Scootaloo began the story with an action, remote from her surroundings. Her eyes glared into the television with a peculiar twitch, blood-red, dripping tears and phlegm.
Gross out, cut to hack, hit the referential, commercial skit which, by its nature, is also a reference to a familiar guy’s style ...
“The Godfather a critically acclaimed masterpiece ...” The announcer murmurs in a sultry tone, ready to hump a boxed set and expend his sticky, critical opinion throughout the plastic and paper.
“Rereleased over and over again, in every format and cut known to man.” Spread out like corpses, Marlon "Horse Pun" Brando’s face repeating always with that same vaguely sad expression, “but you've never seen it quite like this ...”
"It's just a wall of gifs,” declares an ecstatic, pink-hued pony. Looks kind of familiar, like the impossibly plain, pretty girl nextstore archetype you’ve been programmed to emphasize with.
“That's right,” the announcer confirms, “Coppola's true vision has finally been realized! No sound, no context, no story, nothing but five second loops that were recorded on someone's smart phone.”
The pink-hue-hue-hue’d pony is back, squealing before a wall of looping sequences. "I can see the back of the seats, just like really looking at video recorded on someone’s smart phone!"
“From the people who brought you, Spider Man 2: The Upsidedowning, with Chinese Subtitles and Also Missing the First Five Minutes and Star Wars: The Guy Coughing Loudly into the Camcorder's Mike Strikes Back comes the next innovation in obnoxiously incompetent pirating and spoilering ...”
Every breath catches in every throat, anticipating this latest announcement from on high eagerly as killjoys waiting for a new door to open.
“GIFOVISION!”
The corporate brand blasting so loud it nearly knocks Scootaloo from the couch.
The rule of thirds dictates the pink pony’s return. She’s already burned her lines, and now squints in confusion at her surroundings, "I think that blob sort of spasming back and forth there is ... is that Fredo?"
“Coming soon to a Booru near you!”
Picture Luca Brasi’s hand being pinned to the table with a knife forever. The table is a metaphor for consumerism in the unconscious criticism of one cancer cell screaming its own name. Sure why not?
“Whether you want it or not.”
Sic semper something, something about “get your foot off my throat.”
This made perfect sense to the pegasus because ponies call their movie theaters Boorus, it is accepted slang among our four legged friends and I dare you to prove me wrong. Also they watch 70's crime dramas. Once again, I dare you, defy me.
So let's move on from this set piece to the next one, because I'm pretty sure I left a story lying about somewhere. Oh, yes, there it is ...
Scootaloo was dragged from her curtular stupor by the sound of her exhausted mother calling. She screamed at the sudden reintroduction of the real, tumbling from of the welcoming embrace of the couch.
After a few moments scrambling on the carpet like an idiot, she remembered that the hoof part of her foot went on the ground. Then, she walked to the kitchen, sensing suddenly, not a disturbance in the force, but a reek in the air. Her nostrils twitched a little wider, something humid and deathly, unplaceable. A primal scent, something that registered on its own, like red light bouncing straight off her cones.
In the tiled place of torture and tartar sauce from Tartarus, colloquially recognized as a kitchen, the much neglected, invisible family were scattered around the table. Fear grew, chasing air out of little Scootaloo's throat, and her stomach, though empty, clenched and rooted around for remains of a carrot that it might threaten to release.
Before the little, orange angel rested a plate covered with the usual forage. Fried hay, tomatoes, potatoes, and ...
Her heart dropped through her stomach, despair rushing in to fill the hole in her support. Shredded, glistening green hulls, a seed rested among them, slightly paler than its surroundings, like a severed testicle. French cut green beans. The odor overwhelmed her, promising comas in bath tubs and vomit filling her lungs. Death in a can, under-seasoned, over-cooked, and naked with the first learned hatred.
She looked up at her parents, hopeful that this was some sort of joke. An excellent parody of the nuclear family, tortures inflicted in a circle that repeated forever. They couldn’t all expect to eat this ... this ... what it was.
No reaction as grace was said, no reprieve as the teeth began mashing and the mayonnaise passing and ketchup smacking, red syrup spreading.
Realizing that this moment just might be real, the orange pegasus swallowed air. With great care and decision, Scootaloo joined in the ritual, eating the tomatoes and hayfries, pushing herself around the beans, trying to ignore the horrible tickling in her nostrils.
The meal completed, she found the heap, like grass cut and soaked in urine and deposited on her plate, remained.
Daring Do looks up from her hooves, snarling derisively. She has been tied to this chair for hours, alone and isolated by the Nazi Pones, there are always Nazis as if an entire nation of creatures hadn’t gotten the memo that their day was past 70 years ago. Her face sets in defiance and her limbs stiffen. They can do their worst but they won’t break her. She’ll outmule them all.
Apologies to the ever-present, evanescent victim of the racism in language.
"You'll sit here until you eat your beans," Scootaloo’s father turned her with baleful eyes. His own body, just as stubborn, shifting into a comfortable position. No Electra complexes playing out here, nothing Oedipal, either. Before Sophocles gave the Germans their disorders, this conflict is Cronal.
“You’ll never break me,” Scootaloo thought, her eyes locked on the knife in front of her. She’s been here before, surrendered before. This time, however, this time. Line in the sand, tired of running, exhausted face with two weeks of scruff turning to the camera before the violent climax. She could still feel perfectly in her vengeful memory, the last time she’d eaten these hideous vegetables. Her stomach, turning like a creature about to explode out of her chest, it never left her. There are things you can never outscoot.
