Atlanta Neighs

Chapter One: The Rape of Lucrece by the Seven Dwarves of Notre Dame

It was here, under the very coyote skin blanket where he was born, that he woke up. Unlike most days when he woke up, he didn’t feel like he was in need of a shower, nor was his morning need angry at him and attempting to declare its independence in the name of the South.

Ever since that Civil War reenactment he’d been drafted into, his penis had been obsessed with the Confederacy, even tattooing itself with the Confederate flag. His black girlfriend at the time was not amused. Being as though his only girlfriend at the time was his painted-black hand, he couldn’t masturbate for a month straight.

So, when he opened his eyes to see a horse in his bed, he wasn’t exactly surprised. Nor was he exactly perturbed by its weird color scheme; he’d probably just spray painted it, like that time when he was a boy and did the very same to his pet cat. It was thanks to this cat that he had his pornstar name, though, “Longshore Patches”, and he reminded himself to check his PC for any new videos in the “Longshore Patches” folder, which were to be summarily deleted.

It wasn’t until the horse turned around, regarded him, and screamed like an orgasming goat that he wondered if something was wrong.

Then, like a child wondering why the baseball was getting bigger, it hit him: he’d forgotten to turn the oven off last night when he was trying to use it to dry his pet dog.

The horse flopped out of bed, squealed like a pig and ran in circles as he asked, “Oh God, I didn’t cover my penis in peanut butter again last night, did I? If so, I sincerely apologize for fooling your tiny pony mind into thinking that my penis was filled with even more yummy peanut butter.”

It ran straight into the wall and collapsed.

“Neat.” He sat up straight in the bed. “Huh,” he said, “this isn’t my parents’  basement. And this isn’t my favorite tattered coyote blanket. How depressing.” His eyes scanned the area. It was an average-sized room. The walls were a plain, but warm, beige color, and, as he looked to his right he could see a rose-red draped window leading out to a balcony. The bed was king-sized, although its design, rose-shaped, was decidedly less king-orientated.

“Huh. Did I accidentally break into the orphanage again?” He called out, “Little Timmy, if you can hear me, I’m sorry for stealing your bed again. And for convincing you that my penis was filled with yummy peanut butter.”

He looked down on the unconscious horse, giving it an extra glance, just for good measure. Seemed to be the pretty standard American version, four legs and hooves, as opposed to those weird five-legged Canadian versions, with two eyes, a nose, equipment—no, wait, “What the bloody bowels of ’ell is that? That’s not right! That’s not right at all! The shape is completely messed up!”

Given all his mathematical know how, he was sure that this was a direct result of force-feeding the pony far too much propane and propane accessories.

With a groan, he rolled out of bed as enthusiastically as a turtle challenged by a Jewish T-rex to a game of Texas Hold ‘em. The Texan Jewish T-rex was well known for its card skills. Not so much its boxing skills, where he was certain he could defeat one within the first, or possibly second round, by way of technical knockout.

“Oof!” he grunted as fell the the floor, belly-first. He sighed, blowing at a tuft of blue hair that fell over eyes. Wait. His hair was black. Or at least he thought it was. He’d developed a theory that he was actually blonde, and that his mother had secretly snuck into his bedroom, every single night since the day he was born, to dye his hair its standard midnight black because she, and he frequently quoted this: “Did not want him looking like a damned Kraut.” She was horribly racist like that. Ironic, considering that he was pretty sure that his great-great-grandfather had helped orchestrate the Holocaust.

He rolled onto his back, feeling the demonic emptiness in the deepest recesses of his gullet. A roar sprang forth from the belly of the beast, like a thousand lions, or perhaps a slightly wet, very pathetic gurgle. Nevertheless, ‘twas breakfast time. Spying to the right, he once again looked at the horse—with the horribly malformed equipment, how did he ever?—and considered his choice of meal. He’d heard that horse meat was both leaner and sweeter than bovine meat.

He raised his arms to his eyes to wipe the sleep from them, stopping midway through the motion. A sky-blue hoof-like limb dangled over his face. He squinted, leering at it with the scrutiny of a seedy business executive that watched on as a scantily-clad velociraptor tearfully danced to the beat of Caramelldansen. He blinked, his deadpan expression never wavering. Looking down, he noticed that his case of blue-body was not, in fact, an isolated incident. Well, at least it could be worse; God save us from the blue waffles. Literal blue waffles. He’d had them once. Bubblegum was the worst flavor.

With a shocked, though belated, gasp he flipped onto his knees, his elbows bending in the exact opposite direction they usually bent for the last twenty-odd years. It felt distinctly like waking up one day with morning eagerness, only to find that your member curved in a corkscrew pattern.

