The Scootaloo Project

She looks so small when she sleeps.

The bed is more than big enough for both of us. I could take up the whole thing by myself, if I really stretched, but even then she’d have a perfect fit right above my shoulder, or next to my side, or nestled in the crook of my arm like a tiny teddy-bear ready for sleep.

Her mane is so soft.

I always find it under my nose when I wake up. When I open my eyes in the middle of the night, which is often, I can see traces of purple before anything else, and I always breathe deep through my nose, taking in the scent of her hair and letting it remind me that I’m awake. There’s nothing like that in sleep, even when I’m dreaming of her.

So soft.

There’s a feeling that goes through me when I see her there, the first thing, when I open my eyes and she’s there, snuggled up against me, small and sleeping and innocent. A warm flush that starts in my chest and moves everywhere. My fingertips tingle like they’ve been asleep longer than the rest of me, and my whole body begins a dull ache, something I’m not really sure how to describe. Sometimes it passes by itself. Sometimes I forget about it by closing my eyes and nuzzling my nose into her mane, and breathing. She smells like warm air in wintertime.

Sometimes I get up, because having her there is too much.

The sun is too scared to come out at night. Luna says she keeps it away on purpose, but I think it goes because we’re too afraid to have it there all the time. When the moon comes out, we can forget everything we know during the day, and sleep away the whispers in our minds, of sunlight.

The moon on snow. It shines like a sheet of silver, refracting light towards the window.

I could take her with me into the snow. Wake her up and throw her into something warm, drag her outside with no questions asked, and the two of us could make snow angels. She could giggle and toss snowballs at me, and I’d hide behind a tree like it was proper cover, and volley one back at her, and bring myself with it, and tackle her into the cold underfoot and fill up my clothes with her giggling. And of course, our mouths would meet, and we’d come back inside because we’d be too hot to stay around the snow anymore, because we might melt it.

I wonder if she misses the snow.

The little drops that fall from the sky are like lives. If we don’t watch for them, they pass by without ever being seen; even when we look, under the flicker of a porchlight or a beam of moon-borne brightness piercing through a crack in a canopy of trees, we only see them for an instant. They’re gone with the flow of a million more in mere moments, and we have to wonder if the split-second glimpse we saw was worthwhile.

I worry if I hold her too close sometimes, that the heat between us might make her melt away, like a snowdrop. Both so small.

Do any of us want the snow? We accept it like it’s a part of life, but it comes through obligation. It can be fought, like any facet of our existence. Some people resign themselves to acquiescence, while other people struggle, lashing out at the sky like its machinations are intent on our displeasure. Children love the snow. It’s cliche, but it’s true.

I imagine her in a cute little purple snowsuit, laughing with her friends and making snowponies with them, rocks for eyes, and maybe dead leaves pried up from the ground to make wings. She doesn’t have to think about the world when its ashes are falling down around her, or maybe the sparkles of dreams for the next day dancing like tiny angels cascading towards earth. Maybe we can pick up pieces of the sky and put them together to make up more of the world. Maybe those are our memories. Maybe they’re just innocence in the form of ice-cold inconvenience.

I don’t want to take that away from her.

When we wake up to snowy mornings, she might say it’s too cold. She might slide closer to me, even though she’s always right up against my chest, and our bodies would resonate together like two stars, catalyzing the embers of a galaxy between us. She nuzzles her face into me some mornings, and sometimes it stays at that. More often, she wiggles and giggles and gives herself to me with an insistent wheedling. She pokes and points out my preparedness. I can’t refute it. It’s not something I want to ignore.

But we stay inside, more often than not. Is that right?

She’s so small.

I didn’t ask her into my bed. The request was hers, and it went from a simple asking at first to a way of life. Like all things with her, I had my inclinations, but I never expected this. I never expected that first day, or that first meeting, or that first glow-orange and purple mane flickering of her sneer at me until I could hold her with my hands and feel her around me and drink her voice in its highest register like a draught of ‘me too’. I never thought I’d see her smile and extend her tongue, and wonder what I’d done to dispel naivety and disdain for please, can I sleep in your bed.

I don’t have anyone else.

Is she saying it, or am I?

How far apart are we?

She’s always right there, next to me. So small, like she might vanish if I didn’t remind myself she’s there in the middle of night. A scent like soap-bubbles and skateboard wax. Sometimes like sweat and cinnamon sugar. Persimmon. Pomegranate hair and tiny feather-duster flickers under my fingers. A coin falling on a table. Morning glass of orange juice struck with a spoon. Purple tape across a finish line. She won’t go to bed without a ribbon, even if her prize is sleeping next to me. Or is it mine?

I wonder what she dreams about.

Most of the time, I can’t keep my hands from her. Running my fingertips along her body is like letting myself ebb away into an untouchable softness.

The crook of her body when she tucks into herself. Resting my hand, here, on her stomach, side. When I run my hand along her body, a mobius strip to losing everything in want. She makes little noises and curls into my palm sometimes, squeaking like she’s awake—not the noises she makes when she’s really letting me touch her, but softer ones, like she’s dreaming of something else. Sometimes her legs kick a little bit, like a puppy, and I move my hand from her side from her back to her head, and scratch behind her ear, and she coos and press back into my finger.

