Blade

Pinkamena only went to the brook when the sky was completely grey. The soothing ambience of the babbling gave her peace of mind when she needed it. Ariel would follow her sometimes. Ariel hadn’t come that time. She wouldn’t ever follow again. Pinkamena would never skip stones with her or play ‘follow the leader’ again. Lilly didn’t like to play games for some stupid reason.

Pinkamena was running from her father, who had gotten angry again from the quota she had failed to meet. She had tried very hard, but Lilly had skipped breakfast and taken all of the rocks from Pinkamena’s side of the field for her own count.

Lilly was the good girl. She always met the quota. She always got seconds for dinner. Pinkamena was the bad girl. Doing a bad job gave you bad benefits her father would say. She wouldn’t ever get a big dinner like the others.

Pinkamena rubbed the cheek her father had stuck her on. The numbness was dwindling and she could feel it starting to swell. She wiped tears from her eyes as she looked down at the rushing waters of the brook. Her reflection wasn’t visible, so she couldn’t see how bad the bruise was this time. She looked up at the sky and wondered if there were any other fillies somewhere else with the same problem. She saw no pretty shapes in the clouds. There was only a bleak blanket shielding the farm and its land from the sun. She thought of Ariel. Pinkamena thought back to the night she had promised to cure her. She thought about the promise she had so selfishly broken. She broke down and cried. Her tears were lost in the tide of the brook’s current, never to be noticed by anyone.

She remembered that she had to stay quiet so that her father would not find her. She couldn’t stop his wrath, but she could delay it. She wished she had the will power to simply move on and enjoy what little pinch of time she had left before he heard her and gave her something to really cry about.

Pinkamena tried closing her mouth. Her breathing only got louder as she tried to suppress her misery. She felt every second slip away as she smothered herself on the ground to keep the whimpering from escaping into the air. She tried telling herself how weak she was. She even punched herself four or five times as hard as she could. Anything to make herself shut up.

But of course, like everything else she tried, she failed. Effort had nothing to do with it. She was just terrible at everything. She had no worth. Pinkamena had no place in the world. She would never amount to anything. She couldn’t even finish a task as simple as picking up six hundred rocks and carrying each one a quarter mile back to the barrels. She was worth getting smacked. She deserved it for being so useless. Pinkamena was far more furious with herself than anyone else. Nobody would care if she died like Ariel. Pinkamena wished that she had died instead of her baby sister. Her father wouldn’t have cared. She knew that was true.

Pinkamena looked at the rushing current again as she wondered how close her father was to finding her. Every half second or so, she was sure she had heard the sound of the entrance to the clearing opening up. She could swear she heard the thundering of hooves. The brook was too loud for her to hear anything so quiet, so she had to cover her mouth. The sobs still escaped, but they were muffled. It was about twelve minutes before she actually heard something she wasn’t imagining. She heard a stone fall into the water. She whirled her head into the direction from which the sound came, but there was nobody around who could have thrown it. The sound was too far into the current for it to have been part of the shore crumbling. It was most certainly the sound of a rock that had been skipped.

Pinkamena raised her head to get a better look around. There was nothing on the other side of the shore. She was the only living thing in the area for sure.

“Who’s there?” She called, now partially frightened.

It took a few seconds, but ever so slowly, a whispering voice spoke to Pinkamena from above her.

“I skipped a rock.” It said. “Now you skip one.”

Pinkamena was scared. She looked up to see what had spoken, but there was nothing there but the sky of emotionless grey, slowly drifting toward nowhere she could ever go.

The words she said acted on instinct. She shielded her head and ducked to the ground as if she were about to be beaten.

“My daddy says I’m not allowed talk to strangers!” She shouted out of her fort made from her arms. “I don’t know you! Go away! Please!” She begged the voice.

The voice became friendly and warm.

“I know you. You’re Pinkamena Diane Pie.”

Pinkamena opened up and looked around, still ducking in her lingering fear.

“How do you know me? Where are you talking from?” She inquired to the nice voice.

