of hideous ways to shuffle off this mortal coil, only to have the most resilient of them all manage to somehow go to a watery grave in a cupboard when the cheap plastic plumbing lines that the homeowner had installed burst from the heat. An inch of overchlorinated municipal water had undone an inconceivable lifetime of fluffy effort.
Three men howled with laughter at the soaked, limp corpses. One did not. He couldnât tear his eyes from how, even in death, the little black fluffy still held the tiny roasted foal tightly in a tight hug.
âCan you believe it? Only a fucking fluffy could manage this.â