Older Mares

Chapter THREE: Shampoo Ads and Celebrity Gossip

“That’s a load of bullshit!” shouted the angry buffalo student, catapulting her incendiary opinion like a flaming ball of oil-coated earth—or whatever kind of missiles sieging armies flung at castle walls during battles in fantasy epics. Cheerilee wasn’t sure what siege projectiles were made of. Despite her vast and mostly useless knowledge of both classic and contemporary literature, she knew little of fantasy epics; she had never cared much for the genre. The scope was too big, and she had never been the sort of reader who could enjoy a story where the fate of entire countries and kingdoms were at stake. The modern world was impersonal enough without some author scribbling his sprawling pretend nations into existence, forcing readers to remember dozens of house names, regions, land masses, military titles, sigils (Cheerilee wasn’t sure what a sigil was, but she was positive that every fantasy novel contained droves of them)… It was all too much. Though lately, sprawling fantasy and science fiction novels seemed to be the only stories present in popular culture.

“You and your gang of hate-mongers should take your hypocritical, right-wing bullshit back to the Celestial Belt where it belongs!”

Equipped with little more than a sleeveless blazer on top of a plain button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows (the unofficial uniform of Canter U’s hyper-masculinist, hyper-lesbian population), the buffalo student seemed intent on shouting down the walls of bigotry, as if one voice raised in indignation could disband the hoard of unicorn protesters still manning their posts outside of the campus gates. She was small for a buffalo, but sturdy, possessing the typical rotund and stocky build of her species. A cute face dispelled the menace in her bulging muscles, its warmth accented by her plush earth tone fur and tie-dye feathered headband: an article of clothing she wore with no perceivable traces of shame.

Most of the protesters ignored her raving. They took the Celestial highroad, quelling their urges to engage the fuming lesbian in what would ultimately be the verbal and pseudo-political equivalent of a girly slap-fight. Canter U’s privileged elites might have been a gaggle of spoiled, overpaid-and-underworked racists, but at least they were classy about it. They didn’t go around throwing bricks through the windows of griffon owned business, or rampaging through zebra neighborhoods after dark, hanging striped piñatas from tree branches and setting lawns on fire. That was Deep South territory—old school settler pony shenanigans. Canterlot’s lynch mobs were more sophisticated. They traded their nooses for signs, and claimed civil liberates instead of lives.

One protester, however (because there’s always one every bunch), broke ranks and faced the lesbian head on, practically jamming his muzzle in her face.

“This is a peaceful, non-violent protest. As students of Canter U, we have the right voice our opinions so long as nopony is harmed.” The others nodded their agreement, signs floating overhead like war clubs poised to strike.

“No pony, is right,” said the lesbian. “Or is it just unicorn rights you’re fighting for? I don’t see any herders or pigeons out here fighting the good fight with you assholes.”

Well shit. So it was like that, was it? Cheerilee had been on the buffalo’s side until she let the word “herder” roll off her tongue like the last drop of lava down the canted face of a volcano. It was an old racial slur—a throwback to the days when settler ponies herded buffalo tribes off their homeland and cosigned them to the limited space of designated reservations. And though the jaded and presently unamused schoolteacher had never traveled south of Ponyville, as a proud member of the race the word was meant to demean, she took offense. And lots of it.

The protesters took offense as well, fuming on behalf of their conveniently absent earth pony and pegasi brethren. Or at least they pretended too, perhaps using the buffalo’s verbal slip as an excuse to berate her argument.

“It’s always the same old tired story,” said the unicorn’s apparent front-runner. “Yeah, colonization happened, and a few dozen buffalo tribes lost their land. Get over it, we certainly have.” This statement earned a whooping cheer from the protesters, who had apparently forgotten their sophistication and were now excited to gang up on the lone buffalo soldier.

“Of course you got over it. It didn’t happen to any of you.”

“I didn’t happen to you either,” countered the unicorn. “That’s the trouble with you creatures: you’re stuck living in the past.”

The lesbian drew back a half step, her breath catching. “You creatures?” she repeated with a snarl. “And just what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” She pushed her forehead into the unicorns, snorting. “I have half a mind to take that silver spoon you were born sucking on and shove up at your ass.”

“Sure don’t just have half a mind?”

“Fuck you, you fucking uni cunt! Get the fuck off my campus!”

