Roseluck walked into her room and dropped on the carpet in front of the fireplace. It was Summer, so the fire was out, but she still looked into it and sighed before rolling onto her back.
“Ten weddings!” she exclaimed. “The horror! And that’s just this week! I can’t prepare flowers for all of them alone!”
Since no one in the whole of Equestria decided to answer, she furrowed her eyebrows and looked at the couch. Just as she expected, she heard snoring coming from it. Lily Valley didn’t even flinch at her rant, lying on her back with her mouth open, a trail of saliva making a dark path in her fur.
Roseluck groaned, rolled her eyes, and walked to the couch. She leaned over to Lily’s ear. “Bunny stampede,” she whispered.
“Aaargh!” Lily’s bloodshot eyes opened. She got up and was about to run, but Roseluck grabbed her tail with her teeth and yanked, causing her to sit down, panting.
“They’ll get me!” Lily exclaimed, trembling. “The horror! I’m too young to die! I’m only twenty-four and I’m still a–”
“You’ll die at twenty-four if you don’t shut up and listen to me,” Roseluck replied. “In case you haven’t heard, we need to prepare and deliver flowers for ten weddings in Ponyville, Hoofington, and, for some reason, Canterlot. More are to come, not to mention funerals, birthdays, baby showers, cute-ceaneras and whatnot. And it’s all on my head since you’re either sleeping or panicking that Daisy wants to kill you!”
“Chill out, I’ll take care of this,” Lily said. “And hey, I’m pretty sure Daisy already set the plan in motion…”
“Daisy is the most benign pony in the whole universe,” Roseluck replied. “Too bad she’s also a lazy slob.”
Lily raised her hoof. “No worries, I got this.”
Roseluck sighed. “Last time you said that, I had to get you out of prison. Not to mention that this wedding was a disaster.”
“It’s not my fault she wanted to marry a griffon.” Lily rolled her eyes. “Or that he was allergic to hydrangeas. Or that the groom’s mother got drunk and started to chop tables with an axe to make a fire. Also, first you want me to help you and then you say me helping you ends in disasters. Make up your mind.”
“I’d like you to help me, yeah,” Roseluck replied. “I just don’t want you getting high at work and falcon-punching wedding guests. Even when they carry battle axes.”
“Oh, please.” Lily yawned. “She deserved it. Also, good job, Rose. Now I’m tired again.” She turned on the couch, facing its back and resumed snoring.
“What.” Roseluck groaned. “So much for you not being useless.”
Lily raised her hoof. “My caffeine pills are in the medicine cabinet. You’ll thank me later.”
“Oh, come on!” Roseluck exclaimed.
When Roseluck stormed into the kitchen, Daisy was already there, preparing sandwiches. Hearing Roseluck closing the door, she perked up, letting out a quiet “eep!” and collapsed on her back, her legs stiff and motionless.
Roseluck sighed and shook her head, but said nothing. It wasn’t her fault that Daisy, due to a strange turn of events, had gotten adopted by a pair of fainting goats as a filly. Nothing could convince her that the “fainting” part wasn’t genetic and that there was no way she could inherit it from her adoptive parents; she’d still occasionally faint when startled, though living with Roseluck and Lily helped her a bit with this condition – now she was mostly getting regular panic attacks, just like her roommates and coworkers.
“I’m surrounded by idiots,” Roseluck muttered under her breath.
Daisy immediately got up from the floor. “Hardly. We once had an important role in society. When dragons attacked, ponies could run away while dragons were eating the fainting goats. Those were times when our sacrifice was greeted with respect!”
“Daisy, you’re not a goat.” Roseluck sighed and shook her head. “Also, I’ll soon faint if someone doesn’t help me with the orders. We have ten of them already and–”
“Fifteen,” Daisy said. “Mr. Waddle asked for the flowers for Fundamental Frequency’s funeral. She lived in Canterlot, but she was from Ponyville and wanted to be buried here. Not to mention that two kids got their cutie marks, and Pinkie Pie–”
“Wait, Fundamental Frequency is dead?” Roseluck raised her eyebrows. “Who the hell was she?”
