A Nightmare On Canterlot High.

The skies opened up as the yellow buses chartered to drive the school staff and students home, didn't exactly have the smoothest drive back. The weather hadn't exactly been on the up and up since the previous night, and the fact that it took them three hours to get back into town due to a rash number of road closings; mudslides. and heavy rain fall, was a testament to that. In Canterlot City itself, the bay the city had been constructed on began to rise and flood the lower portion of Downtown. most of the major banks and business, from law offices, to bail bonds, had to shut down for the whole day. Crews drove their heavy machinery into the flood zone in the hopes of containing it and keeping the power on.

Not every place had it as bad as the living disaster movie of Downtown though. As we shift our focus from men at work with trucks and emergency service units, to simple folks in the residential outskirts as the coped with the flood in their own way. On Nancy Street, several saw horses and sandbags where being laid out by a few good men, dads, brothers and older sons. As the worked a little boy sat on the piano bench of his living room and watched them at work. He adjusted the beanie on his head and took another sip of apple juice and sighed.

"Did they say if their gonna cancel school ma?" He shouted into the kitchen as a light creamy woman with light brown hair walked the doorway, a pressed white blouse with a pinafore of denim covering it with tan pantyhose on her legs complimented by the comfortable loafers on her feet.

"No Button, you still have school to get to too, so enough with the cartoons, your lunch is packed and your brother is going to walk with you." Milano Joy said as she went back into the kitchen and hummed to herself as she put the finishing touches on her young son's lunch. On the kitchen counter was a tin lunch box, Spongebob Squarepants leaped in the air a jellyfish net in his hand as he tried to catch one. Spongebob guarded a PP&J sandwich, a packet of Ritz crackers with spreadable cheese, another box of pure, non-concentrated, apple juice, and as a special first day of school surprise, a freshly baked M&M cookie, baked last night for dessert and wrapped up for the following day.

"I'm ready mom!" Button shouted as he entered the kitchen in his new orange and red racing polo shirt, and Levis. His beanie perched on his crop of orange brown hair. Joy laughed a bit seeing her son wear his beanie. The boy would be joining his older brother at Canterlot High soon, yet he still wore it.

"Button, don't you think you're too old to still wear a propeller beanie to school?" She asked clasping the lip on his lunchbox and handing it too him. He took it with a chuckle and shook his head.

"Aww mom, my friends still think it's cool, they complimented me on it all summer. He said as he took his lunch and made his way to the door.

"Well...okay but just for today Button, I don't think the school allows you to wear hats, hey WAIT! Hold it just a minute there Mr." She said as he opened the door. She adjusted his clothes one last time and licked her thumb before wiping a few blotches of left over milk from his breakfast of Cap'n Crunch from his face and smiled.

"Aww Mom! Do You always have to do something like this to me?" Button asked as she wiped his cheek clean. Button sighed hard as his mother finally let him out the door and returned to her stacks of Avon order sheets, an archaic practice that hankered back to the days of John Hughes movies, setting the VCR to record the soaps on daytime TV, before they where taken over by talk shows where men learned their
"girlfriends," where really men who knew really good surgeons, but couldn't get approval from the psychiatric board for male to female surgery. Joy shuffled the papers and made sure all the orders where packed up and ready.

The next time she saw her son, she'd be hysterically holding him in her arms as an ER surgeon warned her about popping stitches open.

Button Mash pulled a quarter from his pocket and contemplated picking up a bag of Doritos to go with his lunch. The Uncle Dollar variety store was just a hop, skip and a jump from The courtyard of Canterlot middle school. and it was currently 7:45, less than an hour to when he needed to be in homeroom class. Button planned to cross the street to the Uncle Dollar and be back with a bag of cool ranch and in class in five minutes. This is how it went:

Button crossed the street and started walking toward the store, when he noticed steam and wispy mist rising from the storm drains and man hole covers, and seemingly out of no where, someone called out in voice that at first sounded raspy and harsh before clearing to be softer and smoother.

