Older Mares

Chapter ONE: Cream and Sugar

Cheerilee believed that the quality of one’s coffee, much like the quality of one’s life, had more to do with how much sugar and creamer one added, rather than the excellence of the bean itself. Even if you couldn’t choose your own coffee bean, you could decide the type and amount of creamer you stirred into the mix, and in Cheerilee’s experience, if you had good creamer, then you had good coffee. And Cheerilee always had good creamer.

Sitting at her favorite patio table at her favorite family-owned coffee shop (a rare and exotic wonder here in Canterlot), Cheerilee poured five single serving containers of hazelnut creamer into her coffee and stirred with the vigor of a mare ten years her junior. As she repeated this process of pouring and stirring with five single serving packs of brown sugar (because the sugar must always, without exception, be added after the creamer), the middle-aged college professor mentally jeered at all those poor saps coughing up seven bits for cups of coffee labeled “premium blend” or “imported”, while she doled out a meager three bits for the same black-as-tar liquid rubbish.

Coffee, by virtue of being coffee, was an affront on the taste buds, and if you were paying more than three bits for such sewage, then you were being taken for a proverbial ride. Cheerilee might have felt a modicum of empathy for all the misguided souls overpaying for coffee, but she was too busy basking in her intellectual superiority to worry about others.

Coffee, in her humble opinion, was a necessary evil. She ingested the cups of liquid battery power because they supercharged her mind and body, and were essential if she wished to survive another day of lecturing at the prestigious and largely over-glorified Canterlot University. Like coffee, higher education was also a necessary evil, though Cheerilee had yet to decide how evil—perhaps significantly more so than identity theft and marginally less so than war.

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with higher education (the same couldn’t be said of coffee or war); rather, its multitude of flaws stemmed from a million and one outside sources. Underfunding, certain bureaucratic practices, big business, unmotivated students, certain tenured professors, unmotivated teachers, a general lack of equine decency… The list went on and on, and while Cheerilee could spend her mornings dwelling on such injustices, she chose to ignore the fact that some Canter U professors made less money than sanitation workers, and instead, enjoyed her self-proclaimed status as the most intelligent mare to ever purchase a cup of joe.

Two tables away from her, a triad of young, virile male zebras chatted among themselves as they sipped lukewarm tea, their unique diction accented here and there by the melodic spell of internal and slant rhymes. An earth pony waiter passed their table, sun-bleached and muscular, a tray of sweating lemonade glasses balanced on his broad back. An apple cutie mark adorned his robust flanks. Cheerilee chuckled aloud as the zebra's complimented his brawny frame, and because nopony can resist the flirtatious rhyme of an intrigued zebra—that most enchanting of impromptu poetry—the Apple chuckled as well, his face flushing in spite of his doubtlessly conservative upbringing.

Cheerilee didn’t know the zebras by name, but she recognized them from the university, and saw them every morning here at this hole-in-the-wall coffee shop. Like most male Canterlot U students, they dressed in respectable blazers, ties and corny fedora hats, but their lack of brand-name allegiance suggested a heightened sense of individuality, or perhaps a superior monetary responsibility. Even Cheerilee—who considered herself an agent of nonconformity in this backwards world of rampant consumerism—was guilty of sometimes splurging on luxury clothing, if only because her haughty unicorn peers were more likely to leave her be if she strutted down the halls of Canter U dressed in the latest such-and-such by Hoity Toity. But this triad of striped youths had long ago freed themselves of such high-thread-count shackles, or perhaps they had been born free, immuned to Canterlot’s opulence by virtue of their “otherness”.

Cheerilee had always been attracted to zebras, with their striped coats and exotic accents, and these three were especially sexy, despite their obvious adherence to a certain alternative lifestyle. The three of them had been sipping tea and flirting with waiters for as long as Cheerilee had been visiting this coffee shop, and likely long before she ever uprooted her small-town life and moved to Canterlot. She often wondered at their collective origin. Were they brothers? They never flirted with each other, and they certainly looked alike. Nonetheless, Cheerilee feared making the perilous leap to that conclusion, if only because she didn’t want to be mistaken for the the kind of pony who thought all zebras looked alike.

One of the zebras tittered as he placed a front hoof on the Apple’s shoulder, caressing the swell of muscle beneath the waiter’s beige coat. He looked to his friends/brothers and trumpeted something in his native tongue: likely a lewd obscenity, judging by the corner-of-the-mouth snickers coming from the other two. Their chuckles flowed out like a milkshake journeying from blender to cup: thick and creamy and vanilla-chocolate-swirl sweet. Cheerilee lapped an errant drop of coffee from her bottom lip and kicked herself for staring so hard.

