June 5, 9:55 AM CST
“Today’s the day.”
The simple proclamation had come as something of a shock to the people in the small, monitor-lined room. Not because they had all been selected in preparation for a day that, in all likelihood, shouldn’t have been feasible until their grandchildren’s grandchildren had returned to the dust of the earth, but from the proclamation’s source.
Each of the black-suited humans in the room had, in turn, taken multiple glances at their, ‘til now, mute Head Administrator in hopes to hear a repeat performance between trips to the coffee machine, restroom, or during a simple stretch from their seated positions.
The waist-high mare ignored her agents pointed gazes, staring with large, unblinking violet eyes upon the central monitor hanging from the middle of the ceiling. Horizontally bifurcated, the pixelating march of Doppler Radar swept over the Earth upon the screen’s upper half while satellite photos followed behind on the lower half.
Even under the unnaturally sterile light of the fluorescents, the head administrator’s pale, magenta coat and curling, dark violet mane, wisping white at the ends, shone dimly along her anthropomorphic, equine face. Pretty, but disquieting to the trained observers.
Designed though it was for her quadrupedal skeletal-structure, the head administrator’s tense posture more closely mirrored her bipedal associates, one back-leg crossed over the other, her spine parallel to the straight-back of the chair, and forehooves pressed together over the distinct curve of her feminine nose. Moving a forehoof, she tapped out a quick set of dots and dashes upon the hardened hoofrest of the wide armchair.
A quiet, “Yes ma’am,” was given by a blond-headed suit, who quickly increased the magnification on the central monitor’s portioned screens upon the islands of Japan.
Just two more minutes until the start of zero hour.
Today was the day.
***
June 6, CST
White-knuckling the sink’s edge, Richard Dent concentrated on taking in a slow, unflinching breath despite the protesting twinges of his hunched back. He simply couldn’t risk that last clinging glob of snot falling back down his throat, not after all the time he’d just spent coughing up half a lung to do it. Then, with one last hacking effort, he was rewarded with the sight of a sickly golden-brown globule swirling down the drain.
Turning off the sink, he watched as a pair of blue, sleep-crusted eyes looked up at him. “Hey there good buddy,” he croaked glancing briefly down his reflection’s pale frame, flexing his right arm and swatting his small gut. He half-fancied it something akin to the kind of guys who did the caber toss, but it really was more fat than well rounded muscle down there.
Shaking his head, trying to rid himself the lasts bits of sleep still clinging to him, he sent a silent prayer for the allergy season to finally end. True, the snot running down his throat lowered his voice down an octave. But after a week of coughing, even he was willing to admit the pain simply wasn’t worth it, even if it meant being stuck with an unassuming tenor.
Picking up the simple five-dollar watch from the counter, pressing for the orange glow on reflex, it read 8:45 AM.
‘You really let yourself sleep in today city slicker,’ he thought, ‘but it’s Saturday, so no harm no fowl.’
Chuckling at what he could only describe as a masterly crafted joke, he lurched on his right heel, swinging his free foot towards the shower as the rest of him followed. Eyes falling closed – not that it mattered, he knew where he was going – his left leg easily cleared the lip of the tub. Pinching the green, moose-speckled drapes closed behind him with his toes, he made sure to aim the shower head away as he twisted the knobs.
Once the steam began to rise, he aimed the head back and immediately jumped from the perfectly calibrated water onto the cold rubber of the bathroom mat. ‘IDIOT,’ the thought blazed, as he began peeling off his white undershirt and green-checkered pajama pants, the sodden materials sticking uncomfortably to his puckering skin in the relative cold outside the shower.
Slipping back into the steaming stream of water, now nude, he turned from the nozzle and stood, waiting for the warmth to increase his circulation enough to begin loosening the unending knots in his back. Stretching down to his toes, he began counting to sixty, the minimum required to keep the knots from screaming at him for the day. Rising slowly up, an enterprising trail of water took advantage of the changing waterways to worm up his nose. Spluttering, he snorted, turning to face the shower head and, rubbing his nose violently, began filling his mouth with the nearly scorching water to swish out the filmy residue of morning breath stuck between his teeth.
