Just Let Me Pretend I Have Something To Lose
The gopher holes were always a problem.
Bright Mac could recall when Applejack and Big Macintosh had been chasing each other through the orchard (as foals were wont to do). Big Mac had nearly broken his leg when he’d stumbled right into one.
How long ago had that been now? Five years? Ten?
No...
No, now it was closer to fifteen.
Bright Mac sighed. Days, months, years; they hardly mattered anymore.
He stared at the hole in the ground, and tried to kick some of the dirt piled around its edges into it.
Of course, his hoof went right through.
“You know it won’t do anything.” Pear Butter’s voice floated from behind him, borne on the breeze he couldn’t feel.
“I know.” Bright Mac spent another futile effort on attempting to move the dirt back into the gopher hole. Again, his hoof passed clear through the soil, not a single granule moving from its place on the ground.
“I just don’t want them to get hurt, is all.”
Pear nodded. “I know, dear.”
“It was hard enough then, when I—when we could actually do something about it. But now?” His hoof passed soundlessly through the dirt again, and he exhaled a slow, doleful breath. “Now we can’t do anything. Makes me feel damn helpless.”
She was silent at this. Bright Mac turned to look over at her once again, and took the moment to drink in her features. At least this was something still afforded to him.
She looked just as beautiful as she had in life; the fact that she was harder to view did little to diminish this. In fact, being faded, flickering—not all there—made her seem all the more there. As unnatural as their situation was, the view was as natural as it had been before.
Pear smiled, and raised her hoof to point at the treeline behind Bright Mac, breaking him from his thoughts. “Listen.”
From behind them came the plodding of hooves through leaves and grass, the creaking of wood and the turning of wheels. Big Macintosh was making his way towards them from the direction of the stead.
Cart dragging behind him piled high with earth, trowel clenched between his jaws.
And there he was, pausing every few feet, carefully filling the dirt back into the gopher holes, and packing it down so one could hardly tell they’d ever been there to begin with.
Pear was walking towards Big Macintosh now. He knew what was going to happen. He didn’t have the courage to do it any longer, but Pear...
Well, she didn’t give up so easily.
One of the best things about her.
Pear, adjacent to her son, held up her hooves and did her best to balance on her hindlegs. Big Mac filled another gopher hole as his mother stood position like a ballerina over him--
And he straightened himself, walking right through her as he plodded off towards the next hole.
Pear sighed, and slowly walked back towards Bright Mac. “Almost felt him that time,” she whispered as the two watched Big Mac pour more dirt into the ground.
Bright Mac smiled at Pear, who returned the expression just as strong, despite the fact that they both could see the trees behind each other through their heads, and the strange, gripping pain in their gut that found them even without physical forms.
Sometimes Bright Mac stared at the barn and wondered how they’d rebuilt it. He knew that they had been more than capable of doing so—he’d have expected nothing less of his family.
The world stopped for nopony. Things had to move on.
Still, looking over at the wooden structure, he couldn’t help but to see it as the smouldering wreckage that had robbed his family of so much.
That had robbed him of so much.
The sun was setting now. As it dipped over the horizon, the sky burned orange, setting everything within sight ablaze as the late-afternoon rays streamed over the hills against the barn.
And it was as if he’d been plunged right back into that moment.
If there was any sensation to recall, beyond this cold, removed nothingness—this numb, fog devoid of physical sensation—it was those final moments of life.
His mouth full of ash.
The burning in his lungs.
The hot, heavy air, choking every last bit of energy from him.
A shrill, piercing scream.
He’d told her not to go after him.
And now they would both never wake up again.
Or so he thought. That’s how it was supposed to be.
And yet, here they were.
Sometimes, when he looked down at his hooves, he could see the keratin smoking and crumbling, blackening and flaking away into soot and charcoal. He could see the fur burning away, the flesh peeling back, and the white bone turning black.
“Dear?”
His heart would have stopped if it already hadn’t so long ago. They made little to no sound now unless they were speaking—and even then they only heard one another. It wasn’t hard for her to sneak up on him. That didn’t matter nearly as much as the thought that had always plagued him, day after day, month after month, year after year—
And before he could stop himself, he found that he was finally asking her a question that had sat on his mind for so long now.
“Why did you go in after me?” he asked. His voice was barely more than a whisper—so quiet he was surprised if she heard it at all above the rustling of the trees in the orchard as the late evening wind that neither of them could feel any longer ripped through Sweet Apple Acres.
But she did hear him, and she didn’t hesitate to answer.
“I had to.”
His answer came back almost as quick. “No, you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t leave you in there alone. I was thinking, if the worst happened—”
“But the worst happened. And we left them all alone.”
Now she did hesitate. The pause was filled with the chattering of the tree branches, the squabble of leaves as that balmy dusk breeze that neither would feel again continued onward.
“Did we, though?”
Bright Mac looked over towards the farmhouse. The sun had set enough to allow him to see properly once more, and three silhouettes were making their way towards the front porch steps. Raucous giggles and excited shouts reached their ears.
And he didn’t truly have an answer for her.
Night had fallen at last. Applejack had put Apple Bloom to bed, and Big Mac and Granny had long retired to their respective rooms. At long last, the farmhouse had fallen silent.
The moon was bright that night; it poured in through the windows, cold sunlight reflected down to caress the earth. Tonight, it was intense enough that one could almost feel it—
Assuming one could have felt anything physical at all.
If Bright Mac set his mind to it, he was sure he could float through the ceiling. He wasn’t even sure how their forms worked, or how they’d come to pass—just that they were little more than shades, faded echoes of what they’d once been, barely existing in this world beyond a basic realm of sights and sounds.
