The Jar

by Knackerman

Rating: teen
Tags: Braeburn, Caramel, Big Macintosh, Dark, Granny Smith, Sad, Applejack, Drama, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 4861

When the Carnival rolls into Ponyville Big Mac comes across a sideshow that may change his life

This story is an adaptation of a story by, and dedication to, the late Ray Bradbury. May he live forever in our hearts.
(NOTE: I take no credit for this story nor the bulk of the writing of it. It is an adaptation, not an original story)

When the Carnival rolls into Ponyville Big Mac sets out to sell the family wares. While he's there, he comes across a sideshow that may just change his life forever. And the lives of everypony in Ponyville.

Published 2012-06-07 13:54:02 UTC
Last updated 2012-06-07 13:54:02 UTC

Carnival

It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled, dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you. It went with the noiselessness of late night, and only the crickets chirping, the frogs sobbing off in the twilight. One of those thing in a big jar that makes your stomach jump as it does when you see a preserved brain in a laboratory vat.

Big Macintosh stared back at it for a long time.

A long, long time, his big cracked hooves draped over the rope that kept back curious ponies. He had paid his bits and now he stared. It’d been a long day at the carnival, selling what treats he could to hungry passers by. It was rare that such traveling sideshows would stop anywhere near a small town like Ponyville. When they did, the farmers would come from miles around to try and sell their wares. The carnies welcomed them. It made the whole affair a lot more neighborly. Besides, if folks ate at the carnival, they’d stay longer and spend more bits riding rides and seeing shows.

It was getting late now. The carousel drowsed down to a lazy mechanical tinkle. Tent-peggers back of a canvas smoked and cursed over a poker game. Lights switched out, putting a summer gloom over the carnival. People streamed homeward in cliques and queues. Somewhere, a calliope blared a few final notes, then cut, leaving the Equestrian sky wide and silent with stars.
There was nothing in the world for Big Mac but that pale thing sealed in its universe of serum. Big Mac’s loose mouth hung open in a pink weal, teeth showing; his eyes were puzzled, admiring, wondering.

Somepony walked in the shadows behind him, small beside Big Macintosh’s tallness. “Oh,” said the silhouette, coming into the light bulb glare. “You still here big fella?”

“Yup,” said Big Mac, like a stallion half asleep.

The carny-boss appreciated Macintosh’s curiosity. He nodded at his old acquaintance in the jar. “Everypony likes it; in a peculiar kinda way, I mean.”

Big Mac rubbed his long jaw bone. “Ya-uh-ever consider sellin’ it?”

The carny-boss’s eyes dilated, then closed. He snorted. “Naw. It brings customers. They like seeing stuff like that, sure.”

Big Macintosh made a disappointed, “oh.”

“Well” considered the carny-boss, “if a fella had money, maybe-”

“How much money?”

“If a guy had-” the carny-boss estimated, counting with his hooves, watching Big Mac as he tapped it out. “If a fella had three, four, say, maybe seven, or eight-” Big Mac nodded with each motion, expectantly. Seeing this, the carny-boss raised his total, “-maybe ten bits, or maybe fifteen.” Macintosh scowled, worried. The carny-boss retreated. “ Say a fella had twelve bits-” Big Mac grinned. “Why he could buy that thing in that jar,” he concluded.

“Funny thing,” said Big Mac, “Ah got just twelve bits in my saddle bag. And Ah been reckoning how looked-up-to Ah’d be back down in Ponyville if Ah brung home something like this to set on my shelf over tha table. The folks would sure look up to me then, Ah bet.!”

“Well, now, listen here-” said the carny-boss.
The sale was completed with the jar put in Big Macintosh’s wagon. The carny-boss glanced up with an expression of, almost, relief. “I was tired of seeing that darn thing around, anyway. Don’t thank me. Lately I been thinkin’ things about it, funny things---but, heck, I’m a big-mouthed so and so! S’long, farmer!”
Big Mac trotted off. The naked multi-colored light bulbs withdrew like dying stars, the open, dark country night of Equestria swept in around wagon and pony. There was just Big Mac, the steady measure of his hooves, and the crickets.
And the jar in the wagon behind him.
It sloshed back and forth, back and forth. Sloshed wet. And the cold gray thing drowsily slumped against the glass, looking out, looking out, but seeing nothing, nothing. Big Mac paused and leaned back to touch the lid. Smelling of strange liquor his hoof returned, changed and cold and trembling, excited. Yup! he thought to himself, Yup!

