Working Mare
Part 4: Gearing Up
Be Ken, A stay at home father with a law degree. You are currently sitting on your patio reading the newspaper and nursing a beer while periodically observing your pet fluffy Blossom do the yard work. She’s gotten quite good at it over the week since you started training her; it still takes her most of the day to get much of anything done, especially the lawn. It’s just too large for her to cut it all in one go for her, especially since she has to do it with her teeth. So what ends up generally happening is that she looks through the gardens for weeds uprooting them with her teeth and depositing them at the compost heap that sits in the back corner of the yard behind some bushes. She then picks the ripe vegetables (if there were any) from the vegetable garden, and sets out the sprinkler to water the gardens. It was just the cutest thing watching her drag it out to each garden and even more fun watching her try and struggle to turn the tap on. After the gardens are watered she then generally picked up where she left off clipping the lawn from the day before, trimming it down one mouthful at a time. Though really, at the pace she was going it would take her two weeks to trim the entire thing down, and of course by that point she would just have to start over at the other end because it would have become shaggy again in the interim.
You’re just finishing an article in the paper about the rising crime rate in the city proper, when you hear Blossom cry out, “Daddeh Ken! Bwossom sowwy! Bwossom haf oopsies wiff wed veggie… again…” You look up from the paper to see Blossom with tears in her eyes, her front covered in tomato splatter. Dammit, this is the third time this week she tripped and destroyed one of the tomatoes while transporting them over to the patio. You sigh and fold up the news paper laying it on the table.
“I’m sorry Blossom but you know what I got to do now” you say getting up.
Blossom frowns and looks up at you with watery eyes, her ears lowering sadly. You give her a stern look and put your hands on your hips and eventually she relents. She walks sullenly over to the hose and you carefully wash the remains of the tomato out of her fluff. She shudders and tries to suppress her whimpers to little effect. Afterward you bring her inside and wrap her in a warm fuzzy towel, then put her in the play room as you think that no more work would be getting done today.
There has got to be a way to help Blossom from destroying more of the vegetables in the garden accidentally. You ponder over the issue for a short time; you come to the conclusion that the simple solution is the best. A cart, a simple fluffy drawn cart, you think that, heck, if horses had used them for thousands of years, a fluffy version wouldn’t be too odd would it?
You head to your workspace down in the basement, you admit that you never have been too handy, but you think that knocking together a simple cart that could be pulled by blossom shouldn’t be too difficult.
The next day you finish the project, it surprisingly turned out better then you had expected. You ended up taking apart an old dresser that had been left over from the remodeling of Blossom’s playroom. The hardest part was the wheels, but you managed to make some decent circles of wood with the reciprocating saw and attached them to the body of the cart with wooden dowels you had left over from some other project. For the harness you used an old leather belt that you glued onto the long dowels that you had used for the shafts that would allow Blossom to easily pull and disengage from the cart.
You wrap the cart up in a sheet and bring it upstairs and outside to the yard. Blossom was trimming the grass as best she could, though you know that it would still take her a couple days of work to get to the other end of it. You set the cart down on the patio and say “hey Blossom, come over here for a bit, I got something for you!”
She comes waddling up to you and says “Daddeh Ken, wats unda da sheet?”
“I made you something that should help you with your yard work,” you say lifting off the sheet, revealing the cart. Blossom’s eyes go wide as she stares at the cart in wonder, she then looks up at you and says “Daddeh Ken? Wat dis?” you smile and explain what it is to her, how she can load it up with the vegetables that she picks and transport them all at once and with no risk of accidentally squishing them. You also explain how it can save time with weed picking by taking them all over to the compost heap all in one go instead of having to go back and forth between each weed. You show her how to pull it by putting her head through the leather hoop. She gives it a try and soon after she is giddily prancing all around the back yard with it behind her laughing all the while.
There weren’t any weeds that needed pulling or any vegetables that needed picking today, so after a while of Blossom running around the yard getting used to the cart, you call her in for a job well done today. She looks like she was going to bring the cart inside with her and you had to tell her to leave it outside on the patio, much to her disappointment. Once inside you dig through your wallet and pull out three dollars for her work today and four more dollars for yesterday’s work which you forgot to pay her for. She runs off and stows the money you assume under her bed again. She comes back out with a look of worry on her face. She comes up to you and asks “Daddeh Ken? Bwossom fowget to ask, but how much cawty ting cowst Bwossom?”