***
Clean and shaven, he dressed in a pair of tan cargo pants, plenty of pockets, and slipped on an ancient steel-grey hoodie, whose thinness could attest to having been worn since high school. With today’s business now officially completed, it was time to get serious. An entire day of movie watching and unhealthy eating stood before him. It would be quite the challenge, but he was sure he had the discipline to tough it out thanks to the Skittles and milk he’d scored from yesterday’s store run. The phrase ‘enough to choke a horse’ came to mind, but he shook it off. That would just be a perfectly good waste of milk. Shrugging off the odd thought, he turned on the television, plugged in a blu ray, and plopped down into overstuffed central cushion of his faded-beige sofa for some well deserved rest.
***
“So where is it,” Richard mimed around a mouth full of candy and drool, “where’s my FOOD?!”
Ah, the perfect villain introduction. Hopper’s very presence brought a mob of trampling, fear-ridden ants to a sudden halt at his very presence, towering over the cowering bugs in a dark room lit only by the sunbeams streaming down from the holes the grasshoppers made in the ground to reach the underground chamber.
‘If only he was one of the good guys,’ Richard smirked, admiring the cartoon’s, now, decades old design while reaching for another bag of Skittles, a batch of sours this time. Taking care not to rattle the crinkling bag, he tore a hole across the long side of the package, the lip-puckering scent doing its best to waft over his sugar-ridden exhale as he placed it gently upon the rainbowing nest of empty wrappers piled up around his waist like a patchwork quilt.
Never breaking eye contact with the screen, he poured out a fistful of the orbs, doing his best to ignore the way the sour coating rubbed off, reminding him of chalk dust, and in turn making him think of nails on a chalkboard, the way the screech makes your- He stuffed them into mouth, ending the thought before it spiraled any further. Squirming under the burst of acidic sweetness, empty packets crinkling like dry leaves, the phone rang.
Eyebrows crashing down, nearly eclipsing his eyes, he thrust his hand into the cushion for the remote and paused the movie. Drinking down what was left of the gallon jug of milk, wincing as it brought down the sticking lump of candy, he reached into his pocket, ready to curse whatever telemarketer had decided to darken his day off with their parasitically dull spiels, only to see ‘Daddy’ glowing in blue across the small screen.
Flicking open the ancient flip-phone he answered with a sodden, “schh-Hello?”
“Hey there good buddy,” came the deep, cheery voice, “happy birthday. Though it sounds like you might be having a happy time with some lucky girl already. AHAHAHAHAA!”
“Ewww, come on Dad, doh’n be gross,” he tried to admonish, wiping away the clinging bits of candy from his smile.
“Heh, just wanted to wish you a happy birthday. What are you nine, ten?”
“Uhh,” he paused, never really keeping track of the arbitrary number himself, ‘Ok, so I was born in,’ he silently counted, counting up until I finally said, “Thirty?”
“Well you certainly don’t sound too sure about that,” he joked. “Anyway, what’chu up to? Got the day off?”
“Sure did, and right now I’m vegging out on the sofa, enjoyin’ God-awful amounts of candy, and am currently going through an animated movie marathon.”
Whistling he said, “Well it sounds like you got your whole day planned.”
“Yup,” Richard grinned.
“Well have fun,” he said, pausing briefly before adding, “and make sure to say hi to your mother, you know how she gets. Oh, and did you get those gift cards?”
“Sure did, two $100 visa gift cards. Thanks Dad.”
“Well, I leave you to it. I’ll still see you on that fishing trip in August right?”
“Sure will Dad. Love you.”
“Love you too son, and keep an eye out on your sweet tooth.”
“Hmph, very well,” Richard huffed. It was all in good fun, though he sometimes wished he could be this indulgent more often.
“Alright then,” he chuckled, “I love you. Bye.”
