Eeyup.
You’d call me a liar, but I was a runt when I was born. My parents, Green Apple and Strudel, had mixed feelings ‘bout my birth. I was smaller than most colts, small enough to fit inside my father’s hoof. My mother thought I was beautiful even though I was smaller ‘n a brick. I’d gotten her eyes and my father’s hide, and I guess something went wrong because my mane didn’t look anything like theirs. They told me I neighed and whinnied every night, but the sound was so babyish that it didn’t even wake up the other ponies.
I’m a-sure they would of left me to the orphanage or something. My father was a hardened pony. I’d end up calling him Brutal Strudel when I grew up, and every time he heard that name he’d be sure to kick ‘n whack me ‘til my blood ran 'cross my hide. They’d both come from hard backgrounds, my parents. The great drought of Apploosa had driven them to Ponyville, and despite their affinity for apples, to this day I can’t think of no other couple less-suited to be with each other. They fought every night about the crop, about the ranch, about money. Mostly it was money. This was before the invention of cider, and Ponyville had only been ten years old at the time. Granny Smith, then known simply as Smithy, was the one who took care of me.
She may be a few apples short of a bushel nowadays, but back then she was to me what Princess Cadence is to that unicorn Twilight Sparkle. She was my foalsitter, my watcher and my guardian when Brutal Strudel was out in the fields and Green Apple was inside dreamin’ about the bits we didn’t have.
Granny Smith was the only pony to celebrate my first birthday. Even I didn’t want to celebrate it, because the day before, Green Apple had passed. She’d been a-workin’ too long and too hard out in the sun, what with Strudel having a bad flank injury, and he sent me to check on her. I had barely grown and the heat was still like a monster. I guess you could say it was like being in a dragon’s throat, though I got no experience in that.
But I found her. She’d fallen in the fields, sweatin’ like a pig, eyes rolling in their sockets. The sun had gotten to her, and by the time we got a doctor out to the fields it was too late. She’d passed. No funeral. We didn’t have the money to pay for a funeral. Instead Strudel forced me to dig for hours under the blazing sun right outside the orchard.
Those hours were like hours spent cooking in an oven. I was more sweat than stallion, and I wasn’t even a stallion. Just when I thought that I was gonna suffer the same fate as my ma, Strudel took the shovel from me and finished the job, burying her a few feet from the orchard fence. That night I wanted to cry, to drown myself in tears and smother my undergrown body with my blankets. I couldn’t cry. The heat had sapped every last bit of moisture from me. My breath was dry, my sweat was gone, and when I tried to relieve myself I almost expected dust to come out.
That night was the longest of my life, and the only night where no sleep ever took my body.
Was only after Green Apple passed away that my pa really earned his nickname of Brutal Strudel. The Apple family was a like an orchard, spread out over Equestria and far beyond, but I knew he thought I was the worst. He looked at me as though I shouldn’t ever have been born, like I shoulda just stayed in Green Apple’s womb and passed like a bad kidney stone. He hated me, my pa did.
At least he didn’t want me dead, not like ma. I wasn’t just weak; I was pathetic. My hide was growing faster than my muscles, and I remember lookin’ in the mirror and seeing how pinched I looked, how very little I was, more like a tiny dog and less like a colt.
But Strudel would find ways to work me. He didn’t want me t’to anything else. When Granny Smith brought up the possibility of me goin’ to pony school, he told her to shut up and make him his supper. It was around that time when Strudel he gave me for my second birthday the only present I ever got from him. A work collar.
Back then, we didn’t have fancy machines and such to help us with the plowing and sowing. We still don’t, though some ponies in Equestria do. Back then, a stallion and his son worked side-by-side with work collars around their necks, pulling and pushing t’get the crop going and the food on the table.
If ever in my life I could say was a hell period, it was that. The sun was brutal as Strudel, but even more so ‘cause it wouldn’t yell at you or criticize you. It’d just stare and judge you, and you couldn’t look it in the eye ‘cause you’d go blind. Strudel made me work even when the sun weren’t shining, when the pegasi decided it was time for a storm and rain and lightning were dropping down all across the fields. Strudel, the hypocrite he was, watched from the porch as I struggled to plow the fields in a work collar that was three sizes too big for me, cutting into the folds of my scrawny neck and hanging down everywhere else.
I welcomed the rain during my foalhood. I cried for Green Apple. I cried from the pain. Sometimes I cried without really knowing why. But I never cried unless it was raining. ‘Cause nopony can see your tears in the rain.
Lookin’ back, I’m actually glad for all that hard work. It certainly kept me from being known as Runt all my life. In the three years that I worked under Strudel and his buddies, all who I thought were rustlers and saltlickers and such, I became a different kind of colt. The sun baked my hide and made me nearly impervious to the flying dust and hard light that I faced every day in the fields. Strudel was getting older and older, and Granny Smith was gettin’ along as well. But I just kept getting better. My mane grew longer, my hooves toughened, and muscles slowly began to bulge up under my hide. Eventually I needed a new collar, as my old one wouldn’t fit, and you would not believe how angry Strudel was when he had to blow his gambling bits on a new collar. Leaving the store, he made a snide comment, something about me and a cow’s rump, and can’t quite remember.
I do remember that that was the first time I ever called him Brutal Strudel to his face, and that was also the first time I actually appreciated my limited town visits into Ponyville.
Strudel beat me so hard that night I felt like I was gonna die. Granny’s screams only encouraged him, and he looked as though he’d have a heart attack from the excitement that my pain was causin’ him. When he was done with me I was bleeding like a stuck pig and couldn’t move any o’ my parts.
