This post is brought to you by: drugs. A lot. 
The car stank of energy drinks and vape juice. Blake’s playlist was blaring something that sounded like a robot having an existential crisis over a repepetive and driving bass line, but he insisted it was “grindset-core” and claimed it increased testosterone. Kyle said nothing. He was slumped in the passenger seat, knees awkwardly folded, hoodie sleeves pulled over his hands like he wasn’t just as fuckin cringe as his brother
Blake dusted debris from his stained white tank top that clung to his body unevenly, a brown nipple half exposed by a stretched out armscye, an angry peeling sunburn flaking from the exposed flesh of the muscular older brother.
“I’m telling you,” Blake said, one hand on the wheel, the other cracking sunflower seeds and spitting them into a Big Gulp cup, “this whole exterminator thing is probably a scam. Aunt Deb’s just getting old and paranoid. Or like, she’s gonna call all us up and go branch Davidian on us, cult shit. If I had her money, I’d be living in Miami right now, not calling in backup over a couple roaches.”
“They’re fluffy ponies,” Kyle murmured, eyes fixed on the power lines flashing by outside. “They eat everything, shit on everything, they’re noisy and spread disease. That’s—worse. Like a lot worse than just roaches.”
Blake scoffed. “It’s a house. It’s not gonna fall over just ‘cause some fluffies pissed on the original hardwood floors, dismissive wank gesture.”
Kyle shrugged. He’d helped hoarders clean their houses enough when he was on his mission; Kyle knew exactly how much damage a little animal waste could do. Houses actually do fall down because of animal urine. He didn’t like defending Aunt Deb, but he hated being wrong more. And Blake was wrong a lot. Blake just never noticed, which made him dangerous in the way toddlers with scissors are dangerous.
They hit a bump in the road and something crunched under the tires.
“Was that a raccoon?” Kyle sat up, the stink of death momentarily fumigating the cab of the saccharine effluvium of preworkout and soda.
“Roadkill is a mindset,” Blake said without looking back. “Either you’re the predator or the meat smoothie.”
Kyle looked at his brother, face illuminated by the cold blue glow of the dash lights. Sometimes Blake sounded like a parody of himself. Sometimes Kyle thought he was one. But mostly, he envied it—how he could be wrong, ridiculous, loud, and still win. People laughed at his shit jokes, let him dodge blame, make messes and walk away from them like a golden retriever who’d just eaten your dinner and then gotten belly rubs for it.
They pulled off the highway and into the quiet suburb where Aunt Deb’s house sat like a dollhouse that had been forgotten on a shelf. Faded shutters. Overgrown grass covered in shit from a dog that died a decade ago. Porch light flickering like an epileptic eye full of dead moths.
Blake parked halfway in the yard. “God, this place is a dump. She’s gotta be, what, ninety?”
“Sixty-nine, I think.”
“HAH! Niiice. Whatever. Same thing. Dusty old bitch.”
They got out of the car. Kyle hunched into himself like a turtle retreating from judgment.
“She better have food,” Blake muttered. “And not, like, old-lady food. I’m talking about steak. Chicken. Real nutrition. Carnivores don’t compromise.”
Kyle didn’t reply. Something about the house made him uneasy. Not just the bugs or the threat of fluffy pony infestation, or the flickering porch light, but the stillness of it all. Like the house was watching. Waiting.
He swallowed hard and followed Blake up the steps.
Behind them, the car clicked as it cooled, the engine ticking like a dying thing, bright colored debris poking out of one of the wheel wells and the tell tale stink of worse than roadkill confirmed that it was not a raccoon they hit at all.
Door unlocked. Foyer lined with dusty boxes and piles of books. The old bat was too trusting, this definitely wasn’t the kind of world you just left your door unlocked in anymore. Inside the house, something skittered. Something bigger than a roach.
Aunt Debbie was the kind of eccentric that would chat up strangers at the flea market. She wore her long grey hair in two braids laced with charms and beads, the jingle of indigenous jewelry on her ankles and wrists, turn8ng them green, ordered online from countries she had never seen. She stank. She stank like wet patchouli and sour sweat and that mint Castile soap that stung your eyes and still didn’t clean anything well. But as all the cousins did, Blake and Kyle came to pay their respects in the hopes of being kept in the will. Dad’s oldest sister was the heir to the family’s modest fortune and the current occupant of the hundred year old farm house where we lay our scene.
She swished and jingled down the stairs, a ghost draped in bright colored rayon batik to embrace Kyle.