Daring Do turns her face, up, mane dangling into her eyes, a psychotic grin spreading across her muzzle, promise of masochism. She says nothing, nothing more than her final, bitter defiance. Immense, veined and powerful the Nazis pace before her, with their ways of making her talk and angry accents from ancient homeplaces and moves to improve or spread their personal empire.
Moments passed into hours around the turning of the clock. Scootaloo stared at a wall opposite, drawing strength from her meditation. She could read those black and white flecks for days while willing the beans to evaporate. Worst case scenario, she’d get to miss school tomorrow.
Daring Do’s perpetually useless companion creeps up behind her, whispering into her ear, "Dude, dad's pissed."
Tell dad dude’s pissed, too.
Honestly, the series has been going downhill ever since they added the sidekick. Always stealing scenes with his dirty diapers and first words, always bowing down to the french fried fascists. If it were up to her sidekick, the Nazis would never be thwarted and instead stride over the world like a colossus stomping the meek, try-hard lambs.
Scootaloo arranged two of the beans in a line, like the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. One bark and the imps fold with a groan like paper that groans when you fold it in half. Also the paper would bleed, I guess. Yeah, okay, she’s like 10 years old, dude, cut her a break on the metaphor.
I rotate on my 360 degree limitation, the best money can create at this moment in cultural stasis. With a midi squeal, the peace breaks and the demon appears, a pink sprite with glowing eyes. Immense and bullheaded, his mouth opening wide enough to rip my head off. His feet planted and pink skin inflamed, bellowing in a barely understandable voice.
“That's enough. Eat the goddamned beans!”
Scootaloo broke, she always broke. The green beans dangle, dripping cold water and emitting the stench of the grave into the air; they rise, wilting moment by moment; they enter her mouth. She jerked in exaggerated agony, feeling or perhaps willing the vomit to spill like a desu tide across the boards of the table.
Daring Do’s face slams to the side. A hoof dripping blood pulls back beneath a smiling Nazi Pone. They'll kill her with or without her consent. The hideous taste, blood but also grass gone horribly wrong, rests on the center of her tongue. Damp and soggy in her mouth, every ounce of her body refusing to swallow. Refusing to betray the last principle and descend from kosher to cannibal living.
Scootaloo looked imploringly to her mother, but she just seemed amused by the filly's suffering.
"Another," her father said, demanding a sequel to the worst epic in existence. Socrates wished he could conspire with a chorus to imagine something so flavorless and yet horrible in place of art, and for that they force fed him poison. Scootaloo would take a glass of hemlock before this shredded hate.
Without swallowing, she picked up another another load of beans and shoved them into her mouth. Like a heap of death right on the center of her tongue, unassisted by butter lubrication or a gallon of hot sauce, nothing but the seasoning of the can. Tears welled in her eyes as the edges of the beans dangled flavorlessly over the tip of her tongue, and on the other end they prodded the base of her tongue, teasing her gag reflex.
I can’t pull the trigger in my mouth, can’t play my guitar hero anymore, can’t do anything in the face of this agony. Nothing but sit here as the demons eyes remained locked on my face. Teeth gnashing to no apparent end. My face turns bloody in stages, flashing red. Click, click dammit. Ready to sink with a Wilhelm scream, perfectly smooth movement to the floor.
Daring Do turns her face forward again. Her eyes promise hateful reprisal. Her mouth completely full of blood now, no hope left. She feels the shift, a tooth has come loose. She turns her head to the side, the bare floor beneath her. Shining clean like a kitchen floor.
Scootaloo, too late, grabbed her glass, her cheeks bulging with stored mattered. Too much to swallow now, too much to wash down. No choice as she coughed. The greens, still unchewed, spread across the tiled floor.
The demon leaps forward, ready to deliver the killing blow, his teeth are pixelated but clear. My useless shotgun is knocked away, scattering across the table.
It bellows, roaring and speaking some alien language. Threatening to stuff green beans down my throat forever as my soul rots in Tartarus. That’ll be the day.
Daring Do tumbles backward out of her chair, rolling in a perfect tumble. She grips her hat, the deus ex machina awaiting her. It shatters like a plate on the ceiling, well fuck.
Scootaloo, just two steps ahead of her paternal opponent, crashes against the stove shoving it away from the wall. The demonic nazi reference is upon her as she grips the gas line.
I reach back gripping the handle of the BFG 9000. If shotguns mean nothing to this beast, then it is time to go all out. With a flash the surroundings disappear, and I find myself in a world infernal and melting.
Daring Do tips her hat to the baffled Nazis before diving out the window. Beans escaped and heroism achieved. Hoorah!
The End.
"It seems to me," Sweetie Belle said, staring in wonder at the burning house and the forever orphaned filly, "that if you swallowed the beans without chewing, you wouldn't have to go through this every week."
"You have no idea what a principle is, do you?" Scootaloo asked askance.
This might be a place to have Morgan Freeman reprise his role as Joe Clark, but we’re above that sort of thing, aren’t we?
Obviously not.
But we are out of time.
Just ten minutes from the television, fade to hack for the audience, but she’ll keep living in the land of heinous horse fuckery.
Author's Note
So, before writing this, I cooked a can of French Cut Green Beans.
I was somewhat afraid that this childhood terror might have been defanged by maturity, and I wouldn't be able to relate to the idea of how absolutely disgusting those things are.
Instead, I threw out the entire can after one bite, and if I ever see them on my plate again I'm gonna burn the damn kitchen down. There is no excuse. No excuse at all. Pass the broccoli and peas.
