The Meaning of Friendship
Prologue: The New Arrivale
Edward glared at his computer monitor in a mixture of horror and disdain, its eerie blue light giving his features a pallid glow. He had been working on and off for days, his own self-imposed deadline looming, when Windows suddenly decided to give out a nice thick “Fuck You.” Hours of work, lost. He took a deep, steadying breath and powered down his system.
So it seemed to go in Edward's life. The more he accomplished, the more he gained, the more the world took away from him. It was beginning to drive him mad.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed. Nothing for it now; it was already into the wee morning hours and he had the lunch shift tomorrow. Just one more scrapped project. He climbed to his feet with a groan, knees popping after so many hours sitting down, and trudged into the bathroom. There, he contemplated his life as the taste of baking soda and peroxide made his scowl deeper.
Edward worked at Burger Bob's, a small local fast food joint in his home town. To be honest they were a Burger King rip-off, and a pretty blatant one at that; from their menu, advertising flame-broiled Boppers, down to their logo, the word Burger Bob's between two stylized buns, a crimson semi-circle on the left side. The main difference (and the way they avoided a lawsuit, he surmised) was that a stylized representation of molten cheese oozed over the top part of the O in Bob's. Just enough of a detail to avoid copyright issues.
It was not a job he enjoyed, though it did put food on the table. The work was demeaning, his supervisors and manager even more so. Numerous occasions had seen his bike tires slashed, or the chain cut; now he hid it behind the dumpsters where it was too unpleasant to go without a very good reason. Customers seemed to have an instinctive, ingrained belief that they were better than he. They ALL seemed to have this opinion; from the borderline schizophrenic living month to month on welfare checks, to the slightly lost tourists who stumble in for a cheap ball of grease to clog their arteries. Today had been especially heinous...
He had clocked in precisely one minute and seventeen seconds late, which today’s manager, Juan, found particularly offensive. In a drunken rant that was, honestly, quite typical, the ratty little man had warned him that if it should happen again it would be his job. Not that Edward was particularly concerned; the same man had given the same warning nearly a dozen times now. Ed had come to the conclusion that he just liked to make his life even more difficult.
Later, after cleaning Juan's reeking vomit off a dining table, he was accosted by a particularly angry woman who claimed to be a mother of five. She had ordered five kids' meals, it seemed, and had instead gotten six. She, of course, wanted a refund. After checking and double checking her receipt Ed DID find an errant sixth kids' meal, but it had been rang up as a customer service discount; it had been free. After laboriously trying to explain that he couldn't refund something that had not been paid for, he received a slap for his efforts, along with a vivid description of what the tiny woman would do to his mother, sister, cousin and dog.
At this point, Juan, now sober, sauntered out of his office. After finding out what the problem was, Juan demanded that Edward give the woman a refund. The problem was that the system would not allow a refund for an un-paid-for item. Juan responded by opening the cash drawer, taking out the money and handing it to the woman with a wink. Then informing Ed that, since his cash drawer was short, he would be receiving a cut to his paycheck. Again. Such were his days.
During his off hours Edward split his time between drinking, Minecraft, whatever creative project he would inevitably abandon that week, and more drinking. He had no friends, save for the sparce few acquaintances on the internet; after spending eight hours a day, five days a week dealing with rude, loud, obnoxious, self-important, often violent customers, human company only served to irritate him. So he wiled away his time alone. As he had today, as he would tomorrow evening. He was a shut-in, and happy that way. More or less.
He brushed his short, brown hair out of his face, hazel eyes staring back at him over the rim of his glasses. He patted the light paunch of his gut and sighed. He needed to lose weight. Maybe start jogging again. He scoffed at the thought. Maybe start drinking wine instead of beer.
He climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling for a moment before rolling over and staring at the empty pillow next to him. His girlfriend had left him just a couple of weeks ago, and part of him still ached from the loss. Lethargically he dragged it over his own face and took a deep breath. No matter how many times he washed it, it still smelled like her lilac shampoo. Getting into bed with wet hair had probably soak some of it into the batting of the pillow. He reminisced for a moment, taking comfort in the familiar smell. Then he remembered the day she had left him, when she had gotten into another man's car and told him she was worth more than a burger flipping loser. He bolted upright in bed and hurled the offending pillow across the room, swearing after it. He fell backwards and covered his face with his arm.
