Another taxi buzzed past them in the street, eating up part of the climax of Babs' story.
"--And so I told him, you best step off, we out!"
Apple Bloom could stand it no longer.
"So Babs," she asked over the traffic, "what's being a stylist like?"
Babs hadn't said one word about her new cutie mark, a shiny pair of fancy sparkly scissors. It was like she didn't even know she had it.
Maybe she didn't, with the look she was giving Apple Bloom.
"Huh? A stylist?"
"Y'know? That cuts manes?" She mimed taking scissors to her hair with her hoof.
Babs glanced around at her flank. "Oh yeah. Yeah, I could see how you mighta thought that from the letter I sent," she said, her Manehattan accent turning her words almost into da letta. "Nah, those scissors are for cuttin somethin else." Dose scissas.
"Like what?" Apple Bloom asked. They looked like they wouldn't be good for cutting much else. They were kinda weird, but maybe you had kinda weird tools to work with if you were into fashion and style and stuff. Rarity certainly did.
"Lemme show ya." Babs paused to open up her saddlebag, where she retrieved a pair of scissors that looks similar (but not quite identical) to the ones on her cutie mark, and a knotted tangle of what looked like shimmering yarn. It came in all colors, everything you could find in a rainbow and then some, and trailed back into her bag. It seemed like it might go on in there forever.
"What is that?"
"The Weave of Life," she said, like that explained everything. "Well, a part of it." Paaht.
"What's--"
But Apple Bloom was cut off by some passing pony bumping into her from behind. If that had happened in Ponyville -- which was rare, but sometimes the marketplace got crowded -- she would have received an apology even before her breath was knocked out of here. Instead, the pony that knocked into her -- an unshaven stallion wearing a knit cap -- barely broke stride and barked at her: "Outta mah way, kid!"
"Watch where ya walkin, ya bum!" Babs yelled after him, but he was already halfway down the block. He probably didn't even hear over the traffic. "You aight?" she asked Apple Bloom.
"I'm fine." She adjusted the bow in her mane. "But what's that thing you've got? And what does it have to do with your cutie mark?"
"I'll show ya." A grin spread across Babs' face that Apple Bloom wasn't entirely comfortable with. "Lemme just... there."
She had fished a reddish-brown thread out of the pile, one that appeared to be connected to the mass of the tangle in only a few places. Babs made a couple of quick motions with her gleaming scissors, snip snip snip, and the thread fluttered to the pavement, freed. Its color faded, and it blended almost seamlessly with the sidewalk.
"And, just watch." She indicated to the rude pony halfway up the street.
Apple Bloom watched.
And the rude pony was crushed by a falling sofa.
It had fallen out of one of the high-rise apartment windows with a spray of glass. A young earth pony with a backwards cap on poked his head out of the broken window and said, "Oh man, oh dude, are you okay there dude?" but it was plain to Apple Bloom, even from this distance, that the dude was not okay. Two other walk-bys stopped and rushed to lift the sofa off him, one of them asking the other, "Is he...?"
"Uh-huh," Babs answered as she packed away the thread and scissors, although only Apple Bloom heard her. "He's dead."
"Dead?" she gasped, watching the flow of hoof traffic divert around the sofa, the two helpers, the colt and his friend who had bolted down the stairs and off the stoop, and the body. "But... but..."
"Like I said," Babs said, sounding as unconcerned as the rest of the travelers looked, "it's the Weave of Life. Everypony has a thread in it, and they're all wrapped up together. And when you cut one out, bzzt, that's it, yer outta the game."
Apple Bloom stared at Babs. A cold feeling was spreading from the pit of her stomach. Another pony nudged their way past her. She barely noticed. "You did that?"
"Well, me an the scissors, yeah."
"Just because he bumped into me?" She couldn't believe what she was saying. She couldn't believe what was happening. It was like another bad dream.
Babs shrugged. "Well, no. Not just that. He was probably a putz anyway, his thread was only tied in a couple-a places. He was probably on his was to jump off the Hooflyn Bridge or somethin."
"You can't know that... he might've had a family, or, or..."
She shrugged again. "Not much of one. Come on, fuggetaboutit, there's this calzone place a few blocks from here I gotta show ya."
And then she started walking, like it was normal to just kill ponies by cutting a magic thread.
Apple Bloom followed Babs in silence past a few buildings, past the sofa and the commotion and the corpse. An ambulance had arrived at the scene. Babs muttered, "Shoulda called the coroner instead." Da corahna.
When they were at least a block away from the accident (was it really an accident, though?), Apple Bloom felt brave enough to speak again.
"So... how do you decide who... um, how do you pick?" she asked tentatively.
"It's easy enough. You just gotta pick away where the Weave gets messy. Keep it clean. Ain't nothin to it."
"But, who put you in charge of it?"
"I dunno. Who put Princess Celestia in charge of the sun?"
Apple Bloom paused in her step a moment, then had to trot to catch up to Babs. "That's not the same thing."
"Yeah it is. The sun's gotta come up. Ponies gotta die. Somepony's gotta be in charge-a all that."
"But, why? Why can't it be, y'know, natural?"
Babs stopped and looked at her. "This is natural. Nature don't give a rat's if ya young or old or if ya lived a good life or a bad one. Nature don't care. You don't matter to nature. None-a us do."
"What happens if you just stop? What happens if you throw the scissors away?"
Babs shook her head. "Can't do that. In the end, every thread's gotta be cut to make room for somethin. Yours. Mine. This guy," she said, indicating a passing pony with a tie, who swiveled his head around to glare at her.
Apple Bloom looked at the scissors of Babs' flank, remembering the hungry way the real item had cut surgically into the thread, and how it had drained of its color once unconnected to the other living threads. "What do you think comes after?" she asked, and swallowed. "After you cut a thread away?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe a new thread starts in the Weave. Maybe whoever died goes to a higher plane of existence that we can't comprehend with our limited brains, and they understand why they did the things they did in life and they're free to explore wonders of the universe that we'll never see even in our most deepest dreams.
"Or maybe they just become worm food. Who knows. Come on, the calzone place is right up here!"
-/-
Apple Bloom was in a fog all the way back to the Crusader's clubhouse.
"How was Manehattan?" squeaked Sweetie Belle.
"And what about Babs?" asked Scootaloo. "Does she like being a mane stylist?"
"It was great," Apple Bloom lied, "and she likes it fine."
Author's Note
"Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus, a rather eerie and existential song, is better known as "that song from The Silence of the Lambs that Buffalo Bill dances to".
