The Circle of Life

by Admiral Biscuit

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Human, Other, Anon, Second Person, Comedy
Length: 1197

Your roommate, Filly Anon, clogs the toilet. Repeatedly. Not out of malice; just because she's an equine.

Your roommate, Filly Anon, clogs the toilet. Repeatedly. Not out of malice, but just because she's an equine.

While you're plunging it for the umpteenth time, she explains the circle of life as earth ponies understand it.

Published 2018-04-22 01:00:06 UTC
Last updated 2018-04-22 01:00:06 UTC

Filly Anon Clogs the Toilet

Filly Anon Clogs the Toilet
Admiral Biscuit

There's a magical time in the evening when everything is just right.

For a moment, you can almost imagine the graph in your head. There would be little colored lines representing thing like work-related stress, comfort, food, sleepiness, etc. And you're at the magical point on that graph where all the things intersect at their best possible value. Maximum relaxation.

Flush.

Your brain is coasting along at idle, currently wanting nothing. If you were a sim, every one of your little bar graphs would be well and truly in the green. You're at the point where you've become one with the couch and there's nothing that will move you from your spot, not until it's time for bed or—

Flush. “Faust dammit!”

—or your roommate clogs the toilet again.

Surely that isn't what just happened, because you were just getting comfortable, setting in for the long haul with your good friend cable television. You even had a bowl of microwave popcorn all set out in anticipation of the Looney Tunes marathon that was about to start, but no, fate has it in for you once again.

It's strange to think that you've learned the sounds of the toilet as it overflows along with the sounds of the plunger being ineffectually applied. That's what you're hearing right now.

Flush.

Now comes the sound of water splashing on the bathroom floor and that means that it's time to abandon your comfortable couch and go help out because this is your life now and you still haven't decided if you deserve it somehow.

You seem to remember that Frodo—or maybe it was Gandalf—had something to say about that in Lord of the Rings. What was that line again?

You cast aside your Polar Fleece blanket and mute the TV. Then you remember that since you live in a civilized age, you can actually pause cable, so you do that. No potty emergency is going to cut into your Loony Tunes.

“So do all who live in such times,” you say, the quote suddenly coming to you unbidden as you walk through the hallway to the bathroom. “But that is not for them to decide.”

“Anon?”

“Just quoting a movie,” you say, and then continue. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

“Uh, okay.” She's standing in horseshoe-deep toilet water, the plunger held in her mouth. “I clogged the toilet again.”

“I know. I heard.” You debate for a moment the hygenic implications of taking the spit-coated plunger from her mouth. Since you are also now standing in toilet-water, it's really the lesser of two evils.

“For someone so tiny, you sure are hell on the plumbing,” you comment as you thrust the plunger into the toilet. Maybe someone smarter than you will invent some sort of built-in ram to help remove pony leavings. Probably the Japanese; they have a weird toilet fetish. Hell, maybe such a thing already exists.

Maybe you can order it from Amazon.

“I can't help it,” she says. “I've told you before, I can go outside.”

“That's not civilized.”

“Poop on the ground and fertilize the flowers, like Faust intended.”

“That's just weird.” Although really, is it any more weird than having a little green filly as an unwanted housemate?

“It's not weird, it's the cycle of life.”

Nine times out of ten, she's cute and kind of clueless. That tenth time, though, it's like if Yoda or some Buddhist monk were to be reincarnated into filly form. Probably Yoda; she's the right color for that.

“Plants take up nutrients from the ground and we eat the plants to get those nutrients out and then we poop on the ground in the fields we’re working and tread it in with our hooves and the plants eat it again and that's how it works. How it's supposed to work.”

“That's not how it works on Earth,” you tell her. “Poop is supposed to be flushed down the toilet and never thought of again.”

“Where does it go?”

“Away.” You savagely jam the plunger down in the toilet, your ear focused on the gurgling sounds the water makes as it tries to get by the clog. “How do you even, you know, crap so much? You're on the toilet like ten times a day.”

“It's hard to get nutrition out of plants. There isn't a lot there, so I have to eat a lot. And what goes in must come out.”

This conversation is starting to go places that you aren't comfortable with. Are all ponies this cavalier about pooping? Does it have something to do with the fact that she also doesn't wear clothes? Is this a lack of body modesty thing?

“Like most healthy ponies my age, I eat over a pound of pasture grasses a day as the foundation of my diet, and drink around two gallons of water. The math is really simple from there. Plants are really hard to digest, though, so a lot of parts of them don’t really get broken down all that much.”

You have a sudden flashback to corn and how it doesn’t really seem to change overly much when passing through your digestive system. “I really don't need to know that,” you say. Your plunging has finally paid off, and with a reluctant gurgle, the water in the toilet finally goes down the trap like it's supposed to.

“Just pretending that something doesn't exist doesn't make it so,” she says.

“I know,” you tell her. “Heck, you came along.”

“It wasn't my fault!”

She does have a good point. She's as much a victim of circumstance as you are, at least if her explanation of a magic spell going wrong is to be believed. It might as well be true; it's not like you've got a better or more rational explanation for why you’ve got a pony roommate.

Your mind briefly considers the plumbing system as a whole. Besides the s-bend in your toilet, there must be other twists and turns further down the line, and perhaps even now fibrous nuggets are building up, collecting like sediment in a river, and one day there will be a clog that the plunger can't reach. What then?

Sometimes it's easy to forget truths if you really want to. A few minutes work with the mop—which she does—and the bathroom is back to normal, as if it never happened. As if it won't happen again and again, nearly half the time she poops, to be honest.

You can will your mind to not think about that. To not consider the future, past the part where you take your shoes back off and sit down on the couch and pull your polar fleece over you. To where you unpause your DVR and launch into the anticipated Looney Tunes marathon.

She's warm against your side, not unlike a big shaggy dog. It's a natural thing to put your hand on her mane and to scratch behind her ears as you watch Bugs Bunny outwit Elmer Fudd once again.

Life is good.