“You first, you under-evolved dyke!”

“Fascist homophobe—”

“Lazy hippie—”

“Asshole—”

“Bitch—”

And there it was: the pre-predicted girly slap-fight. No longer amused, and unable to decide which party was more full of shit, Cheerilee rose from her curbside seat across the street and began heading for the subway. She didn’t want to ride the train home, but after sitting at the bus stop for exactly fifty-seven minutes, the exhausted lump of schoolteacher realized that her white knight and golden chariot weren’t coming to whisk her off into the sunset.

There she went again, thinking about fantasy novels and fairy tale endings. Maybe she was missing a touch of wonder in her life. For the capital city of nation that went by a boisterous title like “The Magical Land of Equestria”, Canterlot felt pretty void of magic today. It was all late buses, schoolyard arguments and faded poison joke highs.

She was in a mood. It wasn’t exactly a bad mood, just the usual heightened feeling of self-awareness that followed all good poison joke highs. She had come down from worse drugs during her college days: herbs and pills and powders that had left her insides feeling rotten once the good times were over. At least the joke always put her down gently, instead of dropping her on her head and kicking in her ribs while she was down.

In one way, both the drugs low and high points were almost exactly the same. They never failed to fill Cheerilee with a sense of emptiness, and strong desire to wander, as if hoping she might stumble upon some hidden treasure or oddity. When she first came to Canterlot, her favorite pastime had been to smoke bowl after bowl of poison joke and then wander around the city for hours after dark, staring up at the spiraled ivory towers, and the billboards and neon signs that so boldly outshone the daytime sunlight.

And if she ventured out far enough—past the hustle and bustle of big city industry, beyond the specialty shops clogged with designer clothing, and the luxury wagon lots, and the cut-from-marble opera houses, and the domed sports arenas were Royal Guards tussled with Leather Wings: jousting, sword fighting, wrestling…

If she managed to wander by all that—to scale the heights of the mountainside city and escape its wellspring of carnal distractions and too-often empty delights—then, standing on a serene cliff at the edge of Mount Canter, she was free to gaze up at the jeweled splendor of the real Canterlot, all twinkling stars in a black-velvet sky that stretched out into eternity. No politics. No cross-dressing gangsters. No mirrors to catch her reflection and taunt her with the creases marring her once smooth skin. No. None of those wretched things. Just a silent beauty that she doubted she could still appreciate today.

A fantasy… Maybe that’s what Cheerilee was missing now. Maybe that’s what she was looking for: a fantasy…

On her way to the subway station, she didn’t come upon any fantasies lining the ivory streets, just her favorite liquor store and old-fashioned newsstand. She entered the store and purchased two drinks from the donkey standing behind the counter. The first was for her roommate: a bottle of cheap whisky imported from the Antler Isles, the word “STAG” scrawled on the its label in barely legible, uppercase cursive. If words written on labels could think and feel, then STAG would have been the kind of asshole who basked in the perceived sensuality of his own steroid-juiced physique. He was sexy and he knew it, or at least he thought so, and he couldn’t figure out why all the pretty mares that populated his favorite bars and nightclubs kept scrunching their faces or giggling at him as they trotted by.

The second drink was all Cheerilee’s: a tall can Zapp Apple’s Sparkling Orange Juice. She wasn’t sure how a pony named Zapp Apple had stumbled into the orange juice business, but she was glad that the universe apparently had a sense of humor, even if the joke was a bit obvious.

“Hello, beautiful,” she cooed, cracking open the can. “And just where have you been all my life, hmmm?” With her bottom plopped lazily on the curb, sitting beside the newsstand, Cheerilee tilted her head back and took a long swig of her precious sugar water, enjoying the acidic burn of carbonation and artificial flavoring as it spilled down her parched gullet, nurturing her parched soul…

Okay, so it wasn’t as dramatic as all that. Not the kind of life-affirming moment you’d read about in a coming of age novel, or see on the big screen during your favorite life-on-the-road indie movie—you know the ones, where the lead character gets cancer and goes on a journey to “find herself”, then later learns a lesson about enjoying the small things in life while watching the sunset with a witty train-hopping drifter, all of it set to the lazy plucking of acoustic guitar rifts… or something like that…

Nah, it wasn’t all that, but it was still pretty nice. She didn’t know this Zapp character, not personally anyway, but as the high fructose corn-syrup gushed down her throat, she thanked him for his steadfast dedication to safeguarding all that was simple and self-indulgent. “Cherish the little things” was Zapp’s upbeat, after-school-special message. He was a true Equestrian hero, thought Cheerilee, even if his nutrient-free swill was currently eroding the enamel off her teeth.