Placing his “hoof”—unless his elementary school gym teacher had finally made good on his promise to amputate his hands and and spray paint a random color of his choosing in that exact order, something that probably never actually happened—on his face, he prodding it gently. It felt longer, if only vaguely, as his hoof-like stump wasn’t getting very much sensory input. He did, however, feel something very much like fur brushing against his flesh as he continued pressing softly. He raised it higher, jutting from his forehead was something long and phallic to levels that Freud himself had considered filing a sexual harassment suit.

He threw his head up, his neck swerving left and right, his eyes scanning for anything with a reflective surface. “Ah ha!” he cried. Three feet to the left of the unconscious horse was a small desk with a smaller, oval-shaped mirror attached. He jumped to his hooves and bounded towards the mirror. Although “tripping after the first step and rolling the rest of the way while shouting every obscenity in seven different languages” would be more accurate.

He looked up from his crumbled position, glaring at the pale-pink mirror-desk-hybrid abomination as it silently taunted him for his inability to burp the Canadian national anthem. He’d never forget the humiliation. He reached his short, blue limbs towards the edge of the desk, and with a growl of effort, he pulled himself up. Placing his chin on the desk for leverage, he raised himself to a standing position, his arms, which felt more like forelegs—although he was not entirely sure how he'd known that—still holding onto the desk so that he was standing on what felt to be his hind-legs—trippy.

After a couple of deep breaths, he stared into the small mirror before him.

“Oh. Well then.” To his surprise, staring back at him, a light blue horse-like creature, not unlike the one that sprawled out on the floor beside him, who he noted, was appearing to come to. Its shaggy hair, or mane rather, was of a darker variation of the rest of its body, a small blue horn emerging from the forest of dead cells like the Tower of Babel erupting from an orgy of blue werewolves.

He blinked, and it blinked back. He rose his hoof to his furry cheek, the horse-creature mimicked the action. His eyes widened as realization dawned on him. “Oh God…” he moaned, his voice cracked and his eyes stung with threats of erupting tears. “I don’t even like blue!”

The small horse-thing beside him let out a soft whimper of agony. “Oh quiet! God! Why does everything have to be about you?” the man-turned-blue-horse-thing growled. It whimpered again. He sighed, shaking his head. “And you wonder why I feel we aren’t working out anymore.”

He looked at the small creature again, this time closer. Its coat whitish beige, and its mane dark-pink, with a lighter patch of pink running through like a skunk-stripe. He shivered, the color pink arousing feelings of dread powerful enough to dent the steel vault of memory repression that kept at bay the trauma born of bearing witness to the atrocities committed when those mice declared jihād that one St. Valentines Day.

Still, the physiology of the thing, and not just the color scheme, was also very unusual. It wasn’t actually that deformed, now that he looked at it—that is to say, severely deformed by horse standards, but there was something decidedly anthropomorphic about the horse’s intimate features. Salvation from his nightmares!

He gave himself a winning smile in the mirror before he turned from it, planting himself firmly on his four limbs and hoofing his way over next to the odd equine which managed to be more disturbing by being less disturbing. When you went to bed with a thing, you sort of expected said thing to look like said type of thing. This specimen was downright bizarre.

The mare—and he knew it was a mare—groaned, opening her eyes dazedly with her eyes spinning comically and deeply impossibly in her sockets, unfocused and staring at nothing. “I… I didn’t realize cute bucks could materialize in beds. That’s slightly…” Her eyes finally found focus, and on him no less. “…creepy.”

“Hullo. My name’s Longshore Patches XIX, Defender of the Turkey People and professional toilet diver.  You may call me by my Christian name, Steve.”

Silence.

“Nah, just call me Longshore. No one ever calls me Longshore.”

Another pause. The sort of pause that preceded horrible news, like “Good sir, you have cotton cancer!” or the ever-popular “I’m afraid your horse has diabetes. Yes, the liquor is that bad.” Then the mare screamed, a high, haunting sound like a thousand Russian banshees on their period, all aware of the fact that their sister-in-law just stole the last absorbent. The bitch.

Miraculously, the mare stopped screaming, instead taking up far more productive hobbies, such as communication. She blinked. “My name’s Roseluck.” Blink blink. “I-I grow and sometimes eat flowers. But you can call me Rose.”

“It suddenly strikes me that you can talk, but then it suddenly strikes me that so can I, and I sort of look like you, so why am I even surprised?” He furrowed his brow in thought. “In fact, this is all very normal in the context of interaction between two sapient beings, which worries me because, firstly, I’m now worried if I’m gonna be have to call you later, which I certainly did not sign up for when I went to bed with a horse, and secondly, ach noo, Oi’m goin’ ta the prisoon hoose noo!”

“I... what?”

“Because of breaking and entering, plus you can probably press molestation and rape charges against me no issue.” He waggled his eyebrows knowingly. “Trust me, I’m familiar with this scenario. Less than you’d think, but more than I’d like.”