“Radio announcer and folk guitarist, I think,” Daisy replied. “Vinyl told me that years of drinking caused her liver to get a mind on its own, run away from her body and get splashed on the ceiling. No one lives long after that.”
Roseluck nodded slowly. “Surely. Knowing Mr. Waddle, he has a sophisticated vision of how the flowers should match the deceased’s personality.”
“In that case, it should be my weed,” Daisy said. She actually had a prescription for medical cannabis, though Roseluck kept wondering for what condition exactly.
“Good,” Roseluck muttered, opening the medicine cabinet. “You’ll help me, then. Speaking of, have you seen Lily’s caffeine pills?”
“Over there,” Daisy replied, pointing at the rather shady bottle of pills. Its shadiness was mostly expressed by the fact that according to the label, it should contain vitamin C that had expired three years ago.
“Okay then.” Roseluck opened the bottle and took two pills. She swallowed them and shrugged, waiting for any effects. When she turned back to Daisy, she blinked several times, her vision suddenly sharpening and getting more colourful. Blood rushed through her veins, sending oxygen to her cells so fast that the mitochondria nearly exploded. Roseluck felt it, despite never being particularly aware of the existence of her mitochondria. In fact, after taking a deep breath, she could even feel the citric acid cycle spinning faster and faster in the matrices.
Roseluck raised her hoof; it trembled when she looked at it.
“Are you okay?” Daisy asked. “Those weren’t caffeine pills, were they?”
“I– I don’t know,” Roseluck said quickly, smiling in a way that shouldn’t be possible. “I sh– should do something. I want to do something but I don’t know what…”
“Flowers,” Daisy said, backpedalling until she found herself in the corner of the kitchen. She briefly considered fainting, but the look in Roseluck’s eyes told her that it wouldn’t help.
“Yes, flowers!” Roseluck spun in place, grabbing Daisy and running out of the kitchen with her. “We need all the flowers!”
There were only a few things Berry Punch liked more than relaxing on her porch with a glass of whisky and her cousin Cherry Berry. In fact, the only thing she liked more was relaxing on her porch with a glass of whisky when Cherry Berry wasn’t around, but it wasn’t like she could kick a family member out of her house. Or the porch.
“So, how’s yer business?” Cherry Berry asked.
“Flying it, thanks,” Berry Punch replied, looking over at the distillery. She also had a vineyard and they both worked much better since she stopped drinking half of their products herself.
“And how are you?”
“Flying it, thanks.” Berry took a large gulp of whisky.
“And how’s yer kid?”
“Pinchy’s flying it, thanks,” Berry said, looking at the meadow in front of her house. Pinchy wasn’t currently there. Instead, Berry saw a large pile of flowers walking forward much faster than any pile of flowers should. Mostly because piles of flowers can’t usually walk.
Berry looked at her glass, then at the bottle, and then at Cherry Berry. “Oi, bloody hell,” she muttered. “Can ya see that?”
“What?” Cherry Berry asked.
“That,” Berry Punch replied, pointing at the pile of flowers. As far as she could tell, it was lying on the top of a battered cart, making a cacophony of noises suggesting that it’d soon fall apart and end its glorious life only to reincarnate as firewood.
“I cannae see it, them flowers obscure the view.” Cherry Berry shrugged. She squinted to take a closer look. “Ain’t that those two flower muppets there?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Berry Punch said and took a sip of whisky. “May me next shite be a hedgehog if they ain’t buzzin’ on a funny flour again.”
Cherry Berry gulped her whisky and poured herself another glass. “Yeah. Fecking addicts. Times when they’re sober are as rare as a rocking horseshit.”
“Indeed.” Berry Punch watched as the flowers disappeared behind the hill and shot the bottle a longing gaze. “Another one?”
Vinyl was sitting by the window, silently gazing at the road next to her house. Octavia walked to her and gave her a cup of tea.
“You okay there?” Octavia asked.
Vinyl shrugged, continuing to look through the window.