“You actually gonna buy something today?” said the stallion working the newsstand, talking around a stalk of hay that poked from the corner of his stubbly mouth. His jaw was huge and round, like a pelican carrying a boulder in its bill, and his eyebrows were hairy caterpillars wriggling above grey eyes.

“Shampoo ads and celebrity gossip,” said Cheerilee. And that was all.

“I hear ya,” said the stallion, seeming to understand her cryptic response. “But pushing ads pays my bills, and this ain’t one of them fancy-schmancy libraries in your fancy-schmancy school. So buy something or—”

“Or beat it?” she interrupted with a dismissive tone. “Yep, never heard that one before. And are you positive you didn’t mean to say ‘your fancy-schmancy learnin’ house’?” she added, mocking the gruffness of his voice.

The stallion rolled the stock of hay from one corner of his mouth to the other. “One of these days you’re gonna say the wrong thing to the wrong pony, and I hope to Celestia’s ivory snatch I’m there to see it when the shit finally goes down.”

“When the shit finally goes down?” Cheerilee parroted. “Who talks like that?” She belched, not bothering to cover her mouth. “That’s what I like about you, Fancy-Schmancy, you have no style whatsoever.”

She had been referring to the stallion behind her favorite newsstand as “Fancy-Schmancy” for almost six years now, because any adult capable of un-ironically uttering nonsense like fancy-schmancy, even during a casual conversation, deserved to be labeled as such. Cheerilee wasn’t crazy about labels, but she did want to live in a world where spades were called spades, and the intellectually superior didn’t have to pretend that morons weren’t morons.

“Did you get a chance to check out this month’s issue of Now?” Schmancy sneered as he plucked a magazine from the rack that stood behind him. “Your marefriend is on the cover.”

Cheerilee never read Now Magazine. To do so would have been unethical—nothing short of a sin against all equine kind. If today’s newspapers were rags, then Now was a discarded shred of toilet paper that was so thin you couldn’t use it to wipe your ass without bits coming loose and sticking to the insides of your cheeks. She was stalwart in her refusal to acknowledge Now’s existence, so, naturally, she dropped her can of simple pleasure, rose to all fours and snatched the periodical from Schmancy grubby front hooves. Her eyes flashed over the title, then the cover image, and the shock alone shaved ten years off her life. She stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared also, or rather it smiled, grinning with lips and teeth and an arrogance that belonged to Cheerilee’s most hated of hated rivals: A. K. Yearling.

“What?” was the best rebuttal she could manage. Had the planet recently spun off its axis? Was up down and down up? Why on the fruit-bearing earth was A. K. Yearling on the cover of Now, and could her shit-eating grin have been any wider or any shit-eating-er?

Everypony that knew Cheerilee was aware of the special strand of hatred she carried in her heart for A. K. Yearling. They also knew that their so-called “rivalry” was entirely one-sided and only acknowledged by the presently distressed schoolteacher, mostly because Yearling was a nationally acclaimed author who had seventeen bestselling books, nine movie deals, several vacation homes, a small fleet of private jets and absolutely no idea who Cheerilee B. Cheery was.

“A look inside the mind of Equestria’s No. 1 wordsmith?” said Cheerilee, reading the subtitle aloud as though it were a statement deserving harsh scrutiny.

“I’ll never get what you have against Yearling,” said Schmancy. “She’s a good writer, my foals love her stuff.”

“Your foals are six! Can’t you see what she’s doing? Getting them while they’re young and don’t know any better.”

“That ain’t true. My wife enjoys them books too.”

Cheerilee flipped open the magazine. “No offense, Schmancy, but your wife is married to you, and she looks like a Paleozoic herbivore. So you’ll have to pardon me for not taking any literary suggestion from her.”

“One of these days,” said Schmancy, gnawing on his stalk of hay.

“Blow me.”

