***
“Can’t tell if they’re coming or going anymore. Just need to scare ‘em off, show ‘em you mean serious business, that’s the trick...
...Can you hear it, dear? Lotta bluster and kick in this one, that’s for sure. Sounds like it’s coming this way. Might even have a fighting chance this time…”
***
Spring Petal awoke in the dead of night, shivering. Rain pummeled the windows and roof. Her foggy eyes were wide, but took in nothing but blackness. She still heard the words in her head as though somepony were whispering them in her ear. A dream. She breathed.That must be it. Storms always give me strange dreams.
The bedroom felt chilled. There was a sickly familiar scent about the air, something that fermented overnight and resulted in open windows all the following day. Her husband Flint Fetlock complained about the smell constantly, but Spring was used to it by now. It returned daily despite the fact that she washed the sheets nearly as often. She wanted Flint to be as comfortable as possible, so she brought him meals in bed, propped up his pillows, read him the paper so long as he was awake, never certain if he was listening or if he even understood the words she spoke. He’d usually forget about the acrid smell around noon, when he took his first nap of the day.
She moved her hoof across the bed slowly, arthritically, feeling her stiffened joints pop like gritty static across the sheets until discovering a cold, empty spot the same size and shape as her husband. A dim flicker of lightning strobed in the distance. She stroked the empty side of the bed with her hoof, listening for thunder. When it didn’t come, she sat upright.
The lamp on her nightstand came to life, catching an eerie visual of her false teeth floating languidly in a glass on the nightstand. Something out of a horror novel, she thought with a shiver, plopping them into her mouth. It was as though she’d stumbled from sleep into the laboratory of a mad scientist who kept disembodied body parts contained in vats of viscous fluids. Her husband wouldn’t appreciate the visual. She wasn’t particularly keen on it right now, either.
Spring heard a deep, primordial growl. She wrapped her forehooves around her chest. Finally, thunder, she thought, feeling foolish. A little cloudburst like this shouldn’t frighten her. “Flint?” Her own voice sounded croaky and distant, product of a ragged windpipe with half a night’s worth of phlegm fighting against it. She cleared her throat. “Flint!” she called again, and waited.
Outside, a white vein of lightning pulsed in the heart of a distant, heavy cloud. Spring blinked. She rose to her hooves and moved to the closet faster than a mare her age had any business moving. She blinked again, her old eyes still fuzzy with sleep. She slipped on boots and a raincoat. She didn’t bother with her wig. It would only get wet.
Under her breath, Spring exhaled a prayer for her husband, then inhaled a benign little curse.
“Hopefully the storm got to him before I have the chance,” she muttered. Thunder grumbled against the windows. She grabbed a lantern out of the closet, clenched its metal handle between her false teeth. She held her hip with her forehoof as she hobbled down the darkened hallway, groaning over the stiff gristle in her joints, mentally preparing the scolding she’d give her husband. Overhead, the rain roared like a nocturnal predator.
Spring tried to block out the sound by focusing on the aching in her joints, trying to recall the last time she hadn’t felt some kind of pain, but couldn’t. Memories were precious and few to her now, like the summer holidays she used to take with Flint. That pony knew how to make the perfect ham out of himself, showing off how fast he could clear the sky of clouds so Spring could sunbathe.
The two of them were older than dirt now. Old age couldn’t take much more of her away, which was its own sort of perverted solace. It had taken her auburn mane, her love of flying, her friends and family that now only dwelt in unkempt, dusty corners of her memories. One of the only things it had brought back was her fear of storms.
Chewed up all the joys, and left the pains for dessert, she huffed silently. That animal’s got a twisted sense of humor.
The front door was wide open when she reached it. Wind and rain poured through the entryway, ruining a wool mat that had been a tacky anniversary gift many years ago. Spring hung the lantern on a hook by the doorway. She braced herself against the frame, squinting into the darkness. Rain plastered her face. She made out the shape of the garden fence and the shadows of trees experiencing epileptic fits in the erratic wind. Lightning illuminated the landscape. Spring felt her heart skip a beat. The lighting left a silhouette of the patio imprinted on her vision. In the imprint was a pony, the same size and shape as her husband.