“Oh sweetheart I’m so glad you’re here! Kyle you’re such an angel to come all this way to help me. It’s nice seeing you in comfy clothes, not that Mormon car salesman uniform. Such a good boy.”
She paused.
“And you brought Blake. You’re so … tan. Coffee?”
“Thank you, Aunt Debbie. No coffee, Steak. Bacon. Need to fuel up with protein before we get to the grind.” Blake beamed, he was indeed very tan. He ran in the sun every day with only coconut oil to protect his skin, leaving his upper body a gleaming bronze from ears to navel, which graduated down to a painfully goofy looking tan line at his belt, visible even through the fabric of his shirt.
“Ohhh-kay,” she said, drawing out the vowel like a passing train. “I haven’t had meat in the house since your uncle crossed the rainbow bridge. I might have some seitan, or some falafel. Those fry up like meat balls.”
Blake winced like she’d just offered him a rice cake soaked in sadness. “I said bacon, not Satan.”
“Oh no, its Say-tan, not satan. It’s protein!”
Kyle glanced at him, then at Debbie, then at the dusty chandelier overhead, trying to dissociate into the ugly leaded crystal.
“It’s fine,” Kyle said. “We don’t need food right now. We should probably see what the situation is with the—”
“The ponies,” Debbie said dramatically, clutching her batik robe like she was about to deliver a soliloquy. “They are everywhere. Living in the walls, crawling under in the floors, nesting in the goddamn pantry. I swear I heard them fucking. Fucking, Kyle. Like little… demon fornicators.”
Blake popped the tab on a Bang energy drink and took a swig. “That’s what exterminators are for. We’ll just keep out of the way and look useful so they don’t charge extra for your vibes.”
Debbie stared at him blankly, then blinked. “They canceled.”
Kyle froze mid-step. “What?”
She waved a hand, jangling like a tambourine. “The universe said no. I pulled a tarot card this morning—it was The Tower, inverted. You don’t ignore The Tower inverted. It means catastrophe and upheaval. It means trust yourself, not some hooligan in a pesticide van.”
Blake groaned, dramatically leaning against the stair rail. “So we drove three hours for what, exactly? Group meditation? Psychic fumigation?”
“No,” Debbie said, eyes twinkling like she knew she was pushing him. “You two are going to help me cleanse the house. The right way. The natural way.”
“With gasoline and matches? Crowbars?” Blake added unhelpfully.
Kyle’s stomach dropped. “You don’t mean—”
“Yes,” she said, holding up a bundle of white sage and what might have been dryer lint. “We’re gonna smudge.”
Blake’s eyes locked on the smoldering bundle as Aunt Deb lit it with a small torch that was not the kind to caramelize a creme brullee. the other kind of torch. Yes precisely, a neon green crack torch from a head shop. More like Aunt Dab, ya know what I’m saying?
Blake stared with the same expression he gave men with lower back tattoos and salad. “You can’t smoke shitrats out with your cultural appropriation blunt, Aunt Deb.”
“Oh honey,” Debbie said sweetly, “you can if you believe.”
Kyle was already coughing. The smell hit first—burnt herbs, hot dust, and something vaguely like mildew. He felt his soul trying to retreat into his socks, pulling his hoodie tight around his head, like a jersey cotton foreskin.
And somewhere inside the walls, as the smoke began to spread, something did start to move.
Something that didn’t care about Etsy, or bacon, or belief.
From the stacks of crap piled around bright colored dots began to emerge from the mess. It was worse than fluffy ponies. It was worse than reality tv dating shows. It was micro fluffies.
Blake recoiled so hard he tripped over a yoga ball and landed in a pile of tie-dye cushions. “What the actual—” he shouted, kicking his legs like a large gym bro frightened of micro fluffies running around his feet.
“Oh god there’s hundreds!” Kyle choked out, stumbling backward as a wave of micros poured from the crevices like a fuzzy neon avalanche. They were like stress balls with legs, all chirps and chaos, in every color from radioactive pink to pastel avocado. One ran across Kyle’s shoe with a scream, “Saeb Mummah! Saeb Mummah!” As the fist sized pony abandoned the young that fell off her back, peeping peanuts with tiny libs waggling thin as toothpicks
“Oh no,” Debbie said with far too much calm, watching a lavender pony knock over a stack of magazines. “They’re agitated. They don’t like disruption. Be gentle.”
Blake leapt to his feet, scraping shit off the sole of his shoe on the landing of the staircase. “Gentle?! There’s a horde of whining Easter eggs infesting your wook hut! We need to stomp them with extreme prejudice!”
