Some People Call Him the Space Cowboy (or Maurice)
A long time ago, before a lot of babies were born, there was a man named Bill Hicks.
Bill was a human being of the planet Earth.
Bill was a crazy person.
It was not that Bill suffered from a diagnosed mental illness, but the fact that in his later years Bill started to understand the Universe’s most intimate and fiercely kept secret. Once Bill figured out said secret, he knew that he could not truly die. This made him want to become like one of the rock stars he idolized so much.
Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Jim Morrison, among others; Bill wanted to be like them. He wanted to live fast and die young, and the Creator of the Universe took notice of this. So the Creator told Bill’s spirit, without warning Bill’s temporary humanoid body, that poor Bill was going to die a young man, never to have offspring or gray hair on his scalp or a malfunctioning penis.
Bill’s spirit was very happy about this news. He hated children.
The Creator didn’t kill Bill, though. Pancreatic cancer did. Pancreatic cancer told Bill’s temporary body that he had to die.
And died he did.
“And... I think that’s the last one,” said Princess Twilight as she oh-so poetically turned a comma into a semi-colon. Suddenly the essay was perfect. Twilight didn’t think it was perfect before she created a dot above the comma with her special quill, but now she did.
Twilight was not a human being. She was a pony of the planet Cuckoo. She was, however, a Japanese prostitute in a previous life. Like Bill, she was also crazy, and other ponies were afraid to tell her this for fear of being lectured.
Twilight enjoyed lecturing ponies, but they didn’t.
Bill didn’t enjoy it either.
He was looking over Twilight’s shoulder as she rolled up the paper with her magic so it could be stored and later sent to a publisher. Bill sighed with relief and eased his muscles. He was a horse now. His coat was a pale blue and his mane jet black. Bill had the choice of either keeping his previous form or turning into a stallion, and since he didn’t want to be a damn dirty human again, he chose the latter. “Took you almost four hours just today, but hey, I’m not doing this for free. What’s it about, really?”
“The essay? Oh, that’s easy,” Twilight said. “The relationship between light magic and dark magic on a molecular lev-”
“Nom-nom-nom-nom!” Bill started smacking his cheeks. “That’s the noise I’m hearing right now, because a certain someone isn’t answering my question!”
Twilight groaned and stuffed the scroll into her saddlebag, which she would no doubt be using the following day. Her saddlebag contained a collection of essays which were to be published as one book. This idea came from the fact that ponies always seemed to become popular when they wrote books and filled people’s minds with words that were as dry and meaningless as sandpaper in literary form. It was a mostly harmless business, though. Mostly.
The book was to be titled Some Remarks.
The book was to be comprised of nine different essays. The book was to be analytical, although Bill still had little idea as to what its overall purpose was, despite the fact that he worked on the book alongside Twilight.
Bill was an earth pony. Twilight was a unicorn. Twilight could use magic with her all-natural phallic object on her forehead. Bill was made of the same stuff they used to fire out of cannons during the Revolutionary War. The Revolutionary War started when a group of white slave owners thought that they themselves should be freed from other white slave owners.
“C’mon, get fuckin’ real with me here,” Bill said. “What does it mean?”
“Not sure what you’re talking about.”
“Essays are supposed to have messages to them, right? Right?”
“Yeah... I suppose they do.”
“And what are these particular essays talking about? War? Poverty? The royal sisters? Lame hip hop music made by white people?”
“I thought you said they looked more pink-ish,” Twilight said as she raised an eyebrow. As a matter of fact, their skin was a light pink. But nobody would take a race of pink people seriously.
“They do, but I didn’t. I was so white that I couldn’t take off my shirt at the beach so as not to get arrested for manslaughter.”
“That still weirds me out, you know.”
“Manslaughter?”
“Yeah. It sounds worse than murder, to be honest with you, and we don’t even have that.”
“You don’t have murder? As like a criminal offense?”
“Well,” Twilight hesitated. “Lots of ponies don’t even know what it is.”
“So wait, you’re meaning to tell me... that the idea of killing another pony for one’s own interests... wouldn’t even come across as an idea to you people?”