She hated them for their gayness—not because she was homophobic, but because they would never have eyes for her, never pin her to a nearby flat surface and whisper dirty rhymes in her ear while rutting her from behind…

The fantasy skirted through her mind without shame. She would have indulged it for longer, but the 234 Mauve Line—that most wondrous of golden chariots waiting to whisk her off to another day of academic drudgery—was due to arrive in… yep, less than fifteen minutes… and the walk to the subway would take her at least ten of those fifteen.

Chugging the last of her fuel supply, Cheerilee smiled politely at the striped trio as she hopped down from her seat and started for the sidewalk. They smiled back, and one of them waved, a prompt and dutiful “Morning, Professor Cheerilee,” rolling off his tongue.

The sweet music of her name on his lips tickled every one of her pleasure centers. Although she didn’t have a single zebra in any of her classes—a troubling fact that she chalked up to biased standardized testing, overwhelming tuition fees, and, in her wildest fantasies, a government conspiracy to purge Canterlot of all ethnic diversity—she figured the striped student must have recognized her from Canter U, and better yet, he even knew her by name. As the train station’s entrance came into view, she hummed a jaunty tune and practically skipped down the spotless street, her mind preoccupied with dreaming up naughty words that rhymed with ‘Cheerilee’.

She was so preoccupied that she stumbled and nearly toppled down the stairs. Luckily, a veil of magic light—warm and pillow-soft—shrouded her body and righted her once again.

“Oh, um, I’m terribly sorry,” she stammered, checking her saddlebags to make sure she hadn’t dropped any of the C-average midterm papers she’d spent the better portion of last night grading.

“It’s no trouble at all, Miss.” The elderly unicorn did a little bow as he adjusted his glasses. “Just do yourself a favor and tread more carefully in the future.” He spoke with the conviction of a stallion accustomed to being heeded, though there was no hint of force or bluster in his tone. He sounded a bit condescending, but Cheerilee nodded graciously and trotted on, choosing not to hold the unicorn’s arrogance against him. His starched suit and upright posture betrayed his allegiance to the upper class, and everypony in Canterlot with money in his pocket and a horn on his head possessed varying degrees of jerkishness. It wasn’t their fault; they were byproducts of a backwards social environment. She could have snapped at the old stallion for his belittling tone, but then she might as well chastise the sky for being blue, or trees for being tall.

The world beneath Canterlot was almost as spotless as the world above. Cheerilee looked to the tunnel walls as she approached that thick yellow line that ponies weren’t supposed to cross, her eyes scanning for traces of graffiti. If you arrived at the tunnels early enough—before the city deployed its mid-morning, government-salary minions to cleanse the walls of teenage rebellion—then you could sometimes be privy to the work of Canterlot’s most talented street artists.

Cutie Marked was Cheerilee’s favorite spray-painter. His work—always identifiable by the initials ‘CM’ scrawled somewhere on his murals and tags—was silly, profane and seemingly worthless. Whether he was scrawling 34-line stanzas of free-verse political poetry on the tunnel ceiling, or adorning train cars with giant murals of diamond studded penises, CM’s message always remained the same: fuck you, and everypony who looks like you. Exactly who CM was telling off eluded Cheerilee, but the sentiment was nice.

Unfortunately, CM’s crass wisdom had already been scrubbed from the walls this morning, a blow felt not only by Cheerilee, but by all of Canterlot’s frustrated fringe rebels. Not that it mattered much. He would be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, armed with aerosol cans, permanent markers and a bad attitude likely brought on by absent parents, bullies, a crappy diet, porn magazines and violent video games; that is, if Equestria’s various media outlets can be trusted with explaining the root causes that produce wayward youths.

To reconcile with CM’s unjust censorship, Cheerilee boarded the 7:30am train without paying, fighting the good, rebellious fight in her own selfish way. This also didn't matter; Canterlot’s superb public transit system hardly needed her measly contribution to shuffle this morning’s gaggle of coffee-fueled commuters to their respective places of toil. Once aboard the train, her impudence was rewarded with packed car after packed car, meaning she would have to stand for the next four stops.

Standing in the center aisle, she cocked her head to one side and was met with a row of five preppy, teenybopper pegasi: three stallions and two mares—a perfect cast for this fall season’s latest tween dramedy. Cheerilee could already see the pilot episode premiering on channel 13—Tuesday nights at 6pm, 9pm eastern time—the title, “Why Fly When You Can Be a Dickhead and Take Up Space on the Subway,” filling the top and middle portions of the screen, saving the bottom for hoof-written-style scribbles of the cast’s names. She glared at the ensemble of potential teenage stars, choosing to remain silent while she prayed to the rating gods that their imaginary show got canceled after the obligatory three episodes.

One of the feathered brats looked especially old for her age, and her plump lips and smooth forehead reminded Cheerilee of her own fast-receding youth. Though many a fashion magazine ad and shampoo commercial might speak to the contrary, Thirty was not the new Twenty, and Thirty-Six was closer to bad hips and hospice care than many might think.