Sometimes I move my fingers lower. Along her face, tracing underneath her eye, shielding against tears that I hope never have reason to be there. Her chin, her neck, orange fur, feeling her softer there than almost anywhere else, somewhere I could kiss if she’d let me get close enough, that I might kiss when lying next to her. The softness of her fur on my lips. Touching it with my fingers. Lower.

Down her chest and stomach, pulling at the tiny tufts of fur there, watching her wriggle under the blanket, shifting them away so I can see her. Always wanting to see her. Just rest and let me do the work. She’s too small for anything else.

Lower.

That’s where she’s softest. In a mix between satisfaction and guilt, her legs always part to let my hand past. Below the invisible line of her innocence, not even touching before her mouth moves and she makes a mewling sound, asking me for more. Even when she’s sleeping.

I’ll let my hand rest there for a bit, touching the air more than her. She might fall deeper into sleep sometimes, and other times begin to move, asking for more without words. Asking for more with a soft little whimpering under her breath. With clenching her eyes shut tighter and turning from side to side until she’s shifted down the bed, pressing herself into me. Until that first touch, when she settles, and the noises become breathing, soft again, but filled from minute to minute with sharper sounds, hiss, breathing louder there when I press down, when I run my hand over, a loud murmur through her closed lips, parting them and wriggling onto her back to expose herself completely. I have to lie next to her then.

No matter the temptation, never more than my hand. I don’t sleep in any clothing, and I can find no backwards sanctimony of faulty logic that tells me a hand is fine when something else isn’t. But I don’t do more. I lie next to her, letting her rub against me of her own accord. Feeling something stiff at her back, or her side, depending on her position. Letting her coat tingle over my hardness, grinding into me when the touching isn’t enough, when she’s awake in her dreams and her mouth goes from barely open to wide, whispering a silent ‘inside’. But I can’t. Not while she’s asleep.

I massage her wings with my other hand. Feel the give of her muscles and feathers under my fingertips while my others become soaked. More murmuring then. Sometimes almost a word. It’s hard to stay there, but it’s the only time I get to watch her like that. Not delirious with things she shouldn’t know to say. Not panting, lapsing into laconic lament for more, closing her eyes and being the tiny part of my life that’s the best wrong I’ve ever done right. She simply is when she’s asleep—maybe an angel, or a beauty at rest that only wants me to help coax it into peaceful bliss. I’ve never asked her if she wakes up, if she remembers. I don’t need to.

Her neck. I can’t help it. Soft, so soft, softer than cloud-thread on my lips. Kiss. She doesn’t wake, but she wiggles against my caress. Fingers still moving. Between her lips, not inside when she’s sleeping, never inside. Between, wet, for some reason wetter than she ever gets otherwise. I could leave her like that and breathe her in from the sheets for months, but that wouldn’t be the same. I clean them every night, and every other night find my hand between her legs, coaxing new noises from her, soiling the sheets with her dreams again. With my dreams too.

Once or twice it’s been enough. With her in the strongest throes of her imagination to accompany my touch, rubbing in that way she likes, sliding a finger back and forth, mewling to moaning to full on panting, though she never opens her eyes. Like that, one time with her on her side, and pressing into me just the right way, between her legs too, the tightness of her cheeks that I still haven’t broached, like a cloying cloth coaxing me further. Even before she had stopped I was done, but my hand kept moving even after the slickness of her sweat was joined by my shame, sprayed all over her back. If she was awake, she would have dived on me, her mouth hungry for mine, wanting to kiss me, clean me, ask me for more like that, and never to stop my hand. But she was sleeping, and finished with my help, by herself, and then slept. And I slept. And that was one time, joined by another. I wasn’t sure how to feel about them then. Unlike the things we share when she’s awake, I never sought it out again. If it happens, it happens. It’s not about me, when she’s asleep.

I can tell she’s close when her wings begin to stiffen. She flaps them like she’s practicing, gearing up to fly away—away from the ground, from life, from obligation; from her own impulse and motivation; from me. I would never hold her back—but she likes it when I rub her there. When her wings become sore from overexertion, thrusting out from her back like she’s frozen. She likes my fingers there, and elsewhere, and the harder I feel her push into me the harder I push back, until her whole body freezes, and my fingers feel a twitch on both sides, and she shudders into the bed, and sighs.

Most of the time, I’ll steal a real kiss. Even though she’s sleeping, it’s the one thing more I allow myself to have. Her lips. She still tastes like summer in winter. Like a laugh I can hear bubbling when she’s awake, kept there even when she isn’t there to share it. She kisses back, so gently that I might miss it if all my attention, my everything wasn’t focused on her. Her tongue moves to the beginnings of a sentence in her slumber, but she doesn’t speak. She just lets her lips move to mine ever so slightly, and then sleep comes properly, a sigh, so long, and I feel like I’ve put her at rest more than I ever will while she’s awake.

When I hold her against me, my arm over her side, she feels so small. So small it’s a wonder she doesn’t slip away into the ether when unconsciousness takes over. So small I might wake up the next day and be unable to find her, because she’s vanished into the holes in circumstance that aligned to let her be here in the first place.

A kiss on the back of her neck says I love her. The smell of her hair makes her mine, even if it’s only in memory that might be real.

Scootaloo sleeps so peacefully, it’s a wonder there’s any reason for her to wake up.

As long as she lets me, I’ll be that reason.

So small.