“I fucking hate my life. If there’s a god out there, or a goddess, or a magical horse, or whoever the fuck is listening...”
Somewhere, a strange horse with a cherry red mane smiled softly...
“Take me away from all this. I dont care what happens any more. Kill me, send me to another world, turn me into a cartoon, I don't care! Just...dont make me keep living this excuse for a life.”
He rolled onto his side and fell asleep, a single tear sliding down his cheek.
A soft glow shone forth from a dark corner of the room. A four-legged goddess stepped soundlessly towards the bed. She stared down at him with a matronly expression, her eyes softening further when he began to mutter and writhe in the grip of some unpleasant dream. Dreams and nightmares were not within her sphere of influence, but she remembered when her own children had nightmares. She craned her head down so her mouth was by his ear. The tip of her horn began to blaze with divine radiance as the air grew thick and heavy with power. As the wind began to swirl around them, she began to sing...
Morning came too quickly, the harsh squawk of Ed's alarm waking him from a restless sleep, plagued with strange dreams. Groaning in discomfort and pain, he swatted the alarm to silence it and sat up stiffly. He sighed and made ready to begin his day.
It happened on his way to work. Edward didn't have a car; it was far too expensive. He had a bike he usually used but he had blown a tire. So, he was hoofing it today. He was crossing the street when it happened.
He wasn't sure at first WHAT had happened. Had he crossed at the wrong time? Had the driver not stopped? He didn't know. All he knew was explosive pain, then flying through the air. Impacting the pavement, hard. His side began to go numb even as he was consumed with the worst pain he had ever experienced. As he began to feel cold, and his vision began fading, a song came to him, as if from a memory...
Hush little children,
I'll take thee away,
Into a land of enchantment...
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you're falling, but you aren't afraid? Edward was having a dream where he was falling. And he was terrified.
He was surrounded by the brightest and most intense colors he had ever seen. The entire color spectrum swirled and pulsated around him. Lightning crackled amongst the colors, and the roaring wind was enough to steal his breath away. Images blazed intensely from the shimmering display; fantastical creatures he had never seen before. A bat-winged lion with a scorpion's tail swiped its terrible claw at him, but it dissolved into mist an instant before tearing through his flesh. A spectral, icy blue horse charged at him, only to burst into a cloud of snowflakes. He tried to close his eyes but couldnt; he could only stare in bewilderment as pegasi and unicorns danced across his vision. An orange pony walked up to him as he fell, wearing a...cowboy hat? It looked at him with a serious expression, cocking its head side to side as if studying him. Then it turned right around, raised its back hoofs into the air, and kicked him in the face.
Edward woke coughing, feeling as if he really had been kicked by a tiny horse. He brought a hand to his face and groaned as he sat up, eyes clenched against the inevitable mind-splitting headache.
“Fffuck,” he moaned as he back and shoulders popped loudly, “I need to stop drinking so damn much...”
He opened his eyes slowly and looked around in bewilderment. He was surrounded by small-ish horses in a variety of pastel colors. Some had horns or wings, many wore clothes or...armor? All of them stared at him with expressions ranging from curious, to stunned, to terrified. Two, in particular, caught his eye, mostly because they were twice as large as the rest, but also because they had the strangest manes: the white one had a mane in all the colors of the sky; the black one's looked like the stars on a clear night, complete with constellations, nebulae and galaxies. Both of them had both horns and wings.
He stared at them for a moment, eyes going in and out of focus, then took in his surroundings more fully: as near as he could tell, he was in some sort of throne room. The big horses had crowns so he guessed they were...queens? Something like that. He thought about the absurdity of that idea. Then he thought the black one had very pretty blue eyes, for a horse. Then he tried to remember what the hell he had drunk. He couldn't.
“Well, I'm never drinking it again,” he declared, before falling backwards, his head striking the polished marble floors with a resounding thud and a very unpleasant crack.