Slosh, slosh,slosh...

In Ponyville, numerous grass-green and blood-red lanterns tossed dusty light over ponies huddled, murmuring, spitting, sitting on the General Store property. They knew the creak-bumble of Big Mac’s wagon and did not shift their raw, drab-maned skulls as it rocked to a halt. Their voices were frog mutterings on summer nights

Big Macintosh called out eagerly, “ Hi, Caramel! Hi Hayseed!”

“Lo, Mac. Lo, Mac,” they murmured. The political conflict continued. Big Mac cut in.

“Ah got somethin’ here. Ah got somethin’ you might wanna see!”

Braeburn’s eyes glinted, green in the lamplight, from the General Store porch. Big Mac’s cousin, he was visiting from over in Appleloosa. It seemed to Big Mac that Braeburn was forever installed under porches in shadow, or under the trees in shade, or if in a room, then in the farthest niche shining his eyes out at you from the dark. You never knew what his face was doing under that hat of his, and his eyes were always funning you. And every time they looked at you they laughed a different way.

“You ain’t got nothin’ we want to see, cousin of mine.”

Big Macintosh held up one hoof, “Somethin’ in a jar,” he went on. “Looks kine a like a brain, kine a like a pickled jellyfish, kine a like--well,come see yerselves!” Somepony ambled over to look. Big Mac grandly elevated the jar lid, and in the uncertain lantern light the pony’s face changed.

“Hey, now, what the heck is that...?” It was the first thaw of the evening. Others shifted lazily upright, leaned forward; gravity pulled them into walking. They made no effort, except to put one hoof before the other to keep from collapsing upon their faces. They circled the jar and its contents. And Big Mac, for the first time in his life, seized on some hidden strategy and crashed the glass lid shut.

“Ya’ll want to see more, drop around Sweet Apple Acres! It’ll be there,” he declared, generously.

Braeburn spat from out his porch eyrie, “Ha!”

“Lemme see that again!” cried Mr. Greenhooves. “Is it a octopus?”

Macintosh began to amble away. “Come on aroun’! You’re welcome!”

“What’ll your sister say?”

“She’ll kick the tar off’n our hooves!”

But Big Mac and his wagon were gone over the hill. The pony folk stood, all of them, chewing their tongues, squinting up the road in the dark. Braeburn swore softly from the porch...

Big Macintosh climbed the steps of the farm house and carried the jar to its throne in the living room, thinking that from now on this old wooden home would be a palace, with an “emperor”-that was the word! “Emperor”- all cold and white and quiet drifting in his private pool, raised, elevated upon a shelf over a ramshackle table. The jar, as he watched, burned off the cold mist that hung over the place on the edge of town.

“What ya got there?” Applejack’s soprano turned him from his awe. She stood in the door to the kitchen, glaring out, her thin body clothed in her green nightgown, her hair drawn back in a ponytail. Her eyes were the same shade as her nightgown. “Well,” she repeated. “What is it?”

“What’s it look like Applejack?”

She took a thin step forward, making a slow, indolent pendulum of her hips, her eyes intent upon the jar, her lips drawn back showing her teeth.

“It...it looks...looks just like you, Big Mac!” she cried. She laughed, reared up, and galloped away up the stairs to her room. The door slammed.

The reverberation did not disturb the jar’s contents. But Big Mac stood there, heart pounding frantically. Much later, when his heart slowed, he talked to the thing in the jar. “Ah work the land to the butt-bone every year and she grabs the bits and runs off with her friends for nine weeks at a stretch. I can’t keep hold of her. Her and the folk from the store, they make fun of me. Ah can’t help it if Ah don’t know a way to hold onto her! Dang, but Ah try!”

Philosophically, the contents of the jar gave no advice.

“Big Mac?”
Somepony stood in the front yard door. Big Mac turned, startled, then broke out a grin. It was some of the fellas from the General Store.