“What do you mean ‘you people’?”
By this point Bill had started leaning on one of the book shelves for comfort. He found out the hard way that he couldn’t pass the time by smoking cigarettes anymore. Thankfully, the planet Cuckoo had more powerful and useful drugs coming out of its soil than even the most mind-altering hallucinogens known to Terran science. He figured it was probably the reason why a lot of the ponies he’d met looked so damn happy as they went about their day.
This partially explained why Bill turned out to be good friends with Zecora the zebra, who was a reclusive doctor who lived in the woods. Humans would call her a witch. They would then most likely compare her weight to that of a duck’s and drown her in a pond.
Humans are fucking goofy, Bill once said to one of Twilight’s friends. Applejack was her name. She gave Bill a funny look when he said that. She thought he was weird for knowing many words nopony else did, and he thought she was weird for having a southern accent in a town full of Pennsylvanians. Or so that was how Bill put it.
“Never mind that. I thought you guys had vampires and shit. on’t those kill people?”
“Um.”
“You don’t know what a vampire is, do you?”
“We have vamponies, if that helps,” Twilight said and blushed sheepishly. She felt as though Bill knew something she didn’t, and if there’s one thing that disturbs an intellectual on a personal level, it’s the possibility of knowledge that can never be obtained. Bill was from Earth. Twilight was from Cuckoo, although the ponies never said that. They said they were from Equestria, which was a country.
Countries think they own the world sometimes.
“So what do vamponies do? Enlighten me here.” Bill then unconsciously reached for a pocket in his side that he no longer had. Bill was a heavy smoker when he was a human; some smokers went through whole cigarette packs each day, but Bill went through lighters.
“Last time I checked, they eat fruit.”
“What?”
“Well, that’s not quite right. They suck the juice out of fruit,” Twilight said as she played with her mane. Bill’s mane was black. Twilight’s was shades of violet. Despite her natural good looks and exceptional physique, Bill thought she was average-looking, much to the cries of fanboys millions of light-years away.
“My god... even the vampires in your world are pussies.”
“And? What’re your ‘vampires’ like?” Twilight felt offended on an abstract level that Bill thought the vamponies were a bunch of pussies. She didn’t know what a pussy was, but she came to the conclusion it meant something bad.
“They don’t exist where I come from. Our vampires are too cool to be real. They suck the blood out of people and gain youth from it.”
“Ew! Blood doesn’t even taste good!” Bill immediately saw this as an opportunity to royally fuck with the Princess.
“Maybe they like it? I think they do. Human blood in particular.”
“Ugh...” Twilight winced. “Fruit is much more healthy for you.”
“But vampires are murderers, you see. And cannibals, now that I think about it.”
“They sound terrible.”
“But they’re supposed to be. The idea of one scares you, doesn’t it?”
“If by scared you mean disgusted, then yes,” Twilight deadpanned at her editor. Sometimes she wondered how she could stand him, but then again, he didn’t seem to mind the position much. Unbeknownst to Bill he was also working for less money than what he actually deserved, not that he could tell the difference. He couldn’t give the difference in value between an Equestrian bit and an American dollar the time of day if it ran over his mother with an Oldsmobile.
“Someday you’ll understand the appeal,” Bill remarked with a wry grin before stretching out his legs. All four of them. He could no longer crack his knuckles, for he had none. This made him feel sad on the inside occasionally. “Anyways, I should have had dinner by now.”
“Then go. Your help has been much appreciated today. By the way... What’s cannibalism?” Twilight was scared to ask, but some mysterious force compelled her to do it anyway before Bill left for his house.
“Ohhh Christ...” In all his years, Bill had never met adults who were as painfully innocent as Equestrian ponies. And to think they were talking ponies. From space. Who used magic. Even as he rubbed his forehead with his own hoof, poor Bill couldn’t believe it.
Clearly when the Creator was picking a world for Bill’s next incarnation to live on, he felt like being a prankster on that day.
If Bill had fingers, he would probably extend his middle finger at You-Know-Who.