“They’re not an infestation,” Debbie insisted, arms open like she was welcoming a commune of tiny prophets. “They’re astral hitchhikers. Beings of joy. Their aura is literally golden. There’s just too many of them, and I worry about the sub flooring .”
Kyle stared in horror as a lime-green unicorn launched itself at his foot, “Dis am Smawty wand! Wowstest Huwties!!!”. It made a noise like a bike horn as it bounced off his shoe and promptly perished from the force of the impact. Caught between a laugh and a cry, Kyle could only choke.
“This is not joy,” he wheezed, batting it off. “This is a violation of natural law.”
Debbie was already gliding toward the kitchen, jingling like a sleigh with an empty sack. “We just have to calm them. Let the smoke work. I made up some parsley tea. I heard that works for getting rid of them humanely.”
Kyle and Blake turned to each other with identical expressions of dread.
“You knew about these? You said a pony extermination. I thought her yard was invaded like a dozen, not … this!” Kyle hissed.
“I thought she was being metaphorical!” Blake snapped. “You know, ‘the ponies in the walls are a metaphor for government surveillance or capitalism’ or some shit like she always does. I didn’t think they were real.”
A micro fluffy the color of mustard climbed onto Kyle’s shoe and began vibrating with what could only be described as desperation. “Be nyu daddeh and wub fwuffy! Am gud fwuffy!”
“I am not equipped for this,” he said, voice cracking.
Aunt Debbie reappeared from the kitchen in a flourish, holding what looked like a Fabuloso spray bottle covered in sun and moon stickers.
“I infused it with moonlight, rose quartz, and organic flat-leaf parsley,” she said proudly, misting a little into the air like it was perfume. “This should soothe them. Calm their energy. I added a whisper of lemon to open their heart chakras.”
“Deb, no—” Kyle started, but she was already spritzing.
The first micro pony it hit—an innocent-looking coral puffball that had been quietly shitting near a stack of Reader’s Digest magazines—let out a squeal so sharp it made the window glass shudder. Then it convulsed violently, puffed up like a tiny balloon, and exploded.
For only being a few ounces in weight, they were sure full of blood.
A slick splatter of bright red goop hit the floorboards, the walls, and part of Debbie’s muumuu.
There was a second of silence.
Then another micro wandered into the settling mist of herbal tea. This one burst with a wet pop, launching itself several feet into the air before detonating like a squeaky grenade.
“Oh sweet Gaia!” Debbie screamed, shielding her face as another micro pony exploded behind her in a fine mist of chartreuse fluff, brown shit, red blood and piss yellow panic.
“STOP SPRAYING THEM!” Kyle bellowed, ducking as a magenta micro fluffy pony flew past his head and burst against the wall, leaving a crimson smear like someone had put a Lisa Frank mascot in a gulag or guantanamo bay.
“They’re dying!” Debbie wailed. “I didn’t mean to—I thought parsley was soothing!”
“Parsley is toxic to micro fluffies, Debbie!” Blake shouted, flipping over the kitchen table for cover. “It’s the one fact I remember from that weird documentary you made us watch at Thanksgiving!”
Debbie looked around, wide-eyed and horrified, as the survivors began to panic. The micro fluffies were now shrieking and sprinting, launching themselves off piles of clutter in chaotic arcs of squeal-fueled terror.
“Oh god they’re mass suicide-ing like lemmings,” Kyle said, half-crawling behind the couch as another exploded against the base of a lamp. “We’re gonna be cursed. Or sued. Or devoured.”
Blake ducked under the rain of fuzz and exploding guts as one whizzed by his head, like a deflating balloon full of shit. “Get the spray bottle!”
Debbie clutched it to her chest like a relic. “No, I can still fix this!”
“You are the problem!”
A final blast rang out as a royal blue micro pegasus squealed as his fluff sizzled, farted across the room, screaming “fwuffy wingies wowk! Fwuffy can FWY COWKSUCKAS!!!” As it collided with the ceiling fan and exploded in a brilliant halo of frothy blood and fluff, raining down like grotesque confetti.
The fan kept spinning. The smoke drifted. The remaining micro fluffies—fewer now, and smarter—vanished into the shadows.
The house went still again, a thick silence broken only by Debbie’s green ringed wrists and fingers trembling,setting the cheap jewelry tinkling, and the slow drip of foul goo from the chandelier.
Kyle stood slowly, smeared with rainbow gore, blinking. “Well.”
Blake wiped a streak of green from his arm. “Now we have a different problem.”
Debbie clutched her genocidal spray bottle, eyes haunted. “I think I’m going to hell.”
From deep in the basement, the low rumble came again—louder now.
Something else was there.
The End (?)