“Uh, Mac, we...we thought, well, we came up to have a look at that...stuff...ya got in that there jar.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~

July passed warm and it was August. For the first time in years Big Macintosh was happy as apple trees growing after a drought. It was gratifying of an evening to hear hooves shuffling through the tall grass, the sound of heavy bodies creaking the boards on the porch, and the groan of the house as yet another shoulder leaned against its door frame and another voice said, as a hairy wrist wiped a mouth clean, “Kin I come in?”

With elaborate casualness, Big Mac’d invite the arrivals in. There’d be chairs, soapboxes for all, or at least carpets to squat on. And by the time crickets were itching their legs into a summertime humming and frogs were throat-swollen like ladies with goiters shouting in the great night, the room would be full to bursting with ponies from all the country around. At first nopony would say anything. It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon the shelf. They wouldn’t stare sudden like. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room - letting their eyes fumble over just any old object that happened into their consciousness.

And, just by accident of course, the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pincushion. The only sound would be someone sucking a corncob. Or the filly’s scurrying on the porch planks outside. Maybe some mare’s voice would come, “You girls git away, now! Git!” And with a giggle like soft, quick water, they would rush off to scare the bullfrogs.

Big Macintosh would be up front, naturally, enjoying the fame and looked-up-to-ness that came with keeping the jar. Applejack looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched strangers tromp into their living room and sit at the feet of her big brother, staring at this here Holy Grail-like thing, and her lips were set cold and hard and she spoke not a civil word to anypony.

After a period of proper silence, somepony, maybe old Mr. Greenhooves from down Fluttershy’s way, would clear the phlegm from a deep cave somewhere inside himself, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips maybe, and there’d be a curious tremble in his hooves. This would cue everypony to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. Ponies settled like little sows in the warm mud after a rain. Mr. Greenhooves looked a long while, measured his lips with a lizard tongue, then settled back and said, like always, in a high, thin old mans tenor: “Wonder what it is? Wonder if it’s a he or a she or just a plain old it? Sometimes I wake up nights, twist on my corn-matting, think about that jar settin’ here in the long dark. Think about it hangin’ in liquid, peaceful and pale like an animal oyster. Sometimes I wake Maw and we both think on it...” While talking, Greenhooves moved his hooves in a quavering pantomime. Everypony watched his brittle limbs weave and undulate. “...we both lay there, thinkin’. And we shivers. Maybe a hot night, trees sweatin’, mosquitoes too hot to fly, but we shivers jest the same, and turn over, tryin’ to sleep...” Mr. Greenhooves lapsed back into silence, as if his speech was enough from him, let some other voice talk the wonder, awe, and strangeness.

Caramel, from down near Rarity’s neck of the woods, rubbed his hooves into the floor and softly said: “I remember when I was a runnel-nosed colt. We had a cat who was all the time makin’ kittens. Mercy, she’d a litter any time she jumped around and skipped a fence...” Caramel spoke in a kind of holy softness, benevolent. “Well, we give the kittens away, but when this one particular litter busted out, everypony within walkin’ distance had one or two of our cats by gift already. So Ma busied on the back porch with a big two gallon glass jar, fillin’ it to the top with water. Ma said, ‘Caramel, you drown them kittens!’ I member I stood there; the kittens mewed, runnin’ ‘round, blind, small, helpless, and funny. They was just beginnin’ to get their eyes open. I looked at Ma, I said, ‘Not me, Ma! You do it!’ But Ma turned pale and said it had to be done and I was the only one handy. And she went off to see to the chickens. I...I picked up one...kitten. I held it. It was warm. It made a mewin’ sound, I felt like runnin’ away, not ever comin’ back.”

He nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past, making it new, shaping it with words, smoothing it with his tongue. “I dropped the kitten in the water. The kitten closed his eyes, opened his mouth, tryin’ for air. I ‘member how the little white fangs showed, the pink tongue came out, and bubbles with it, in a line to the top of the water! I know to this day the way that kitten floated after it was all over, driftin’ aroun’, slow and not worryin’, lookin’ out at me, not condemin’ me for what I done. But not likin’ me, neither. Ahh...” Hearts jumped quick. Eyes swiveled from Caramel to the shelved jar, back, down, up again apprehensively.

A pause.