But he wasn’t done. Maybe with me, but sure as heck not with Granny.
I don’t wanna say what he did to her that night. I have a quite few ideas, but none of ‘em I want to write down. I didn’t see anything. Heck, my eyes were so swollen that I couldn’t see if I wanted to.
But I heard them. I heard Strudel’s grunts of pleasure and Granny’s high-pitched squeals. I was only five at the time. You can’t imagine a worse kind of torment, to hear your only friend being…being…
I can’t say it. It’d haunt me too much. It still haunts me. I look at it every day, embrace it, tell it I love it…
Because I do love it.
And she don’t know where she came from.
When it was over Strudel came out with a crazed look in his eyes. I thought he’d killed Granny and wanted so badly to beat him to a pulp, but I still couldn’t move. He looked at me with the evilest of eyes and the sneeriest of sneers, and he spoke.
“You was a mistake, Little Mac. You was a blight. It’ll be a blight, too. You see.”
That was the last I ever saw of Brutal Strudel, when he kicked down the house door and vanished into the night.
Granny lay in bed for weeks after that, and I had to get that odd-eyed pegasus to send a letter to Braeburn in Apploosa. Sure enough he came in a jiffy and promised he’d help us, and you’d better believe in all my coltish dumbness I believed him. Braeburn didn’t do nothing, not that he didn’t try. His heart wasn’t in it, not like mine. But my heart was in it for all the wrong reasons.
The months went by and Granny stayed in bed so much that we missed the Zap Apple season, not to mention fell behind on two applebuck seasons (one of which I had to do myself). The town went nuts. Some ponies packed and left. Some, with everything lost, just walked off and did nothing ever again.
Braeburn did his best, but his best weren’t good enough. Sweet Apple Acres fell into disrepair, and while Braeburn did what he could, I went off in search of ways to bring a few bits to the farm. Those jobs were the worst, everythin’ from mucking out the stables of the Pie family farm to all-nighters to protect the countryside farmyards from the timber wolves.
The only things good comin’ out of this were the money that I was channeling back to the farm and the effect this work was havin’ on my body. I was seven and now I was about the average size of a colt my age, so maybe, if I ever did go to school , the other colts and fillies wouldn’t make fun of me. I hadn’t yet filled out.
Then a telegraph from Braeburn changed my life forever.
I remember racing home at full speed, my work collar only slowing me down slightly. By the time I had reached the farm the whole Apple family was there. News spread fast, I suppose.
Granny had given birth to a filly.
I didn’t realize the implications then. I didn’t put two-and-two together, linking the events of Strudel’s last night at Sweet Apple Acres to my newborn sister. Emotions were tumbling through my head like apples in a windstorm.
Bursting through the door and running over at least seven Apple family members, none who I knew, I saw Granny and the little filly.
Oh, that smile they both had. It was the same smile, and you couldn’t say which was wider or more heartwrenchin’. Braeburn was at her side, but when he saw me he respectfully tipped his hat and showed himself out the door, leaving me and Granny to ourselves.
“She’s a beaut, Mac,” she whispered, holding the little foal in her arms. “She’s…”
“Granny,” I said, going to her side. “’Fore you say anythin’, I…I think I know what Strudel did toya that night.”
She looked at me and her eyes were a cross of sorrow and joy. “Don’t worry ‘bout ‘nything that, now, dearie. You gotta new sister. I gotta daughter. What should we call her?”
I thought. Names weren’t good with me. I hardly remembered the names of ponies in my family, let alone anypony else. But Granny’s eyes widened.
“I gottit! How ‘bout…Applejack?”
I looked down and got a closer look at the filly. Her mane was lighter than mine, and her skin was a soft orange. She had green eyes and the most innocent face I’d ever seen before. She looked into my eyes, and she knew from then on that no matter her beginning I was important to her, I was to care for her, to love her ‘cause she was my sister. I looked up at Granny and smiled.
“Eeeyup.”
Later we learned that two other fillies had been born that day in Ponyville, and a couple days later a pegasus named Star Shine came down from Cloudsdale with her brand-new winged filly.
The years went by, and I gotta say things changed. We had our ups and downs. Applejack grew up to be as stubborn as Strudel but as kind as Granny. When cider started t’hit the towns hard, we tried our hoof at it and no sooner did we get the first barrel out than did Sweet Apple Acres become a household name. We never had money problems after that.
I had changed, too. No longer was I the little runt that could hardly push an apple across the floor. I was stronger, stronger ‘n anypony in Ponyville. And I’d gotten my cutie mark not three weeks after AJ was born. I was just buckin’ the apples in the orchard when the green apple appeared on my flank, and I thought to myself better late than never.
There were setbacks, but there’re always setbacks. When AJ left for Manehattan, that was a setback. I cried when she left and I cried when she came back. I cried when she got her cutie mark. And I cried with joy when I found out Granny was pregnant again. She’d gotten fancy with a pony who’d stopped by for the night, and as much as I thought that was downright nasty, I also thought it didn’t hurt to have a brand new sister.
Changes, so many of ‘em. Apple Bloom came into our family and I hafta say you couldn’t tell who was more overjoyed, me, AJ, or Granny. I never did find out Apple Bloom’s father’s name.
Things have settled, for the moment at least. I’m a-sure things’ll get crazy again. They always do around here. But it don’t matter. I’ve got my family, my farm, and my friends to help me. That’s all I really need.
But I will say this one thing. If I ever see Brutal Strudel again, I’m gonna pound him ‘til he’s a-part of the ground.
You can be sure of that.