“I’m… not sure if I could do that.” She gazed around the room. “Did I get laid last night?”

“Wait, does it even count as beastiality if I too, am technically a horse? Oh ho ho ho, these… these are the questions, lass.” He giggled. “I’m a horse.”

“Wait, I paid for this? I don’t even remember drinking last night!” she said as she threw her hooves up into the air, no doubt trying to flip an invisible table. An evil, invisible table. You thought you were safe, table. Oh, you thought so.

“Not to worry, m’ dear, you can repay me by offering me free lodgings, food, and any available information!”

“That doesn’t sound like a very good method of payment.” Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek in thought. “In fact, come to think of it, I don’t remember Ponyville having any prostitutes.”

“Prostitute? Why’d yew assume Oi’m a prost’tute?”

“I’m sorry, what—oh, ‘why’d you assume I’m a prostitute’?” He nodded his confirmation. “Well, you said you were a whorse, so I just sort of assumed. Was that bad of me?”

Our dashing and handsome and brave and sexy hero cocked an eyebrow at her questioningly. “Ignoring the fact that you consider horse to be synonymous with prostitute—a fact I’m certain we’ll get to the bottom of soon enough with some healthy social exchange—I just realized that we’ve been having this conversation while you’ve been lying on the floor. Need a hand?” he asked, extending his left forelimb.

She tilted her head, peering at the young buck inquisitively. “Sure…” She reached up, the wrist of her right forelimb hooking around his. He did his best not to cringe, which really only resulted in him clenching his teeth tightly, his lips quivering until he was practically foaming at the mouth like an slightly aggravated dish washer. Lifting herself to a standing position, the young mare spoke, “Also, your accent tends to keep—A-are you okay?”

Roseluck took an uneasy step back, cautiously eying the stallion as his mouth foamed like that of a rabid dog leering at a defenseless orphan, his bottom right eyelid twitching sporadically. Her right forehoof raised slightly off the ground, preparing to flee when the situation took the inevitable turn for the worst.

Almost instantly did the mysterious stallion—or Longshore, or Steve, whatever he was supposed to be called—cease to froth like a Nickelback fangirl at a live concert. Whatever that was. She wasn’t quite sure why she made that comparison, attributing the mental outburst to the imaginary booze she had the night before. “Aw! Lookit!” the stallion squeed, thrusting his forehoof in her direction! “Isocute!” he giggled, trotting in place.

Roseluck craned her neck to look behind her, gaze searching for whatever Longshore Steve the XIX had pointed out. “I don’t see anything cute back there.” She looked back at him. “What in Equestria are you talking about?”

“Really?” He deadpanned. “I mean, really really?” He took a second to wait for it to zip in, but all he received in return was a confused shrug. “I was referring to you. You’re cute.”

Her cheeks flushed. “Y-you really think so?”

“Actually, I was talking about the hoof thing you’re doing. That’s ‘burn an entire third-world country village down that’s been totally evacuated save for every single puppy ever’ grade cute.”

Rose’s ears flattened against the top of her head before instantly perking back up, her eyes widening. “That’s… both disappointing and incredibly morbid.”

“I know, right? Wanna get some breakfast?”

“Why are you even still here?” She frowned at her unwelcome guest, her patience with this funny yet abrasive personality running out. “Don’t you have something better to do than harass me? I’m still not even sure if I got drunk and laid last night, but all signs point to ‘no’. Because then I’d have a hangover. And I’d probably be sore.”

“Because I’d rock you like a hurricane, am I right?” he said, trying to eyebrows to wiggle in a wave-like pattern, but really all they did was rise and contort in ways that made it look as though his forehead was having an epileptic fit. And was also squid.

She simply glowered at him, unamused.

“Aw, c’mon, aren’t we, like, the bestest of friends? You can’t just throw me out.”

“And why can’t I, hmm?” She quirked a skeptical eyebrow at him.

“Well, to be honest…” The sky-blue buck seemed to hesitate, rubbing the back of his neck. “To be honest, I kinda have nowhere else to go. I don’t have anywhere to live or anything to eat, I literally just woke up in your bed without knowing where I was.”

“O-oh… R-really? That’s, uh…” The mare seemed to falter, her face drawing into the beginnings of attentive sympathy. “You really have nowhere else to go?”

“Yeah, I mean, I don’t want you to assume I’m trying to deceive you or get free food from you, but I’m sort of at a loss as to what I should do here.”

“Well… I-I guess we could go for some breakfast while we figure things out.”

The stallion’s face lit up in gratitude. “Really? That’d be awesome! You, ma’am, are awesome!”

Roseluck smiled in return. “Thank you, and you’re awesome too.”

“Hey Roseluck?”

“Yeah, Longsteve?”

“Penis.”