out of pepsi

There's a place out in the backyard I like to go and jut sit some days with a glass of Pepsi.

It's at the corner of the fence, where there's a short, squat tree with thin branches and tickley leaves hanging over a folding lawn chair. On a day when the sun shines I get the feeling sometimes and I have to go sit there. I watch the sunlight shine through the spaces between the leaves, and I watch the tiny leaves cast their individual shadows in a pattern that reminds me of a fractal like the Mandelbrot set, or maybe a granny quilt.

When the wind blows, the leaves coo, and the shadows and light sway in irregular ellipses, and I feel the hair on my skin move in rhythm with them. And the arrow of beauty flies in from beyond the horizon and slices my ribs open and I bleed out onto the red clay ground and feed the beetles and the patchy weeds with my blood and insides.

So I was sitting there again today but I finished the Pepsi and I got the thirst. So I went back inside.

My computer was still on so I went on Facehoof and looked at some pictures of my schoolmate Pinkie Pie. I don't have any classes with her but she rides my bus. I can't believe how nice she is. She sits next to me on the bus sometimes when I am all alone, and rubs my hair and compliments it. I didn't know it was possible for someone to be this nice. She is so pretty.

I had already looked at her pictures for twenty-five minutes so I only needed to look for fourteen more minutes before she would appear physically like always. I usually look at Pinkie's pictures when the blue feeling of suffocating makes my ribs squeeze my heart and I turn off the lights and I try to cry but I can't cry. When Pinkie appears she gives me the kisses and my ribs expand and I feel like I have a mommy who loves me.

I got a glass and got ready for some Pepsi and Pinkie but when I looked there was only something like two gulps of Pepsi left in the bottom of the bottle.

So I drank those then closed the Facehoof window because I still had the thirst. I had to go to the store to get some more Pepsi. I grabbed a backpack and my wallet and started toward the store a block away.

I know that Pepsi is bad from a nutritional standpoint.

I walked into the store and went to the soft drinks aisle. I thought about other things I could get while I was at the store but I remembered I'm supposed to save my money for a car. I want a pickup truck because I think the girls would like me more if I had a pickup truck.

I had to look for the Pepsi in the aisle. They change where it is every so often to keep things interesting. While I looked I must not have seen where I was walking because I walked right into a girl.

I was really startled. I fell backwards onto my butt, because I didn't know what else to do.

"Hey! Watch where you're walking, doofus!" She took an aggressive posture, looming over me, fists clenched. She was skinny and blue and very cute. I fell in love immediately.

Staring at her with my mouth open, I struggled out an apology. "I-I'm... Wow, heh, sorry. I don't know how I managed that. I completely did not see you standing there."

"Oh yeah?! Well..." The girl looked like she was getting madder, which scared me, but then she did a double take. "Wait, I know you."

I stood up slowly. "You do?" I looked her over again but nothing seemed familiar.

"Yeah. You're that smart kid, aren't you?" She was still glaring at me but it was subsiding. "Pinkie Pie told me about you, after we had those regional math tests a couple weeks ago.  You got a ridiculous high score, right?"

I hadn't realized that anyone knew of me, so I was startled again. The thought flashed into my mind: since this girl knows who I am, and since I have already fallen in love with her, I wonder if I can somehow leverage this high score into getting her to give me the kisses and let me feel her boobies.

"Y-yeah..." I stammered. I scratched the back of my head with one hand because that is what the guys do in anime and I didn't know what else to do. "I'm sorry. I just came here for some Pepsi, and I got distracted looking for it, and then..."

The girl cut me off. "Yeah, yeah. It's all right." She looked me up and down, and she looked into my eyes and I looked back at hers, and I thought I saw that she was thinking something complicated, but I don't know what it was. "Listen, I'm glad I met you. This might work out after all... Hey, do you want to make this up to me?" She was giving me a weird sort of grin.

I saw the opportunity and the gears in my mind started turning furiously. I stood up straight. I felt like a ninja. "Yes, of course, miss. Whatsoever you ask for, within reason and God's law, I will do my utmost to oblige."

The girl gave a slight snort of a laugh, and that made me feel encouraged. She continued. "Well, look. I'm on the soccer team, and we have to practice this evening. I'm, uh... I'm just here to pick up some Gatorade."

I leaped at the suggestion, still feeling like a ninja. I thought I could impress her with my foresight, which would reinforce the impression that I am very intelligent. "So you want me to buy you some Gatorade?"

The girl looked confused briefly but quickly recovered her composure. "No, no. Thank you, no. That's not it." I was discouraged but I did not run away.

She continued. "What it is, is, uh, I've got this practice tonight, but I also have a lot of homework due tomorrow morning in class. Soooo, if you could just," she unzipped her own backpack and removed an Algebra II book, a more modern one than the one I had learned from three or four years before, "if you could just help me out and do this assignment for me so I can go all out during practice?" She gave a big forced grin, and changed her tone of voice. "What do you say?" She looked into my eyes meaningfully, and rubbed my hair. I felt my ribs expand, and I felt like I was floating a little bit.

I didn't feel like a ninja any more.

"Um, yeah, sure," I said. "I can do that... pretty easily..." It was true. I unzipped my backpack and put her book and assignment papers inside.

"Awesome!" said the girl who started really smiling and doing victory dances. "Anyway, I've really got to go now. Practice is starting soon." She grabbed the Gatorade and started running off.

"Do a good job!" she shouted back as she kept running. "Remember, you owe me!"

As she left, I felt a feeling of relief but also disappointment. Then I realized that I didn't even know her name. But then I remembered the Algebra book. I checked the inside cover of the book for the latest name, and I learned that her name was Rainbow Dash. Then I got the Pepsi and went back home.

But now I had a dilemma. I had fallen in love with Rainbow Dash, and I nurtured a hope of winning her heart by helping her by unselfishly doing her math homework for her so that she could play her best for the school's soccer team. It was a plan that seemed to work out all around, and benefit everyone involved without hurting anyone.

But I was already in love with Pinkie Pie.

Can I have two girlfriends? I asked myself. I asked myself this question many times.

But no matter how I looked at it, I couldn't justify it. So I concluded: either I would have to abandon the hope of winning Rainbow Dash's heart, or I would have to break Pinkie's.

It was a hard decision.

I poured myself a glass of Pepsi, and went out to the back yard. I sat down in the shaded lawn chair under the low tree.

I just needed time to think.

But as I tried to think, a fog obscured my mental vision. The minutes dripped past with no answer in sight, and the sun began to set, and I was sweating.

My ribcage started squeezing my heart, and my spine became heavy, and I became disoriented. I got off the lawn chair and fell into the grass, which was on fire, because I didn't know what else to do. A great black wave of ash darkened the sky and spread like a cancer, infesting the air I was breathing, until it settled into my lungs.

Then I saw the sword in the air.

The sword was giant. It was made of diamond and mythril and it had all the glory of a divine weapon, like the sword of Saint Michael himself.

It hung over me by a single invisibly thin thread that hung from somewhere in heaven, and I watched myself voluntarily spread out beneath it, so that my heart was directly under its dread tip so many thousands of feet above. The wind picked up and soon I felt the rain on my skin. But I could not move out from under the sword, and I did not know whether it would finally fall on me this time, or whether I would be spared once more.

I tried to cry, and I cried. The tears came too fast to stop and I didn't want to stop them anyway. I cried until the wind had blown itself out, and the fire in the grass had burned out, and the clouds had emptied themselves of their rain, and the sword at last was withdrawn back into heaven.

I don't remember anything else.