Flipping through the rag, Cheerilee breezed past celebrity gossip columns and shampoo ads, searching for the madness printed on page 34. Once on the correct page, she found yet another photo of Yearling, this one even more stomach-turning than the first. The supposed “author” (a term all sane ponies used lightly when speaking of Yearling) was sitting hunched over a typewriter, no doubt pretending to be in the throes of creating something of actual worth. Below the image, printed in bold letters that were several times larger than the rest of the printed text, Cheerilee eyed the words, “Process? I don’t really have a stringent one. Storytelling is fluent, and what works for one narrative might not work for the next one.”

She reread the quote twice more, scowling. Celestia, Cheerilee knew, had always been a pro at populating the earth with high-quality assholes, but she really did a number on the mold the day she planted the demonic embryo that was A. K. Yearling in some innocent, unsuspecting mare’s womb. She imagined that Celestia and Luna had created both herself and Yearling at the same time. They had chatted about it and everything. The conversation had probably gone like this:

CELESTIA: “Hey, sis, let’s make a smart, witty, drop-dead gorgeous earth pony mare named Cheerilee! She’ll be crazy sexy and sweet as a button and all the stallions will want her to birth their sons and daughters. It’ll be awesome!”

LUNA: “Cool idea, sis! But while we’re at it, let’s be total pricks and create this other ugly, stupid pegasus mare with a coat that looks like vomit and a hideous monochrome mane! We’ll call her A. K. Yearling, and make her super popular despite being a total loser!”

CELESTIA: “Neato plan, sis! But why would we do something so fucked up and terrible?

LUNA: “Just to fuck with Cheerilee! You know, ‘cause we’re both such brainless jerks! And skanks!”

CELESTIA: “Yay, skanks!”

LUNA: “Skanks rule!”

And then they made out for ten to fifteen minutes before going back to Celestia’s private champers to offer her current “favorite student” some late night tutoring. And by ‘tutoring’, Cheerilee meant child molestation. Lots and lots of child molestation.

While pondering the validity of Celestia’s supposed ability to create life (she was pretty sure Legend Crackers debunked that fable during the season two finale), Cheerilee continued scanning the article, not really reading it, just looking for lines to wrinkle her nose at. She lost all of her shit—or at least the vast majority of her shit—when she read the words “Edited by A. K. Yearling” written beneath the last line of the article.

“What kind of prick edits her own…?”

To Cheerilee’s surprise, the voice that trailed off before completing that thought hadn’t been hers. Excited, she looked up from Now in search of her potential soul mate. But unfortunately, the universe’s sense of humor could be just as cruel as it was obvious. The lesbian was standing beside Cheerilee, her face scuffed, her proud uniform ruffled and torn at the collar and sleeves.

Catching Cheerilee’s eye, she lowered her magazine and said, “You’re Professor Cheery, right?” Her voice was smaller than it had been during her fight with the unicorns. And judging by the rips marring her blazer, the battle hadn’t remained a verbal one long after the schoolteacher had left. "I heard about that speech you gave your class today," she said, her eyes glittering in a I-totally-haven't-been-following-your-for-the-past-hour kind of way.

“Yeah, I was really high when I spouted all that crap,” said Cheerilee, fearful (and a little flattered) that she may have just acquired a stalker. She looked the shabby lump of buffalo up and down, trying not to be rude and scrunch her face. “You okay?”

“Huh?” the lesbian’s eyes flicked over her tattered uniform. “Oh, haha, yeah. One of those uni jerks took a swing at me. It was kind of impressive, actually. I didn’t think any of those prissy ponies had it in them.”

“Lucky it was just unicorns. Now if it had been a gang of herders or pigeons…”

The lesbian looked down at her front hooves. “Hey, I didn’t really mean that stuff I said. When I was a kid I had some bad run-ins with, uh, with ponies like you. But I’m not like that—like the unicorn jerks, I mean. It just slips out sometimes, you know?”

Cheerilee cocked an eyebrow. No, she didn’t ‘know.’

“Uh… so you read Now?” stammered the lesbian.

Cheerilee returned the rag to its shelf. “No,” she said flatly.

“Oh, uh, me neither. It’s pretty lame.” The lesbian glanced around, perhaps searching for the best escape route. “Hey, Zapp Apple’s, huh?” she said, pointing at the can sitting on the curb. “I love that stuff. You mind?”