And thoughts.
Unending, unrelenting thoughts he whispered in his head.
“I want to try something.” He and Pear were in the living room. Pear looked up from where she’d been inspecting several old photographs on the mantle, their frames and glass shimmering in the silver light of the moon.
“Oh?”
He nodded. “We always take the stairs when we... go up at night. I reckon we could probably...”
He pawed at the floor uselessly, hoof sinking partially through the floorboards. “Well, we might as well give it a shot, right? Figure out if we can do it, and everything.”
Pear cocked her head. “Like, floating up?” Bright Mac nodded, and Pear narrowed her eyes inquisitively.
“You think we can?”
Bright Mac shrugged. “Might as well try. It’ll be something new, at the very least.”
Pear nodded, before looking around awkwardly. “Um... how do you suppose we try to do it?” she asked.
“I don’t know, to be honest. I’m thinking we just... go for it? If that makes any sense? I’m not rightly sure myself how any of this business works, so we can just... try and make ourselves weightless, I suppose.”
Pear tittered softly. “Well, might as well give it a shot. And if it doesn’t work for whatever reason, we can always just take the stairs.”
Bright Mac snorted in kind. “Yeah.”
The two closed their eyes in unison. Bright Mac tried his hardest to think about floating, which wasn’t difficult to do; he was used to being suspended in this weightless, nebulous state between life and death. Now all that needed to be done was to apply some direction.
He didn’t feel anything, but a small gasp from Pear made him open his eyes. Sure enough, the two were floating, slowly rising, up to the roof.
And they passed right through.
Through those old, creaking wooden beams, through the crawlspace between the stories and past a small family of rats nested there—
And drifted right up to settle on the floorboards of Applejack’s bedroom above them, right beside their slumbering daughter’s bed.
“Well, whatya know.” Bright Mac smirked. “Hrm. Somepony oughta do something about those rats.”
Bright Mac turned to face Pear and found that she was angled away from him.
“What’s up, Buttercup?” he asked, the giddiness still not fully gone from his voice.
Pear slowly turned to look at Bright Mac, and her expression caught him off guard. It was a worried, tired expression—the same she had when Big Mac had nearly broken his leg all those long years ago.
Bright Mac’s brow furrowed, and his voice softened. “Seriously; what’s up?”
She bit her lip. “You’re not upset, are you?”
Bright Mac was taken aback. “About you thinking we couldn’t float up here?”
She giggled, and Bright Mac felt—for the briefest of moments—something in that empty cave that had once been his chest, in that place where he’d once held a heart, something beyond the faint fleeting impressions of death in that towering inferno.
“No, not that. About... me coming in after you into the barn.”
“Ah.” Bright Mac didn’t look at her at first. Then, slowly, she lifted her head, and fixed her ghostly gaze directly upon his, looking for all the world as if she could see him plainly as he’d been in life.
“Nah. Nah, I’m not. Not really. I’m so sorry if I made you feel like I was, I’m just...” He inhaled, a force of habit that meant nothing now. Even when he remembered what it was like to breath, all he got was ash and smoke.
“It’s so much, all this nothing.”
Pear nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. As far as things go this—this is pretty bad.”
Despite himself, Bright Mac allowed a small smile to creep across his muzzle. “Eeyup.”
A wistful little giggle, and her orange curls bobbed in the way they used to in those evening breezes. “But it isn’t the worst, if I’m being honest.”
This caught him off guard. Blinking, uncomprehending, Bright Mac tilted his head. “How do you mean?”
“Out of all the ponies I could be stuck in infinity with,” Pear Butter said softly, her ethereal hoof gently running across Bright Mac’s back. Sensation was so removed from him, but the memory of the motion carried through when they were alive still echoed around them. “I’m so glad it was you.”
He held his muzzle to hers, and the two passed through one another, snouts overlapping slightly. They shared an otherworldly feeling, one that can only be achieved in this way; all attempts to describe it will fail. If an attempt was to be made, one could imagine it as how an atom feels when it gains an electron from another, ionizing in synch with another. Even that does not come anywhere close to analogizing the closeness and the intimacy, the distance and the longing shared between Bright Mac and Pear Butter in that moment.
After sharing that indescribable sensation for what was not nearly enough time, Pear and Bright Mac pulled away from one another.
“I just want to hold them again.” Bright Mac’s voice was shaking.
“I know.” Pear tried to hold a stoic expression, but her lips were twitching, and her eyes glittered in the moonlight in a way they could only achieve through burgeoning tears.
“Do you think they’ll pass on?” He turned to her. “And not be stuck like this?”
She pursed her lips. “I sure hope so.”
His expression drooped, his form becoming just noticeably more transparent. “But you don’t know.”
Pear laughed. The sound was delicate and quiet. Applejack’s ear twitched in her sleep, and she rolled over in bed.
“Did you expect me to?”
Bright Mac exhaled a soft chuckle. “After all that’s happened? I don’t rightly expect anything anymore.”
Pear Butter trotted close to Bright Mac, and placed her hooves as best she could on his shoulders.
“One day I too hope for normal love—but for now we can be ghosts trapped in this haunted house, tying knots around one another and making sure they don’t suffer like we did." She looked him right in the eyes, her ghostly whisper terrifying and beautiful to his ethereal ears.
"Just let me pretend I have something to lose.”
Yet they did. They knew it. Even though they were dead, they were not gone, and they would be trapped here long after the rest of the family had lived their lives and died.
They still had everything to lose.
And they could both rest perfectly assured—
As they left the room, Applejack occasionally moving a restless limb—
That there is no ending to this story.