Stepping outside in this weather would probably be the death of her. She didn’t care about that. Flint was all she had left to care about. Her expression brewed a storm to rival the real thing. She stomped her hoof on the soggy doormat. “Flint Fetlock, you mad stallion, get back inside this instant!”
The clouds shifted, unveiling the moon. Pale light spilled upon the pony standing in the patio. He didn’t seem to hear Spring. His back was hunched. His limbs were gaunt and ridgid, hardly more than twigs propping up his diminished frame. His faded sea-blue coat was slick with rain. His stringy silver mane clung to the back of his scarred neck. His outspread, yet useless wings twitched. Spring couldn’t see his face.
“Did you hear me, Flint? What in Equestria do you think you’re doing out here in this weather? You’re going to—”
She hardly made a step past the threshold before a thunderclap forced her to retreat. Spring gasped as the thunder trembled in the air and inside her lungs. She clutched the doorframe for her life as though the storm might suck her out and devour her. She closed her eyes and prayed for this nightmare to finish her off painlessly. If Life could afford to spare any more mercies on her, she’d awaken to find her husband beside her in bed, hopefully not in any pain either. Life wasn’t so generous with its favors any more—but her order didn’t seem like a very tall one.
When she opened her eyes, instead of the familiar humidity of her bedroom, or the scratchiness of her hoof-knit blankets, or the shrunken, sweaty cheek of her sleeping husband, she felt a chill of dread. She saw the shape of Flint, a wild silhouette of a stallion, rearing his frail forelegs high into the air.
“Aarggh! Begone!” he howled. “You think a little drizzle like you is going to scare me? Do you even know who I am? Do you??”
The wind seemed to pick up at his words. Spring gripped the doorframe even tighter.
Flint whinnied. “I’ve flown in winds that would tear you to shreds! I’ve pulverized clouds the size of continents! I’ve eaten lightning and belched thunder and spit hail!”
More lightning tore white-hot gashes into the clouds. Spring clung to consciousness and shrieked out Flint’s name. Her cry became drowned in the indifferent bellow of thunder a few seconds later. She heard her husband laugh with every bit of breath in his lungs.
“Ha! You think you’ve got what it takes to be a real storm? Think you can show me something new? Go on then! Show me what you’ve got!” He leapt upward, spreading his pathetic wings as far as they could go. Immediately he crashed to the ground. Spring screamed.
A moment later, the old stallion rose shakily to his hooves, grinning wildly. “Another chip off the shoulder won’t stop me! Go on! I ain’t going down without a fight!” He lowered himself into a stance and bucked at the sky to absolutely no effect. This didn’t deter him in the slightest. “There’s plenty more where that came from!” he yelled.
“D-damn fool,” mumbled Spring, shaking her head. Rain fell from her bare forehead and down her cheeks, indistinguishable from her tears. “Damn, sick fool!”
Flint continued antagonizing the storm, flailing his hooves and wings, rain flying from his body. He grimaced. He spat. He swore personal enmity against the sky itself. He slung insults and curses skyward until his breath came out in gasps and wheezes. Whenever lighting struck it was followed by a thunderclap almost immediately afterward, then a shriek from Spring. Throughout the whole event, Spring kept her eyes shut tight.
Eventually the angry shouting ceased. Spring heard haggard breathing. Rain pattered against the stone patio. Thunder rolled, growing steadily more distant and infrequent.
At last Spring opened her eyes. Her husband lay on his back in the center of the patio. His chest rose and fell rapidly.
Spring rushed to his side, sobbing.
Please, please, oh Celestia please…
Flint had his eyes closed with his mouth hanging open, catching drops of rain. When he heard his wife’s hoofsteps approach, he opened his foggy grey-blue eyes. “Spring?” His eyes sparkled like the moon’s reflection in a pond. “Why aren’t you in bed, honey?” he said, sounding surprised.
“I could ask you the same question.” She shook her head, bending over to help Flint to his hooves. Stabbing pain shot through her knees from the strain. “You shouldn’t be outside in this weather. A storm like this could get you killed!”
“You look like you were crying.” Flint grunted as he lifted himself from the soggy ground. “You don’t have to worry about that storm anymore. Hear it? Tucked its tail and ran! Coward!”