The voice became even friendlier.

“You’ve no need to talk, Pinkamena.” It started. “I’m special and I can hear the things that you think. Go ahead and try it out!”

Pinkamena was skeptical. She thought about her father running in through the reeds, having lured her away from the brook by disguising his voice.

The voice was magical, Pinkamena decided, when it said “Your father really is mean.”

Pinkie thought about the oatmeal she had that morning.

“I bet that wasn’t very good, was it?”

“No it wasn’t.” Pinkie confirmed to the voice in the special new way of talking.

She had stopped crying. She was excited that she had met somebody new. It wasn’t often that she got to do that. Maybe it would come to be that they could be friends. The very idea tickled her all over inside. She had so many questions for the voice. She asked a good deal.

“What is my sister’s name?”

“Lilly” It replied.

“What is my mommy’s name?”

“Marianne.”

“How many years old is grandma?”

Pinkamena didn’t actually know, but she thought of the number three-hundred.

“Three-hundred.” Said the voice.

“Wow! You know everything!” Pinkie thought in wonder as she giggled out loud. Noises coming from her sounded weird now. It felt right to think her words instead of saying them.

The voice chuckled. It was a warm and carefree chuckle. It sounded like the voice was having as much fun as she was.

“Say, Pinkamena. Do you mind if I call you Pinkie?”

Pinkamena’s glee melted away. She thought of Ariel again. Pinkamena frowned and covered her face again.

The voice read her thoughts and knew what was wrong.

“I understand, Pinkamena. You’re right. Nobody else needs to call you that.” It said.

There was a pause. For a second, Pinkamena thought the voice was gone. What she heard then made her feel uncertain. The voice had become an angry one. One that sounded like her father went he didn’t hear the number he wanted when he asked about the quota.

“It’s his fault, Pinkamena.”

Pinkamena was surprised by the sudden change in tone.

“What do you mean? Whose fault is it? What fault are you talking about?”

The voice got angrier.

“It’s his fault. Your father. Ariel would still be alive if it weren’t for him.”

The very mention of Ariel made her want to cry. How could it be her father’s fault? What did the voice mean?

‘You know what I mean, Pinkamena.” The voice responded as soon as she remembered it could hear her thoughts. “He knew that Ariel couldn’t meet the quota either. He wanted her gone.”

The voice turned from angry to creature like. It scared Pinkamena very much. The voice was like acid to her ears.

“He didn’t care about her, Pinkamena. And he doesn’t care about you. Don’t let him get away with it.” It spat at her.

The voice had lost the potential to be her friend. She knew now why her father had told her not to talk to strangers. It was right then that the reeds finally burst open with her father in the center of the split.

She could hear him heavily breathing from where she was, a good twenty meters away. He briskly trotted toward her, gritting his teeth. Pinkamena tried to run away but couldn’t stand up. She was far too scared to move. Her father towered over her when he stopped. Pinkamena had curled into a small ball of fluff in an attempt to shield herself from the initial blow she would no doubt receive.

Her father was patient. He would have waited until she uncurled herself and looked at him in the eyes. Pinkamena wanted to die. Living was too horrible simply looking in her father’s threatening gaze. His expression made it clear that he was absolutely livid. Deep horrifying breaths came from his nostrils as loud as the brook. He only looked down at her and spat.

The saliva landed on her back and ran down her backside slowly. Pinkamena’s body convulsed, letting her father know she had started to cry. He raised his hoof and came down on her. Pinkamena was knocked to the ground, hard. She let out a terrified yelp as she hit the ground. She cowered with her front hooves now shielding her face from any further blows.

“You little shit.” Her father spat in a much worse way. “Get back to the farm before your food gets cold. I’ll deal with you before bedtime.”

He turned around and headed back toward the clearing’s exit. He turned around and finished “If you aren’t back in three minutes, you’re sleeping outside!” Then he casually trotted away.

Pinkamena could do nothing but listen as the sound of her father’s hooves faded away.

Alone again, she found herself being capable of nothing but sobbing.