"Hey kid...you wanna buy something to munch on?" Button looked up to she a metal cart, like the kinds you saw on the fair grounds or downtown that sold coffee from a machine that mounted on it. While there was a steaming coffee machine on the cart, there was also a hodgepodge of prick a prack and odds and ends on the cart itself, and on hooks clipped to the posts holding up the cart's blood red with lime green striped canopy. There where plastic bags of cotton candy, and freshly popped kettle corn, various cheap knock off toys with names like Universal Hero, Super Robots, and for some reason James Bond Jr toys of the cartoon's version of Odd-job and the titular JBJ. Their were balloons with various superheros like Batman, Superman, Wolverine, Spider-man, Captain America, and Thor for the boys. Barbie, The Monster High girls, and some colorful ponies for the girls. The pony ones where strangely the ugliest of the lot, all with their small eyes and oddly portioned bodies, sitting around a table with tea cups or frolicking in fields of flowers, Button gagged at the very sight of it.

"What's wrong kid? Don't see anything you like?" The man running the cart said again as button could only see parts of him. He wore a long black coat hanging down to the floor and a bright red and green sweater under it but he could only see it for a moment before he closed the coat up, Why did that shirt look so familiar? And that hat? This was all drawing a vague memory from him. The man chuckled softly before taking a balloon with a pink pony on it from the cart and holding it out too button. "How bout one of these? You know that cost five bucks at the party store? It's because they are jumbo aluminum balloons that could carry you right to the moon..." He paused as if mentioning the moon was making him want to cough up bile and stomach acid.

"Uhhh I don't want those stupid ponies!" He said trying to swat it away as he also tried to back away, sure the man was on the surface a legit salesman, but there was just something pin pricking the boy in the back of her head. Like an old warning from his mother, 'Button never get in a car with a stranger, Button never accept anything from a stranger, Button can you run to the store and get me some tamp...' Okay that's enough remembering mom's advice.' He then reached out to hand him a quarter for the bag of chips on the rack something seemed to come over him, like he did want to buy something, these toys...these snacks they seemed...so cool.

"That's a good kid, buy something...tell your friends about me Button." He said as he held the Cool Ranch chips to him. Button stopped, shook his head, and retracted his arm again. "Something wrong kid?" He asked as Button began to notice something off about the balloons, they began to have horrible images on them, skulls screaming as snakes crawled out of their eye holes, bugs crawling aver gas bloated dead bodies, all green, rotted and slimy. He saw it for only a second, but that was enough time.

"How do you know my name?" Button asked the man as the coat opened and he saw that red and green sweater that matched the canopy of the merchandise cart. Only now that canopy looked old, worn and ripped. Full of moth eaten holes and slashes as if made by some vicious set of claws.

"I guessed." Was the man's only reply, his voice now sounding as if his throat was full if gravel and rock salt. Button looked around, Desperate for an adult that he could trust, A cop, A crossing gaurd, anyone. The streets was empty, where was the morning rush to work? He was going to be late for school, but the bigger concern was this man standing a few feet from the school with this scary cart and where was someone telling him to stay far away from here? Any other man looking the way he did seen around school children would be run out by every adult within a hundred feet, yet here he was, getting closer and closer to little Button Mash. "Come on Button, don'y you want something nice from the knick nack man?" He said again as a hand reach out to him, Button was almost too scared to do much beyond slowly back away, too afraid to turn and make a break for the school. The school, where'd he safe in his Math class doing the morning's multiplication tables, and then reading Wimpy Kid books for an hour, not fearing for his life in the streets as a crazed drifter grew closer and closer to him.

"I..I gotta go Mr...here just take my quarter for okay." Button threw the quarter like a weapon at the man, which seemed to hit his berserk button. It was then that Button got a good look at his face. His skin was blood red and chunks of skin where missing on the cheeks, chin and near those glowing yellow pale eyes. His nose was hooked and crooked as if broken too many times in his life, and that mouth. The lips parted in a snarl as Button saw this man, if you could call something so horrible a man, had teeth like a set of fangs cutting into the lips and making more thick red blood ooze and splatter on the sidewalk as he held his arm out again.