Zecora, the zebra from the Everfree Forest, rolled her eyes like a dusky juggler, in her head. “You know what that is? I think you know. That is the heart of Life. Believe me, it is so!” Swaying in a tree like rhythm, Zecora seemed to be caught in a wind no one could see, hear, or feel, save herself. Her eyeballs went around again, as if cut free to wander. Her voice needled a dark thread pattern, picking up each person by the lobes of their ears and sewing them into one unbreathing design: “From that all life did crawl. From the very great to the very small. It put out a hoof, it put out a head. It climbed from amoeba, to frog, gaining strength in each life it lead.” She stomped her hooves. “It rose until it stood for all to see! Rising to its gummy joints a pony to be! It is the origin, from which all came; ten thousand years in the making, the start of the game.”
“Ten thousand years!” whispered Granny Smith.
“Indeed, it is ancient and terribly old. Look how it floats there so bold. It has one eye but it does not blink, for it knows that from it did we rise and to it, again, we will sink!“
“What color eyes it got?”

“Gray.”

“Naw, blue!”

“What color hair? Brown?”

“Black!”

“Red!”

“No, gray!”

Then, Big Mac would give his drawling opinion. Some nights he’d say the same thing, some nights not. It didn’t matter when you said the same thing night after night in the deep summer, it always sounded different. The crickets changed it. The frogs changed it. The thing in the jar changed it. Big Macintosh said: “What if an old pony went back ta Froggy Bottom Bog, or maybe a young foal, and wandered aroun’ for years an years lost in all that drippin’, on the trails and gullies, in them old wet ravines in the nights, skin a turnin’ pale, and makin’ cold and shrivelin’ up. Bein’ away from the sun he’d keep witherin’ away up and up and finally sink into a muck-hole and lay in a kind of a...scum...like the maggot ‘skeeters sleepin’ in sump water. Why, why...for all we can tell, this might be somepony we know! Somepony we passed words with once upon a time. For all we know...”

“Lots of little filly’s run around in that bog every year. They run around and never come back. I almost got lost myself. I...I lost my little filly, Pinchy, that way. You...you DON’T SUPPOSE!!!” Breath was snatched through nostrils, constricted, tightened. Mouths turned down at corners, bent by hard, clinching muscles. Heads turned on celery stalk necks, and eyes read her horror and hope. It was in Berry Punch’s body, wire-taut, holding to the wall back of her with her hooves. “My foal,” she whispered. She breathed it out. “My baby, my Pinchy. Pinchy! Pinchy, is that you!? Pinchy, tell me, baby, is that YOU!?” Everypony held their breath, turning to see the jar. The thing in the jar said nothing. It just stared, blind, out upon the multitude. And deep in rawboned bodies a secret fear juice ran like a spring thaw, and their resolute calmness and belief and easy humbleness was gnawed and eaten by that juice and melted away in a torrent! Somepony screamed.

“It moved!”

“No, no, it didn’ move. Just your eyes playin’ tricks!”

“Honest!” cried Caramel. “I saw it shift slow like a dead kitten!”

“Hush up, now. It’s been dead a long, long time. Maybe since before you was born!”

“She made a sign!” screamed Berry Punch. “That’s my Pinchy! My baby you got there! Three years old she was! My filly lost and gone in the bog!” The sobbing broke from her.

“Now, Mrs. Punch. There now. Set yerself down, stop shakin’. Ain’t no more your child’n mine. There, there.” One of the mares held her and faded out the sobbing into jerked breathing and a fluttering of her lips in butterfly quickness as the breath stroked over them, afraid. When all was quiet again, Granny Smith, with a withered pink flower in her gray mane, sucked the pipe in her mouth and talked around it, shaking her head to make her mane gleam in the light:

“All this talkin’ and shovin’ words. Like as not we’ll never find out, never know what it is. Like as not if we found out we wouldn’t want to know. It’s like magic tricks magicians do at shows. Once you find the fake, ain’t no more fun’n the innards of a jack rabbit. We come collectin’ around here in the parlor every ten nights or so, talkin’, social like, with somethin’, always somethin’ to talk about. Stands to reason if we spied out what the dern thing is there’d be nothin’ to chew about, so there!”

“Well to heck with it!” rumbled a bull voice, “Ah don’ think it’s nothin’!”

Braeburn.