A nod from Cheerilee indicated that she didn’t, and her new friend and/or future stalker sat down on the curb and helped herself. “Mm, that’s, uh, that’s pretty good. I’m more of a mango girl myself, but the orange isn’t, uh, it isn’t bad either.”

Cheerilee sat down beside the lesbian. She couldn't help but smile inwardly as she watched the poor, hapless soul stumble about in search in some commonality that could link them together, and perhaps bridge the cultural divide that stood between buffalo and pony.

She was cute. Partially stripped of her proud uniform, and wholly of her indignation and passionate loathing, the little buffalo soldier seemed like an entirely different creature. The fire in her words had been doused by a drizzle of unsure ‘uhs’ and ‘ums’, and she was hesitant to meet Cheerilee’s gaze.

Where had all that passion gone? Had they beaten it out of her? Smothered the fire in her chest with the trampling jackboots they’d been wearing since birth? In a way, Cheerilee felt just as bad for the unicorn protesters as she did for the downtrodden buffalo soldier. Their ignorance was a hand-me-down from their parents, and from their parents’ parents, and the copious media outlets that refused to portray the buffalo, or the gryphons, or the minotaurs, or the zebras, or the diamond dogs as anything more than Applewood villains, job-stealing wretches, disease-ridden charity chases—morons, perverts, criminals, and, in their wildest, most fanciful claims, victims in desperate need of aid from the superior equine race.

But was any of that bigotry the fault of those sign-waving youths? Was it fair to expect a child to grow into a righteous adult when all of her mentors where foolish and hateful? If anything, it was Cheerilee’s fault, and the fault of her generation—the older mares—the ones who had been charged with mentoring the next generation of youths. But where were they now? Where was she? Sitting on the corner nursing a half-empty can of liquefied tooth-decay, her snout buried in the folds of a shit rag as she bemoaned the fall of modern literature.

If the upper class brats were in fact brats, then it was her fault. And if the little buffalo soldier was weak without her anger and hatred, it was because the older mares refused to step aside and let her be strong.

“You can finish the can if you want,” said the schoolteacher. The lesbian nodded and continued to drink.

They sat beside each other for a long time, not saying anything. Their moment of silent reverence was ruined by a speeding Reigns Royce full of stallions dressed from head to hoof in mare’s clothing, jewelry, accessories. A white-faced and blue-coated stallion manned the screaming metal death trap, his licorice-black lips pried apart by a whooping laugh. His mane and eyelashes fluttered in the wind—romantic in a kind of perverted way—and beside him another stallion was hanging out of the passenger side window. As they blurred by, the passenger puckered his painted mouth and blew Cheerilee a kiss, then waved goodbye with a foreleg clad in racy fishnet stockings.

The not-at-all startled schoolteacher leaned forward and watched them go, noticing the pair of stallions humping like jack rabbits in the backseat, their manes worn in cheerleader-ish pigtails, and the license plate swinging from the pumper that stated “The 1%” in earnest black letters.

Two Guard chariots raced after the Steamer, sirens wailing.

“Did you know that guy?” asked the lesbian.

Cheerilee’s shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “We’re friends. I’m sleeping with his boss. They all want to break my kneecaps. It’s… complicated.” It really wasn’t, but saying ‘it’s complicated’ was much less complicated than explaining why she owed several hundred bits to the Daughters of Discord.

“Sounds simple enough,” said the lesbian. “You’re a Nightwalk Mare, am I right?”

This frank statement surprised Cheerilee, though it honestly shouldn’t have. The Nightwalk Mares weren’t exactly some big secret. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

“Uh, sure.” And then it was back to groping blindly in the dark, searching for that magic thread that would tie their lives together. “So, uh, that A. K. Yearling is pretty lame, huh? You know she’s actually Daring Do, right? Talk about shameless self-inserts.”

“Thank you!” Cheerilee exclaimed. “That’s what I’ve been saying for years!”

And there it was. They were tethered now. They would be forever.

After chatting about and laughing at Yearling’s countless literary missteps, Cheerilee halted their prattling with a friendly, “I like your style, kid. I don’t think I caught your name.”

“It’s Strongheart,” said the lesbian, the buffalo soldier (the potential stalker), the new friend. “Little Strongheart.” And she flashed a smile that was anything but small.