“Is it because Fundamental Frequency died?”
Vinyl shook her head.
Octavia thought for a moment. “Is it because you two were having a drinking contest when she died and you’re not sure if that counts as you winning?”
Vinyl shook her head and chuckled.
“Ah, so you won,” Octavia said. “Though I must say that winning a drinking contest against a mare who was eighty-four and had three liver transplants is not something to be proud of. So, it’s about Mr. Waddle not letting us arrange the funeral the way Fundamental Frequency wanted?”
Vinyl nodded, pointing at something moving along the road. Moving, as she noticed, way faster than it should.
“I mean, twelve belly dancers and, as she put it in her last will, ‘enough vodka and coke to send the whole party into orbit’ would be a little bit excessive.” Octavia looked at the place where Vinyl was pointing. “What the hell is that?”
Vinyl let out a faint hum and turned to Octavia.
“I see that it’s Roseluck and Daisy dragging a cart full of flowers!” Octavia exclaimed. “But why do they need so many of them?”
Vinyl ran to her room and came back after a moment, wearing a belly dancer’s outfit and levitating a bottle of vodka. She stood in front of Octavia and smiled sheepishly.
Octavia furrowed her eyebrows. “There’s no way in hell I’m letting you go to the funeral like that!”
Vinyl sighed, lowering her head.
Over the next week, many strange things happened in Equestria. Flowers kept disappearing from various places; sometimes roughly at the same time, even in distant towns such as Vanhoover and Baltimare. On other occasions, the flowers would appear, usually during some important occasion, such as wedding, birthday, or a cute-ceanera. They’d sometimes appear even if no one at the party ordered flowers.
On Tuesday, an accident at the weather factory caused a series of storm all over Equestria. The few ponies who dared to get out during the foul weather, claimed that they heard a maniacal laughter coming from the patches of flying shrubbery. Those sightings were usually dismissed as rambling caused by strong winds and thunderstorms. The medical personnel all over the country could confirm – much more ponies ended up at the psychiatric wards during the storm.
On Wednesday, Lily Valley walked to the medicine cabinet, only to find out that her special pills from the Crystal Empire that most definitely didn’t contain caffeine were gone. Her hooves immediately started to tremble; she came to a few sobering realisations, including the fact that she hadn’t seen Roseluck for a few days and that Daisy looked like she got trampled by a herd of buffaloes. Her groans and constant fainting were driving Lily insane, though not as much as the constant, nagging feeling that she was wasting her life.
She went to the town to get more pills and deal with that feeling once and for all, only to find out that her provider got ran over by a flower cart. Nothing bad happened to him, aside from the fact that the doctors found more pills on him and, since official medicine didn’t like competition, he was now awaiting trial at the local police station.
Utterly devastated, Lily somehow ended up lying on the ground in front of Twilight’s palace and waiting for the great mare in the sky to take her to a better place, where there were no bunnies. It didn’t happen; instead she met Starlight Glimmer. Lily wasn’t sure who Starlight Glimmer was – perhaps Twilight’s troublesome royal mistress. Anyway, Starlight listened to her, said that her cutie mark may be a problem and politely suggested Lily to get off her lawn.
On Thursday, Fundamental Frequency finally found a quiet grave under the pine tree at the Ponyville cemetery. During the ceremony, much humbler than what the former folk singer and the voice of a generation had imagined, Vinyl Scratch revealed that Fundamental Frequency’s last words were “love each other and live in peace”.
That was, obviously, a lie. Fundamental Frequency said something like, “Oh, I can sure drink one more, young ‘un” before suddenly shuffling off this mortal coil, but that didn’t fit the legend that was born with her death. The legend that made numerous ponies (usually in their forties) go to her grave to drink and occasionally perform various sex acts, much to the displeasure of cemetery’s authorities. The grave ended up being protected by guards after it turned out that one of those caught was a local teacher. Alone.
Anyway, the days went by and it was time for Mr. Waddle to fulfill yet another due to the dead. This time, it pained him more than usual – the recently deceased was young enough to be his granddaughter.