“I love you too," he smiled, "bye.”
Flipping the phone closed, Richard chewed at his bottom lip.
‘It’s not that I don’t love Mom, I do, but,’ he sighed, already flipping the worn black casing open, ‘she’s just gotten so ... ‘out there’ since she moved out there with all those ‘artists’. Eh, family, whatuhyahgunnado?’ and scrolled down the call list to ‘Mommy’.
Reaching to press ‘Play’, he lowered the volume as the call connected.
***
Lightning struck, strafing lines of black and white over the low, scratched block of wood Richard liked to call his coffee table. Turning a bleary eye to the orange glow of his wristwatch, it read 5:30 PM. Looking out through the blinds, the sound of thunder shook the apartment slightly. Must have been close. All the same, he’d been sitting down all day, and storm or no, he needed to go for a walk.
Sliding off the lip of the couch and up to his feet, sending a plastic flurry of color briefly into the air, he made for his flip-flops at the door, pausing as the splatter of rain began to hush through the open apartment corridor.
Crossing the mottled white carpeting to his room and opening the bottom most drawer, he shifted through the poorly folded pants until, stuck in the leftmost corner, he pulled out a pair of steel-grey swim shorts with a pullable drawstring, something that had taken months of store hopping to find.
Slipping into his trunks, having long since come to the understanding he needn’t bother having his arm cramp up from fighting the elements as they attempted to blow his umbrella inside out and then having to shell out another fifty bucks for one that was worth a damn. Instead, he could do the more practical thing: treat it like going for a stroll in a river and enjoy the water.
From there, it was a quick trip to the door to slide on his flip-flops, grab the keys, lock the door, and head out through the gusting corridor. Climbing down the metal staircase, the rain was already chilling. This was the hardest part of walking in the rain, you couldn’t simply jump in and get used to the cold all at once. Grunting, he looked at his watch, marking ten minutes to acclimation, and paced through the complex’s parking lot and out to the city sidewalk.
***
Closing the door and removing his squeaking flip-flops, Richard pushed his shaggy, waterlogged hair back and basked in the relative warmth of his apartment. He’d couldn’t have picked a more perfect time to go for a walk if he’d tried.
They were always such fun to be around, The Roamers. Their optimism and good cheer was so infectious. And today, a troop of fully grown adults had gone splashing through rain puddles, himself included, but only after them of course, in their search for the other side of the looking glass, as well as a few other sundry locations he hadn’t bothered to even listen to the first time around. It was hard to believe it had only been five years.
The Incident, as the less than imaginative people in the media were apt to call the first big non-political issue in recent memory, where technicolor, waist-high equine-esque creatures called ponies had twisted out of their human forms and back into what they once were. A great and mystically powerful chimera, Discord, had, by all accounts, managed to bend their very souls across dimensions and into new bodies born of humans, as well as a few other handfuls of sapient creatures of myth from their world. And to say both “earthly” parties had been more than a little disturbed by this was still in the running for understatement of the decade.
But then, just as soon as the whole lot of them reverted back to their old forms, in just a few short weeks, they were gone. Back to their home world. True, some of them chose to stay in the new world they had grown up in since their second childhood, but there were only handfuls of the guys, and they were mums as to say where the rest had gone too. Though general consensus was the Great Lakes area in the United States.
Considering how much trouble their magic, genuine magic, could do, many, Richard included, were glad they kept to themselves. Just the pegasi alone could sit on clouds, wisps of suspended frozen water, flap their stubby little wings with enough power to breach the sound barrier with no detriment to their bodies outside of getting a little winded, and then there was just how much kinetic output their freakishly lightweight frames were capable of.
