I Smell Shippers
Your breath pounding like a throbbing bass, or otherwise a primeval primate drum sounding the festival of the hunt, you skid across the alley, sending banana peels and cigarette butts flying underneath the dumpster at your back. You keep going, racing under grimy windows with casements locked tight against the cold and wet of this dark Saturday night. The only light ahead is bleed-over from vomit-orange street lamps. The only thing you can see besides stained reddish bricks is a billboard overhead, of a pony with a blue and yellow mane grinning as she holds a placard saying Welcome to Manehatten!
Your curl your fingers into a fist and keep running. You’re not in Manehatten. This is New York. The tasteless bastards. You come up with better stuff than that every day before breakfast.
You’ve been running all night; you’d run for a dozen nights more if you could, but at some point it all becomes too much. There are only so many times you can change your name on the internet before the imagination falters. Makes a mistake. Re-uses a name somewhere. There are only so many license plates you can afford, only so many motels you can manage to switch into at the last minute without making reservations.
A voice drifts around the corner. “I smell shipppers!”
They’ve found you.
It happens when the alley runs to a dead-end lit by a 60-watt fluorescent bulb and a single transformer, dripping down like a microphone from the tangle of city wires overhead. An onyx-black pegasus with a hungry grin is the first of the pair, pinning you with his hooves against the wall. You exult at his smooth keratin as the breath is jarred from your chest, and you fall to your knees, dizzy.
“Hello, shipper,” the pony says with deadly calm. You try to hide the incriminating evidence, but in all too short order, you allow yourself to be frisked, and he finds a wad of paper–600 hundred sheets covered in 12-point block type, prose in the faded black-and-beige of newspaper print. You had to print wherever you got the chance.
“That was fast,” he leers. “Double Jepoardy, get over here!” The second pony trots into view, a mare with a white coat and green mane.
Oh, the sweet agony! White is a common color, but your favorite. Even though the first thing she does is snarl at you on sight–and no doubt you’re a hopeless grimy mess by now–you can’t help staring, just a little. The curve of her back and legs, that tail swishing with irritation at being kept away from her five-star hotel room, those perfectly triangular ears, that mane as soft as clouds themselves–you know, you’ve snuck the opportunities to touch both. She takes care of herself; even her coat is well brushed, despite the fact that it’s eleven at night. All the hairs point down her back. You sneak a look at her cutie mark, a gavel, before she hides it by turning to face you.
Your knees shake, and your heart falters, but you tell yourself it isn’t because of the danger. This is the visage worth falling in love with over and over again, flesh, blood, hair, impossibly, utterly, embarrassingly alive. This is why you run.
Or perhaps you should say, ran. Jepoardy unfolds a clear plastic folder and begins reading. “You are hereby blah blah blah, charged with defamation, libel, slander…eh…public indecency, really, how did you get that?”
Okay, so you know now that in pony society, shows of affection are common place among family, friends and even acquaintances. Nuzzling, for instance, to cheer someone up or in emotional circumstances, isn’t out of place. But that wasn’t obvious beforehand. Not everyone knew everything at first. Everyone makes mistakes! And some mistakes result in getting bucked out of second-story windows.
“And tax evasion! Ooh. That’s more exciting than the usual beat. Worth a few extra volts, wouldn’t you say, Black Sunglasses?”
“I say guilty is what!” The pegasus is grounded now–you can’t for the life of you imagine why they’d touch ground while they could be airborne, although they still loom over you. “Got Exhibit A right here.”
“I wrote that before First Contact,” you gasp through the pain. “I didn’t know.”
Jepoardy raises an eyebrow, absorbing your attention while she grabs the papers from Sunglasses and leafs through them. “Aha! ‘Rainbow Dash had just come home from a weekend at her Aunt Bellblues’…’” She looks up with the most evil grin you’ve ever seen on a pony, ever. “That’s funny. I don’t remember any fucking children’s cartoons mentioning the boss had an Aunt Bellblues. D’you, Glasses?”
“I can’t seem to recall it.” That grin is getting infectious. You must be immune to it for some reason.
The transformer crackles and fizzes overhead; the pegasus’ mouth now holds a metal baton with a rubber handle. “Any last words, shipper?” He kicks you to the ground. “Wanna’ tell the boss you’re sorry?”
You crumple, pull yourself upright, and struggle to catch the grin and make it into something innocent and holy. The others will carry on without you, even though more legal channels of attack someday bring them all to their end. You can’t let them down. If that means you get to call yourself a martyr, so be it.
You manage to stand for half a second and stumble towards the mare. She backpedals quickly, dropping your writing as her mouth swings open. Sunglasses bucks you to the ground again, this time with his powerful hind legs.
Your vision swims, dimming, the blinds closing on the beautiful sight of a pair of ponies. “You tell the one who sent you more than that,” you cry out as soon as your lungs inflate with enough air to speak. “You tell her I love her. Forever. Cross my heart and hope to–”
Lightning strikes, and the alley goes silent as well as dark.