He stood in front of the coffin and looked at the crowd. As usual, it seemed that the whole town showed up. He noticed the dead pony’s roommates resting on each other’s shoulder and crying in the first row. He also saw Doctor Whooves – the dead mare’s friend with possible benefits, depending on who’d you ask. Next to him, Mr. Waddle spotted Derpy Hooves – one of the ponies he’d rather not ask about the Doctor’s relationships. She seemed rather touchy about them.
Mr. Waddle cleared his throat. He had over fifty years of experience in giving funeral speeches and no matter what the pony did in their life, he could always tell something good about them. A common joke among ponies was that he could improvise an elegy for King Sombra, not to mention Tirek.
“We’ve gathered here to bid farewell to our dear sister and friend, Roseluck…” Mr. Waddle looked at the photo standing on the coffin. “It’s truly a pity that such a–”
“Oh, what the fuck…”
Mr. Waddle raised his eyebrows and looked at the coffin. It was open, but the body was almost completely covered by flowers, so he couldn’t see it exactly. He gently shrugged and turned back to his audience. “It’s always a pity when a pony dies, but even more so if it’s such a young, innocent–”
“My fucking head…”
“– and kind pony as Roseluck,” Mr. Waddle finished, pretending that he didn’t hear that. He was old and slightly deaf so it wasn’t that hard. “I knew her well, my dear and–”
“Which idiot put those flowers that way?! Lily, was that you?! Now I’ll have to–”
Mr. Waddle looked back and saw the recently deceased Roseluck sitting in her coffin with a bunch of flowers in her hoof. She looked at him and smiled sheepishly. “Good morning, Mr. Waddle,” she muttered.
“Roseluck?” Mr. Waddle whispered.
“Yeah,” Roseluck replied. “I was real tired by all those orders so I took a quick nap. I’d ask what are you doing here, but I guess I’m still dreaming. At least I hope so, because some blithering idiot completely screwed up and made funeral wreaths with wedding flowers.”
“That was you, my child,” Mr. Waddle replied, ignoring the crowd’s stunned “aah!” and the fact that one or two mares fainted. He was pretty sure one of them was Daisy. “You were found dead among those flowers.”
“Me, dead?” Roseluck chuckled, looking around and realising that she was in the coffin. “The horror…” she muttered, passing out.
When Roseluck woke up again, she was in a small room in the back of the funeral house, surrounded by several ponies. After blinking a few times, she recognised them as Daisy, Lily, Mr. Waddle, and Dr. Stable from the local hospital.
“First time I see someone coming back to life during the funeral,” Dr. Stable said. “Though I kinda expected Fundamental Frequency to do that. She was that kind of a mare.”
“Oh, I spent over fifty years in here and I’ve seen seven ponies waking up in the coffin.” Mr. Waddle lit up his pipe. “She’s eighth. As we say, better to wake up during the funeral than afterwards…” He chuckled.
Roseluck rubbed her temples. “During or after, I wouldn’t want to live through this again…”
“I guarantee you won’t.” Mr. Waddle chuckled again, this time ending in a fit of coughing. “Nopony woke up during the funeral twice.” He coughed again. “Though I may not be here to see it.”
Roseluck nodded and looked at her friends. “But how did I even die? I mean… How come nopony realised I was alive?” She turned to Dr. Stable. “You’re a friggin’ doctor here, right?”
“Well…” Dr. Stable smiled sheepishly. “It’s a long story…”
“You stole my pills and ate all of them,” Lily said. “But you brought a lot of bits home, so I don’t mind.”
“Yeah.” Daisy nodded. “After a week, I found you lying in your workshop, surrounded by all those funeral wreaths.”
“Made with wedding flowers, no less,” Lily added. “Guess you got a bit cranky from malnutrition and dehydration.”
Roseluck looked at herself and shuddered, seeing that her coat had lost most of its shine. “To think about it, I could eat a hayburger. Or ten.” She looked at Daisy. “So you found me and called help, right?”
“No.” Daisy blushed. “I passed out.”