But some people were all too ready to search them out. From evil to benign intent they began to come, and in such numbers the US government had to call a moratorium on travel to the United States during those first couple of months, and it didn’t help how much the American government had further restricted movement across the northern states either, keeping a tight lip as to why when the general public began to inquire. But then, just seven months after the exodus, on an intellectual vacuum of a television show called “The View”, it was offhandedly suggested that, “If something like the show My Little Pony's world is real, I can’t help but wonder what other television or even books might be real too.” From there it went to snide jokes about rednecks in Kansas moving to Oz during tornados that might have been funny if the host weren’t such witches, or if Roamer bodies hadn’t been found stretched out across its cities afterwards. But none of that stopped them from trying to go out and find Narnia, Oz, that one hotel from Spirited Away, anything, even as the body counts continued to rise. Though, there was that growing number of missing persons that kept things... interesting.
And in all of it, the trail mix, dried food, and shoe industries couldn’t have been any happier.
After that, things began to settle down, and even interest in the few pony communities, largely in the United States, began to wane. All the better in Richard’s opinion. He’d managed to get his hands on one of the box sets, the five seasons of MLPFIM. Not bad, though he would have liked it a touch more if the surprise twist of Discord betraying the trust of his "friends" at the end hadn’t been based on real world events. Checking his watch, it read 8:45 PM, pretty early, but, stifling a yawn, Richard made for the bathroom anyway. He could stay up late any night, but it had been ages since he’d gone to bed early, so why not?
***
“Alright, she’s hitched up paw, let’s get this field plowed before the rain hits.”
“That’s my boy.”
Hungry. Why food late?
“Schnell! Schnell! Du dummer lasttier!”
Herdmate weak. Dominate!
“Calvary for-WERD!”
Rain cold. Want dry place.
“All-roight, just once more around the track, ‘kay Tulip?”
***
“AAAAAAAHHH,” Richard howled, clutching at his right arm only to jerk it back the instant skin met skin with a new, higher pitched scream. Tossing aside his sheets, the chill of the freezing air biting into him, he grit his teeth, almost wondering why he couldn't see his breath as he stretched out flat, trying to keep as much weight off his arm as possible as his legs twisted around to pull the rest of his body around off his bedside.
Had he pinched a vein he wondered, was it some weird thing where his back and posture had pinched nerve just right, or what? Stepping onto the carpeted floor, he was reminded, again, of the chill. The air conditioner must have be on the fritz, never lowering it himself past a cool seventy-seven degrees.
Shuffling his feet, careful to move his upper body as little as possible, he passed the thermostat, reading a flat eighty degrees. Definitely on the fritz, which meant it was now a confirmed bother he’d have to deal with once he’d figured out what was wrong with his arm. Sliding into the bathroom, the closest place to a bottle of ibuprofen, he flicked open the sink drawer with his left hand, popping the lid, the bottles arrows thankfully pre-aligned, scattering the pills messily upon the countertop.
Clenching his eyes, and jaw, shut, he reached for the light.
Opening them, his eyes trained blearily down, only get caught at the sunburn pink arm sticking out of the right sleeve of his white undershirt. Worse, it looked like the sleeve was filled out a little more than usual.
Leaving the mess, though not without a small pang of grief, he left the bathroom. There was no telling what was going on, and he wasn’t going to take even the smallest chance of making things worse with what was essentially a blood thinner.
Grunting his way back to the cell phone he’d left lying on the coffee table, he flipped it open, the small clock at the top of the screen read 2:02 AM, and dialed.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“Hello, my name is Richard Dent, and my right arm has begun to swell. In fact, the pain of it woke me up. Could you please send an ambulance?”
“Yes-sir, where do you live?”
“I’m in the Elderwood Apartment complex, room 211.”
“Alright,” she said, as her keyboard kept clicking away in the background, “we’ll have someone out to you in just a few minutes.”
“Thank you,” he said, flipping the phone shut, mentally cringing as he moved back to his room to get ready.
The white undershirt would have to do, and, luckily, the pair of jogging shorts he’d gotten for college and never used were nestled back in the bottom of his pants drawer. Stretchy, easy to put on, and with the much needed pockets. Packing in his wallet and keys, and then stretching around to put his phone in the other, it was only when the flash of red and blue shone in through his kitchen window that he realized how long he was taking. Sliding into the slate grey flip-flops still by the front door, he stepped through the portal, locking the door behind him, and, jaw clenched, hissed out a breath through his nostrils as his arm gave another twinge as he shuffled towards the stairs.