Braeburn standing, as always, in shadow. Out on the porch, just his eyes staring in, his lips laughing at you dimly, mocking. His laughter got inside Big Mac like a hornet sting. Applejack had put him up to it. Applejack was trying to kill Macintosh’s new life, she was! “Nothin’,” repeated Braeburn, harshly, “in that jar but a bunch of old jellyfish from the sea, a rottin’ and stinkin’ fit to whelp!”

“Ya mightn’t be jealous, cousin Braeburn?” asked Big Mac, slow.

“Haw!” snorted Braeburn. “I just come aroun’ ta watch you dumb foals jaw about nuthin’. You notice I never set foot inside or took part. I’m leavin’ right now. Any pony wanna come along with me?” He got no offer of company. He laughed again, as if this were a bigger joke, how so many ponies could be so far gone, and Applejack was pawing the floor away back in a corner of the room. Big Mac saw her mouth twitch and was cold and could not speak. Braeburn, still laughing, rapped off the porch with his well polished hooves and the sound of crickets took him away.

Granny Smith gummed her pipe. “Like Ah was sayin’ before the storm: that thing on the shelf, why couldn’t it be sort of...all things? Lots of things. All kinds of life...death...I don’t know. Mix rain and sun and muck and jelly, all that together. Grass and snakes and foals and mist and all the nights and days in the dead canebrake. Why’s it have to be one thing? Maybe it’s lots.” And the talking ran soft for another hour, and Applejack slipped away into the night on the track of Braeburn, and Big Mac began to sweat. They were up to something, those two. They were planning something. Big Macintosh sweated warm all the rest of the evening...

The meeting broke up late, and Big Mac bedded down with mixed emotions. The meeting had gone off well, but what about Applejack and Braeburn? Very late, with certain star coveys shuttled down the sky marking the time as after midnight, Big Mac heard the shushing of the tall grass parted by her penduluming hips. Her hooves tacked soft across the porch, into the house, into Mac’s bedroom. She lay down soundlessly in bed next to him, cat eyes staring at him. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel them staring.

“Big Macintosh.”

He waited.

Then he said, “I’m awake.”

Then she waited. “Big Mac?”

“Whut?”

“Bet you don’t know where Ah been; bet you don’t know where Ah been.” It was a faint, derisive singsong in the night. He waited. She waited again. She couldn’t bear waiting long, though, and continued: “Ah been to the carnival over in Fillydelphia. Braeburn went with me. We...we talked to the carny-boss, Big Mac, we did, we did, we sure did!” And she sort of giggled to herself, secretly. Big Mac was ice cold. He stirred upright. She said, “We found out what it is in your jar, Big Mac...” insinuatingly.

Macintosh flumped over, hooves to his ears. “I don’t wanna hear!”

“Oh, but you gotta hear, Big Mac! It’s a good joke. Oh, it’s rare, Mac!” she hissed.

“Go away,” he said.

“Unh-unh! No, no sir Big Mac. Not until Ah tell!”

“Git!” he yelled.

“Let me tell! We talked to that carny-boss, and he...he liked to die laughin’. He said he sold that jar and what was in it to some, some hick for twelve bits. And it ain’t even worth more’n two bits at most!” Laughter bloomed in the dark, right out of her mouth, an awful kind of laughter. She finished it quick. “It’s just junk, Big Mac! Rubber, papier mache, silk, cotton, boric acid! That’s all! Got a metal frame inside! That’s all it is, Big Mac. That’s all!” she shrilled.

“No, no!” He sat up swiftly, ripping the sheets apart with his hooves, roaring, “Ah don’t wanna hear! Don’t wanna hear!” he bellowed over and over.

She said, “Wait’ll everypony hears how fake it is! Won’t they laugh! Won’t they flap their lungs!?”

He grabbed her. “You ain’t gonna tell them?”

“Wouldn’t wan me known as a liar, would ya, Big Mac? Element of Honesty Ah am!”

He flung her off and away, “Whyncha leave me alone? You dirty! Dirty jealous mean of everything Ah do. Ah took shine off your nose when Ah brung the jar home. You didn’ sleep right ‘til you ruined things!”

She laughed. “Then I won’t tell any pony,” she said.