These revelations, among others, had been the greatest catalysts for change in Cheerilee’s life. The day after her thirtieth birthday, Cheerilee rose from bed, trudged to the bathroom mirror and realized that the bleary-eyed mare staring back at her wasn’t good enough. She was too dumb, too ugly, too unsuccessful; and if the laugh lines beginning to fissure across her brow were any indication, she also, clearly, wasn’t getting any younger. In that illuminating moment, water splashed her face, teeth were vigorously brushed, and a decision was made. She would go back to school, earn a degree and live out her childhood dream of becoming a professor at a prestigious university.

And six years later here she was, standing on a packed train car with a gut full of caffeine and heart full of fragile pride. She wasn’t any smarter or better looking than she had been on that fateful morning, but she was more successful—at least in terms of monetary gain and social status—and in the shallow, suburban, consumption-driven wasteland of Canterlot that must have counted for something.

An abrupt stop sent her pitching into the rump directly ahead of her. It was white and shapely and firm… and belonged to an angry-looking unicorn youth, scarred and bald-headed. He craned his neck and scowled at Cheerilee with hard eyes.

“Hooves to yourself, grandma.”

“Oh, um, s-sorry. I didn’t mean too—”

“I mean it. Touch me again and I’ll break you in half.” The spiral-shaped tattoo obscuring his left cutie mark declared his allegiance to a street gang called the Kirin Sisterhood, or the ‘Spirals’, as they were better known by officers of the Royal Guard. They were harmless for the most part—all bark and no bite—but even so, Cheerilee didn’t make a habit of picking fights with angry unicorns. Some could perform only the most rudimentary of spells, while others could turn you into a hot pretzel with a flick of their tails. This one looked like rather dim, but she saw no reason to take the chance.

“I’m sorry, really. I promise it won’t happen—”

“Hey! Leave that old mare alone, ass-wipe!”

“Yeah, what kind of shrimp-dicked pussy picks fights with the elderly!”

“Senior citizens deserve respect for their years of wisdom and numerous contributions to the well-being of modern Equestrian society!”

“That’s right! Fuck off, you skinhead, racist pile of dogshit!”

To her surprise, it was none other than the teenyboppers who leapt to her rescue. Suddenly their dull dramedy had transformed into a kickass cartoon adapted from an obscure indie comic series. The title “Subway Sentries!” popped into Cheerilee’s mind as the fearsome fivesome leapt from their seats and formed a wall between herself and the ‘skinhead, racist pile of dog-shit’ (who was also a fascist that never sent his sick mother postcards on her birthday, or any of the various postcard-appropriate holidays).

A shouting match ensued, and somewhere between a biting “Why don’t you suck me off, shit-for-brains?” and a particularly hostile “Come at me, bro!”, the word ‘Pigeon’ was uttered—a racial slur that compared pegasi to rats with wings—and a fight broke out. The Subway Sentries jumped the skinhead, pummeling him into the floor and likely earning enough ratings to green-light a second season.

Cheerilee shook her head as she stepped off the train, happy that she’d misjudged the feathered freedom fighters but upset that she’d been refereed to as ‘elderly’ at least five times by five perfect strangers. She left the Subway Sentries on the train, confident in their evil-vanquishing abilities, and hustled back to the surface world, where Canter U waited just a few blocks away.

A billboard featuring a Royal Guard dressed in purple armor urged passerbys to enlist, declaring “CELESTIA WANTS YOU!” in bold black letters, though for what purpose Cheerilee couldn’t begin to imagine. Maybe her highness needed more handsome colts to kiss the golden shoes, preen the royal feathers, and occasionally stroke the royal ego. Cheerilee was a language professor, not an economist, but even she could see that the nation’s current unchecked military spending was a greater threat to Equestrian welfare than any of the thousands of imaginary enemies the monkeys in golden clown suits were supposedly protecting them from. Surely, she mused, the citizens’ taxes could be better spent on education or health care, instead of overpaying the military to safeguard the well-being of three (or was it four now?) immortal, all-powerful goddesses.

But what did she know? She was a lowly professor of a dying art, and she was late for today’s first lecture to boot. She was still six long years away from being tenured, which meant she couldn’t afford to mess about like some of her pompous (unicorn) peers and coworkers.

She was halfway up the ivory steps when a jovial, “Cheers, Miss Cheers,” caught her ear and prompted her to spin around. Before she knew what happened, two pegasus ponies swooped out of the sky, and several rough hooves seized her and shoved a black, burlap sack over her head.

She didn’t bother resisting her assailants, knowing already that escape was impossible. Instead, she grumbled under her breath and tried to keep track of her saddlebags, annoyed that she was being kidnapped.

Again.