“The storm, I know.” Spring buried her face in Flint’s side, feeling the ridges of ancient scars against her cheek. She embraced her frail husband as though she were the only thing holding the tattered pieces of him together. “You’ve always protected me from storms.”
Flint coughed and sputtered as they walked back to the house. “Didn’t put up much of a fight, though,” he grumbled. “Even to sick old pegasus like me who can’t get his sorry flank off the ground. Seems old age might do me in after all.” He gave a disgusted sigh.
“You’re not the crazy young weather pony you used to be, Flint. Those days are behind us now.” Spring said. “You’re still crazy, though.”
“Maybe I am. Can’t really help it.”
“You’ll have to.” Spring wrapped her hooves tightly around Flint. His whole body shook, and his breath carried a disturbing rattle.
“It’s cold,” Flint said. “You shouldn’t be outside.”
“I’m fine. Worry about yourself for a change.”
Flint shook his head and breathed into his forehooves. Spring instructed him to stay put in the hallway while she retrieved a dry towel from the linen closet. When she returned, Flint was dragging himself down the hall, breathing heavily, painting a muddy streak across the wall with his body. He tried to refuse the towel.
“I had the rascal of a storm right where I wanted it,” he muttered. “Everything was under control.”
Spring led him into the bedroom. She shut the door behind her, glowering at her husband in the lantern light. “You were an inch away from a dirt nap not five minutes ago. That storm would have washed you away like driftwood.”
“No, it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. You saw how it ran off.”
“All I saw was a mad stallion screaming his lungs out at the sky.” Spring moved Flint to his side of the bed. She propped up his pillows while he stared at the wall, a terse grimace on his face. “I can’t take any more scares like that, Flint Fetlock. I’m too old for your games.”
“Protecting you ain’t a game to me,” Flint replied gruffly, a hint of offense in his tone. He coughed into the back of his hoof. “I take my job as your husband very seriously.”
Spring sighed. The clock on the wall told her the hour was two-thirty in the morning. She saw Flint quickly hide his hoof beneath the quilts, but not before she’d noticed that it was covered with flecks of blood.
Flint saw her reaction and harrumphed. “Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
After a pause, Spring stroked her husband’s cheek and smiled. “It’s...nothing. You did a good job out there tonight,” she said. In the distance, thunder rumbled. Spring took comfort in the fact that it sounded miles away. She took the glass of water from Flint’s nightstand and tipped it to his lips. “It’s all over. We’re safe now. Come back to sleep.”
“It wasn’t the storm, was it.”
Spring tilted her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I was the one who scared you. I can see it in you face.”
“I…” Spring paused. She leaned in and hugged Flint, rubbing her wrinkled cheek against his damp coat, feeling his chest rise and fell with each shallow breath. “I’m just glad I have you to protect me.”
“Honey?”
Spring lifted her head. “Yes?” Her husband’s milky eyes were full of shame and regret.
“I won’t go out like that again. Promise.”
Spring flinched. His promise stung her heart. It wasn’t the first time he’d made it. “I know,” she said, kissing him tenderly on the forehead.
She climbed into her side of the bed, trying to hold back any obvious signs of strain. Flint didn’t need to help her right now, not after he’d done so much already. He watched her shuffle stiffly under the covers with a dead, melancholy look in his eye, as though he’d just let go of a memory he’d been struggling to recall for a long time.
Finally, Spring dropped her dentures in the glass. She extinguished the lamp. Another rumble of thunder, barely audible, gave the storm a prolonged coda that stayed with Spring after it had subsided. She lay awake in the darkness, listening to the soft patter of raindrops against the window, thinking about storms, wondering how many more she and Flint could weather together. Long after the thunder had ceased, she heard Flint whisper. There was a wild sort of delight in his voice.
“Did you hear that, dear? Storm’s brewing out there! Can’t tell if they’re coming or going anymore. Shhh! Let’s listen a moment and find out…”
Author's Note
"I woke last night to the sound of thunder,
how far off I sat and wondered,
started humming a song from nineteen sixty two,
ain't it funny how the night moves
when just don't seem to have as much to lose,
strange how the night moves
with autumn closing in."
-Bob Seger