He stared at her. “You spoiled my fun. That’s all that counted. It don’t matter if you tell the rest. Ah know. And Ah’ll never have no more fun! You and that Braeburn, Ah wish Ah could stop him laughin’. He’s been laughin’ for years at me! Well, you just go tell the rest, the other ponies, now...might as well have your fun...” He strode angrily down the stairs, grabbed the jar so it sloshed, and would have flung it on the floor, but he stopped, trembling, and let it down softly on the spindly table. He leaned over it, sobbing. If he lost this, the world was gone. And he was losing Applejack, too. Every month that passed she danced further away, sneering at him, funning him. For too many years her hips had been the pendulum by which he reckoned the time of his living. But other ponies, Braeburn, for one, were reckoning time from the same source.

Applejack stood waiting for him to smash the jar. Instead, he petted and stroked and gradually quieted himself over it. He thought of the long, good evenings in the past month, those rich evenings of friends and talk, moving about the room. That, at least, was good, if nothing else. He turned slowly to Applejack. She was lost forever to him.

“Applejack, you didn’t go to the carnival.”

“Yes Ah did.”

“You’re lyin’,” he said, quietly.

“No, Ah’m not!”

“This...this jar has to have somethin’ in it. Somethin’ besides the junk you say. Too many ponies believe there’s somethin’ in it. Applejack. You can’t change that. The carny-boss, if you talked with him, he lied.” Big Mac took a deep breath and then said, “Come here, Applejack.”

“What you want?” she asked, sullenly.

“Come over here.” He took a step toward her, “Come. Here.”

“Now you keep away from me, Big Mac.”

“Just want to show you something, Applejack.” His voice was soft, low, and insistent. “Here, kittie. Here, kittie, kittie, kittie...HERE KITTIE!”

It was another night, about a week later. Mr. Greenhooves came, followed by Caramel and Berry Punch and Zecora, the zebra. Followed by all the others, young and old, sweet and sour, creaking into chairs, each with his or her thought, hope, fear, and wonder in mind. Each not looking at the shrine, but saying hello softly to Big Mac. They waited for the others to gather. From the shine of their eyes one could see that each saw something different in the jar, something of the life and the pale life after life, and the life in death and the death in life, each with his story, his cue, his lines, familiar, old but new.

Big Macintosh sat alone.

“Hello Big Mac.” Somepony peered around the room. “Yer sister gone off with her friends again?”

“Yeah, she run for Canterlot. Be back in a couple of weeks. She’s the darndest one for runnin’. You know Applejack.”

“Great one for jumpin around, that filly.”

Soft voices talking, getting settled, and then, quite suddenly, walking on the dark porch and shining his eyes in at the ponies, Braeburn.

Braeburn standing outside the door, knees sagging and trembling, staring into the room. Braeburn not daring to enter. Braeburn with his mouth open, but not smiling. His lips wet and slack, not smiling. His face pale as chalk, as if it had been sick for a long time.

Mr. Greenhooves looked up at the jar, cleared his throat and said, “Why, I never noticed so definite before. It’s got green eyes.”

“It always had green eyes,” said Granny Smith.

“No,” whined Greenhooves. “No, it didn’t. They was brown the last time we was here.” He blinked upward. “And another thing, it’s got blonde hair. Didn’t have blonde hair before!”

“Yes, yes, it did,” sighed Berry Punch.

“No, it didn’t!”

“Yes it did!”

Braeburn, shivering in the summer night, staring in at the jar. Big Mac, glancing up at it, rolling his eyes casually, all peace and calm, very certain of his life and thoughts. Braeburn, alone, seeing things about the jar he never saw before. Everypony seeing what they wanted to see; all thoughts running like a fall of quick rain:

“My filly. My little foal.” thought Berry Punch.

“A brain!” thought Mr. Greenhooves.

The zebra stomped her hooves, “The source of all life!”

A fisherman pursed his lips. “Jellyfish!”

“Kitten! Here kittie, kittie, kittie!” the thoughts drowned clawing in Caramel’s eyes. “Kitten!”

“Everythin’ and anythin’!” shrilled Granny Smith’s weazened thoughts. “The night, death, the pale things, the wet things from the sea!”

Silence. And then Mr. Greenhooves whispered, “I wonder. Wonder if its a he...or a she...or just a plain old it?”

Big Mac glanced up, satisfied. Then he looked at Braeburn, who would never smile again, in the door. “I reckon we’ll never know. Yeah, I reckon we won’t.” Big Macintosh shook his head slowly and settled down with his guests, looking, looking.

It was just one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you...