Well, yet another unexpected response from Blossom, you reassure her that it is a gift for her, at first she doesn’t accept this so in the end you try to convince her that it is an investment for her work. She doesn’t quite grasp what an investment is but you manage to leave it at that.
Blossom begins to head off to the play room when you see her skitter off in fear to hide behind the couch in the living room. This reaction can only mean that she spotted Carol heading down the hallway. Sure enough carol comes into the kitchen to get a snack. She spots the cart out on the patio and asks “what the hell is that thing?”
“Oh, I made a cart for Blossom to help her out when she’s doing the yard work”
“That thing has been doing the yard work?”
“That ‘thing’ is named Blossom, and you would do well to remember that” you say getting a sterner tone to your voice.
“Look, dad, you know I don’t like that thing…” she trails off.
“If this is about the accident that she had in your room you should know that sh-”
“It isn’t just the fact that she pissed in my room dad!” she interrupted. “It’s just the fact that that fucking thi-”
“Language young lady!” you say raising your voice a little.
“Sorry” she says apologetically, “it’s just that that thing seems so… unnatural, it’s friggin’ engineered to look cutesy and babble with that weird speech impediment. I mean, you don’t think it’s weird?”
“Of course I do” you admit. Carol looks at you with surprise, not expecting the sudden answer. You continue by saying “I know it was kind of hard at first, when I was initially shopping for a fluffy for your sister, I just didn’t know if I could ever get used to them. Their seemingly engineered behavior and sculpted looks; I could see how some people could like them but me personally I was planning on having as little to do with the thing when we got it.” You pause trying to think of your next words carefully, “Heck, I’ve been on the side of the people who feel that they should just all be exterminated, you know, just be rid of them all. It’s not like they were meant to exist naturally anyway so nothing would be lost with them just… Disappearing…” You give your daughter a sheepish look and say “When your sister asked for one I didn’t know what to do. I was still reeling from Duchess’s death, and I was ready to just get any pet to see if it would alleviate the pain I was feeling over it. The research I did didn’t really help though, just kind of enforced my opinions of them being dumb shitrats… if you’ll pardon my French” you say embarrassed.
“So if you had the same opinion of them as me, what made you change your mind?” Carol asks after a short time.
“I got to know her, I gave her a chance” You pause to form your next thoughts. “I know she isn’t the smartest but for a fluffy pony she seems to be quite intuitive and at least she really tries to do her best by us. She really seems to genuinely care about me, Cheryl, and you” Carol rolls her eyes and you say “yes even you, regardless of what you may have done to her.”
Carol’s eyes snap to attention and a look of shock flashes across her face. She quickly recovers and retorts “well I don’t see much of a difference between her and other fluffies I’ve heard of” a snide tone rising in her voice “All I’ve seen her do is beg for food and piss all over my room.”
“Just… give it some time would ya? And please don’t antagonize her, I don’t know what happened that night but I have enough sense to believe that you did something you may regret. She seems traumatized by the event, so please; try to cut her some slack?”
Carol turned a little red and stomped off with her snack. “Don’t count on anything” she says over her shoulder.
You just sigh and grab another beer from the fridge. You walk over to the living room and collapse roughly on the couch. You’re not sure what you can really do about Carol. She used to be so much like Cheryl, but for some reason or another she got much more cumbersome to deal with once she got to high school. You support her in all her choices and love her dearly still but Blossom for some reason is a breaking point for you and her. You sign again and turn on the TV. Just then you feel a nudge on your leg and you look down. Blossom is staring up at you with a sad look on her face and pawing you with her soft rubber-like hoof. “You heard all that didn’t you?” you ask.
The Fluffy pony nodded slightly and asked “Upsies?”
You reach down and lift the pony up onto the couch next to you. She lies down with her head resting on your leg and you and her spend some time just watching whatever nonsense reality TV show is on. After a bit Blossom looks up at you and says “Bwossom Lub Daddeh Ken”
You look down into her deep green eyes and say “yeah I know, I guess I’ve come to love you too.”
Blossom glanced toward the hallway that Carol just went down and says “Bwossom pwomises tu du da best Bwossom can for the Famwy”
“I know you already are. Hopefully certain other people can come to appreciate it as well someday.” You pat Blossom on the head and scratch around her ears feeling somewhat pessimistic still.