He didn’t even make it halfway when the two paramedics crested the stairwell, and then immediately passed by him, staring intently at the brass-colored numbers drilled under the yellow lights by the doors.
Turning on his heel, Richard called out, “Excuse me, but I believe you’re here for me.”
“No sir, we’re here to pick up-”
“Richard Dent in room 211? That’s me gentlemen. My arm hurts. My legs are just fine.”
With a combined shrug the two guys escorted him quickly to the parked ambulance and helped him onto the stretcher, carefully strapping him in. The ambulance rolled smoothly forward once an orderly knocked on a side wall, and they began to see to their duties.
***
“Hohhhhhhh-Kay,” the Asian, and very tan doctor breathed to himself. This wasn’t physically possible.
Checking the medical chart, again, Dr. Tran reread the check marks for 'no' on the poor sleeping shlub’s medical history. No allergies, no surgeries, no nothing except for some orthodontic work back when he must have been in grade school. Nothing to explain why a perfectly healthy adult male had what looked like a sudden acute case of elephantitis ... well, except for the uniformity of the swelling in the patient's right arm, the dark, inflamed red coloration, that his skin was uniformly smooth, that he hadn’t so much as ever traveled out of country, let alone out of state, and, most disturbingly of all, his fingernails were growing proportionally in size with his flesh, and, thanks to the x-ray, Dr. Tran knew the bones in his arm were thickening in kind as well.
In fact, what it really looked like was that the arm of some professional weightlifter had been grafted onto him, with a few busted blood vessels near the top dermal layer from its time in cold storage.
Dropping the offending clipboard to the ground, Dr. Tran began scratching at the back of his head with both hands lest he break something and stormed out of the room.
It wasn’t fair.
Years of training. Months worth of constantly going to boring seminars on what medical procedures had been updated because the chief of medicine was too busy meeting with the hospital lawyer to figure out just how much the new batch of red-tape from Washington was going to further impede them from practicing some actual medicine. And now? Now he got to deal with the utter helplessness of being able to do absolutely nothing for his patient. Not because he was too unskilled, no, and not because science hadn’t come far enough, nooooooo, but because fucking alchemy and all its magical sparkles hadn’t come fucking far enough.
Dr. Tran carefully picked up the plastic guest chairs that paired next to one of the vending machines he was passing, glad that, at very least the sedatives and muscle relaxants were working on Mr. Dent, for now, and noticed a small cut some kid must have scrawled under the seat some time ago. Then, with a heaving growl, he lifted the 'ruined' chair above his head, thoughts of all the patients who now believed they might be reincarnating into their next form while still in this life stampeding through his head, all of those idiots who thought they were turning into a pony years after The Incident because they got stung by a bee, and especially that one time-wasting hypochondriac who thought he was turning into whatever species he came across in the latest video-game. Enough was enough.
“Fucking ponies!” He yelled, throwing the chair, its metal legs bending pleasantly out of their plastic struts, leaving them to ping noisily down the hall, sending a few of the nurses to jump into the air. But his pleasure was cut short, the echoes of his tantrum paling at the rumbling beginning to shake the floor.
“Get under a doorway!” Dr. Tran commanded, the nurses leaping to obey as he rushed back around the corner, he had to be sure his patient was okay and was just a single step from reaching the edge of the doorway when he was thrown off his feet as a wave of red gas flooded out of the room and into the hallway. Coughing, his last fluttering moments of consciousness slipping away, the sound of thunder echoed from Mr. Dent’s room, and somewhere, deep in the back of his mind, it clicked. Cherries. The red mist smelled like cherries.
Author's Note
Remember, bring your adulations to my pre- and proof- readers for what you like, and bring whatever scorn you hold unto me for the problems you do find.