“Sweet Celestia…” Roseluck rolled her eyes. “My best friends are a junkie and an idiot who thinks she’s a fainting goat. No wonder I died.”
“You didn’t,” Lily replied. “You two weren’t showing up to make me a supper, so I found you both in the workshop. I kicked Daisy back into senses, but it was a bit harder with you.”
“Ah, that explains why my ass hurts,” Roseluck muttered.
“Yeah,” Lily said. “So, we decided that we need professional help…”
Nurse Sweetheart yawned. The Ponyville Hospital was chronically understaffed and she couldn’t quite remember when she had last slept. She looked at the calendar hanging from the wall, but it didn’t help her much. She only knew that it was yet another long night at the ER.
Luckily for Sweetheart, Nurse Snowheart had enough cocaine in her locker to get a small country high. Sweetheart just took a bit from her stock and formed a neat-looking line on the mirror lying on the table. She was just in the middle of sniffing it, when she heard banging on the door. Startled, she inhaled sharply and coughed, sending the remains of cocaine everywhere. Her head started to spin; she looked into the mirror and wiped blood from her nose.
“I’m coming!” she exclaimed. Then life became much more colourful; she walked to the waiting room and saw a rather vivid scene, like straight out of the old painting: two ponies carrying another one, hanging limply from the back of one of them. She even realised they were those three flower vendors. Or rather, two – Sweetheart firmly believed in dichotomy of body and soul. “What’s up with her?” she asked.
“Dunno.” Lily shrugged. “She died or something. Do you buy ponies for parts?”
“Not really,” Sweetheart replied, opening Roseluck’s eye and looking into it. Roseluck didn’t quite move, even when Sweetheart poked her.
For a moment Sweetheart considered going to the doctor to consult this case with someone who wasn’t about to get coked out of their mind, but after a moment, she remembered that she was very good at signing papers for Dr. Stable and that a friend in the funeral house paid her for every new client. “Yeah, she’s dead,” she said. “I’m deeply sorry and all that.”
Roseluck smacked her face with her hoof. “Seriously?” she muttered. “You two believed some dumb nurse who barely even touched me?”
“Well, you were pretty convincing,” Lily said. “In looking dead, that is.”
“We were scared,” Daisy whispered.
“Oh, that’s just great.” Roseluck rolled her eyes. “You better give me a good reason not to move in with Doc or anyone else, instead of staying with you two freeloaders who drove me to this.” She pointed at the coffin.
“Umm… we like you?” Daisy asked.
“Not good enough,” Roseluck said.
“Princess Twilight will soon come to us asking if we have a friendship problem?” Lily shrugged.
Mr. Waddle blew the smoke out of his pipe. “I’m pretty sure you’re not helping, young lady.”
“That was almost better than Daisy’s reason.” Roseluck shrugged. “Anything else?”
“Who else would warn you in case of a bunny stampede?” Daisy asked.
“Yeah. And I do the dishes, but no one cares about it,” Lily said.
“Because you do that so often that no one has to remind you of that…” Roseluck looked at Lily. “Well, actually you aren’t that bad. A bit lazy and a hopeless addict, but you do the dishes. And clean the bathroom.”
“And I clean the kitchen,” Daisy said.
“If sweeping the floor by fainting on it counts as cleaning,” Roseluck muttered. She heard her stomach rumble. “You know what? Maybe we’ll discuss it over some dinner. If that’s fine in my state, doctor.” She looked at Dr. Stable.
“Of course,” Dr. Stable said. “Just don’t eat too much at once. Preferably something easy on your stomach.”
“Sure.” Roseluck nodded. Lily and Daisy helped her up and walked out of the funeral house with her. Dr. Stable and Mr. Waddle looked at them until they disappeared behind the corner.
Dr. Stable shrugged. “Do you think they’ll make it up?”
“Hardly,” Mr. Waddle replied. “Forgiving them because they do the dishes? This won’t last long.”
“You seem cynical,” Dr. Stable said.
“Nah.” Mr. Waddle let out a chuckle. “Just experienced…”
