You hurry out back and rummage through the tool shed until you find some scraps of lumber and a can of black paint. You hammer the scraps together into the shape of a sign, then pause. How many years does paint last on a sign?

You shrug to yourself. You sand the sign's front surface smooth, then carve the letters out with a gouge before painting them, to give them a few more years. The barn will last. You made sure of that. That's all that matters. You remember:

She stares at the grass at her feet, every blade distinct and covered with a fine lattice of veins. At the dappled shadows of the cherry tree that dance at her hooves. At herself, not quite so colorful, but every hair and every feather’s vein sharp with detail. At you, now strangely alien again.

“So this is your world?”

You nod.

She looks again at the open field of grass, seven acres in a remote valley in eastern Kentucky, with a new barn from which you have removed the doors, and a spring fed pond near the middle. You had to sell your house to purchase this place and arrange for the taxes to be paid in perpetuity and the barn to be repaired and stocked with hay every winter. You won’t be needing the house anymore anyway.

There is a wide black paint stripe over top of the barn door, and smaller black stripes on the walls inside, everywhere the builders or the former owners had written something. This place will be free of words. There's a wide black paint splotch on one wall marking a spot where you had almost compromised again. Under the paint is a heart drawn in marker, surrounding two rows of letters: your initials, and "FS".

“So this is goodbye?” you say.

She looks away, sighs, looks back, nods. She has also had enough of conversation.

You don’t like to part this way, but you know it’s what she wants. So you throw your arms around her neck, scratch her between the ears, and tell her she’s a good girl, in a baby-talk voice that implies she cannot understand. She does not break the illusion as you pull away. You don't ask her not to forget you. That would defeat the purpose.

You go to the barn and open the door to a stable where a Shetland pony stallion stands, placidly ignoring his bales of hay. You would not deny her any part of being an animal. His mane is long and blows in the wind like hers. “Be good to her,” you whisper in his ear, before unclipping his harness and pulling it off of his head.

He walks unhurriedly out of the barn. They see each other. He raises his head and looks, then moves towards her, stopping some distance away, and like her bends his head to the fine Kentucky bluegrass. You cannot tell if the wings disturb him. They watch each other out of the corners of their eyes. You hope the grass is as tasty as it looks.

You continue half-heartedly passing out seeds and vegetables to the animals around her empty cottage for several weeks, but less and less regularly. You aren’t sure if you do it less regularly because there are fewer animals, or if there are fewer animals because you do it less regularly. They drift away. They seem to know what to do on their own. It was never them who needed her.

In town, you sit in cafés at a table by yourself, and order by pointing at the menu, or simply sitting and waiting for the serving pony to give you your usual. Still, ponies interrupt and expect conversation. Sometimes one or more of her friends come in, look at you, and leave.

She had explained everything to them beforehand, in an awkward library meeting. Some of them had tried to talk her out of it calmly. Two shouted, one blue, one purple and green, angry and hurt. One just stared in uncharacteristic silence, smiled, and shed a single tear. Fluttershy trembled under your hands as she spoke. You reached across her shoulder and stroked her flank, and she was able to look them in the eye.

The one who was the librarian hushed the others and wrote something on a scroll. The purple-and-green one breathed green fire on it and burnt it to nothing, but instead of getting angry at him, they just watched him and waited expectantly. Eventually he burped, and the scroll, or one like it, appeared in another burst of flame. The librarian picked it up and read it out loud:

"Your elements are what you need as much as what you are."

The strange words made all the ponies look away from each other. You sensed they'd start hugging each other soon, so you gave Fluttershy a squeeze around her neck and told her you'd wait outside.

Whatever happened that day was enough for them to let her go, though not enough for them to forgive you. Like many other things between you, you never asked, and she never explained.

You move to the outdoor cafés, where you seem more like background. Finally, you resort to bag lunches that you eat by yourself, on a bench in the square in the center of town. You give up wearing clothes. No one seems to notice. Foals who have not seen you before stare in wonder. If you are careful not to speak, they may come close, and scratch behind your ears, or experimentally hold out an apple.

But many ponies remember you, and say hello, or ask questions about Fluttershy that you answer evasively. Her friends keep what they know, or think they know, to themselves, and it isn't the sort of thing you can easily explain to a strange pony under a hot sun in the middle of the town square.

So one day you simply walk away, picking a road at random, until you come to another town much like it, with another town square. This one has a fountain in the center, a steady water supply. You quietly settle down there, staying off the benches, not letting on this time that you can talk. Ponies bring you small offerings of fruit and vegetables, and scratch you on the head, and you lean against them and rub your head against their furry necks without shame.

Still, it's not quite enough. You start awake, leaping up from your muddy sleeping hole in a burst of inspiration, and trek back to Ponyville for what you need.

You leave Ponyville and its memories the next day, the chain over your shoulder, the sign carried in the other arm. You return to the other town's central square at night, and use the sign as a mallet to drive the spike on one end of the chain into the ground. You set up the sign: “Caution: Hairless Albino Earth Monkey”. Then you close the clasp on the other end of the chain around your ankle, and lie down in the mud and wait for the the ponies, whom you know will now attend to your every need, in exchange for nothing more than being allowed to scratch your head or run their hooves over your strange smooth skin.

Author's Note

Thanks to GhostOfHeraclitus for the Samuel Johnson quote, to bookplayer for reading, to Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body for inspiration, and to Fiddlebottoms for suggesting the flashback structure and for showing what the "dark" tag really means.