The hand bones all the way to the wrist were sticking up exposed against red sinewy muscles of the arm, bits of what could be wires, but looked like blood vessels or sinews of muscle seemed to be the only thing holding the bones on the arm. The bones made horrible creaking and crunching sounds as they clicked with the moment of the fingers, at the ends of which where these long, curved and shiny steel looking blades. Claws, claws that could rip Button to shreds if he didn't light a fire in his belly and run! Button turned around as his legs finally kicked into high gear. He stopped for only a moment as he felt a burning pain in his arm, It had him! He heard the sounds of cloth ripping and took off like a bullet, loud, otherworldly laughter echoing in his ears as he did. It was then he realized that he was back in reality. People gasped then screamed as he ran all the way to school, he didn't stop to ask them why, all he cared about was getting to the one place he knew he'd be safe.

Sweetie Belle and her friends stood by the flag pole laughing as school started. "So Silver and Diamond go to the magnet program at the High School?" Sweetie said as the much larger and vaster Canterlot High stood across the street from them.

"Yeah, s'why you see them there sometimes" Scootoloo replied."Makes sense given how we're only..." She stopped in sentence.

"We're only what Scoots?" Applebloom asked but Scootoloo never finished. She only opened her mouth to scream in shock and horror as Button Mash finally got to school.

"Hey girls, What are you screaming about scooto...loo?" Button looked down at his arm for the first time since he escaped that,,,whatever it had been, and saw just what he did to him. Button's had four long gashes dripping blood on the sidewalk and his whole right arm was streaked red with blood. When button realized just what was wrong with him, he lost his balance and fell over into Sweetie's arms, much gentler arms to catch him.

Milano Joy dried her eyes for what must have been the millionth time, she got the call less than an hour ago and left the TV on, the lights on, and she was sure the garage was still wide open at that very moment. She was at the Emergency Room in a matter of minutes, and thankful that it could have been worse. She stood outside the glass window of her son's room door, nose pressed against the glass as more hot tears streaked down her face. She was thanking every deity she had ever heard of, that she wasn't in the morgue being asked to identify someone in a freezer as her son. "Button...my little precious button." She said softly as she looked into the glass window at the stitches she'd been warned twenty minutes ago about popping open because she was frantically hugging him and crying hysterically that he was alive, horribly cut from shoulder to wrist, but alive. "I promise button...I'll be a better mother to you," she said though by all accounts she was an ideal one to him as it was. She packed his lunch, praised him when he listened and spared the rod when he misbehaved. She didn't spoil Button but did ensure he had as happy a childhood as any boy could have and was on the cusp of worrying since he would be starting 8th grade soon. She didn't do his laundry for him anymore, but always helped him and taught him how to do it and they often did it together, they cleaned the house together, cooked dinner together, and even occasionally though...IT was strictly on a platonic family way...they still took baths sometimes together, Soley to bond and nothing else.

Joy got the idea when Button's brother Dual Shock was only three. His father was asking when it would be time for their son to bathe himself when Milano brought up an article in National Geographic she'd been reading. The article was about life in Japan, and like many Asian cultures, family mattered more than anything there. One thing Joy found interesting was how families had no such taboos against doing things like sleeping in the same bedrolls or if they could afford them (It was a somewhat old article) beds, and took baths together regardless of age, as there was nothing sexual among family about it, no shame, only bonding and keeping the values in family strong. Her husband was initially against the idea, but relented when he was reminded that they'd sugar coat nothing when it came to their children, no stories about storks or cabbage patches when he/she/they asked where they came from, if they had a daughter Joy would bluntly tell her everything she'd need to know about being a woman when the time came, no sidestepping, no sugar coating, no nothing. The Mash family was all the more happier and stronger for adopting such polices.

Now her son was crying softly trying to get over the pain of having his arm stitched up in the hospital room, an IV providing him with fluids to replace the lost water, blood, and other such necessities to live. He had come around and according to the doctors he'd recover well enough with plenty of rest and going easy on the arm, 'but what about the scars my boy would have on the inside? Can a doctorate tell you how long it will take for those to heal?' she thought as she sat down in the plastic chairs outside the room door.

She buried her hands in her face and cried again as a sad truth hit her like punch in the face. You can try your damnedest to be the best parent in the world, but you can't protect your children from the horrors of the real world forever. She only wished this revelation didn't have to come to her at such a horrific price, wishes...what a laugh that she desperately need that was.