The shovel bumped against Applejack’s back as she walked, and the sun had warmed the blade enough to almost burn even through her fur. She made no attempt to change her gait or shift her hold, though, letting that heat swell and fade with every step. Almost relishing it, that not-quite pain the warmth brought with it. The grass was crisp beneath her hooves, yellowing and crunchy, and the sun beat remorselessly down on the corner of the orchard she found herself pacing through. It had been a long walk.
Close now, though, in this forgotten and distant edge of Sweet Apple Acres. Close to where she needed to begin. Applejack wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but she’d know when she saw it. Each of her steps careful and measured, pacing herself. The hot shovel bumping against her shoulders. Grass crunching underhoof.
And then Applejack stopped.
She stared intently at the ground beneath her, at the grass and the cracked dirt peeking through from underneath, and she knew this was the place. To an outside eye, it would seem exactly the same as any other patch of grass and soil in this corner of the orchard, but to Applejack? It was exactly the same as any other patch of grass and soil in this corner of the orchard.
And yet she knew this was it, could feel it deep within, in the same place inside her that had pulled her to this spot. The shovel slipped free with a roll of her shoulders and thunked into the dirt as Applejack planned out her attack. Her first strike ended in a shuddering bounce that reverberated all the way up her forelegs, but she braced herself and tried again, and this time she felt the shovel stick fast, slicing through the grass and piercing the tough shell of dirt.
A deep breath, and then a stomp on the shovel’s blade to drive it deeper. It gave, sinking in an inch or so more, and then again, and again, until Applejack was satisfied. Levering down the handle brought a tearing of roots and crumbling of dirt, and with one last rip a chunk came loose and left a hole in the ground beneath her.
For a moment, Applejack paused. The first blow had been struck – the ground torn and sundered in front of her to reveal a small but noticeable divot. A beginning. The beginning. A hole, present from the moment there was any absence, and all it could do from there was get bigger. And as she stared at the hole – the space where once there was dirt – she could feel it waiting to yawn wider and deeper, an intense anticipation seeping out of the emptiness.
And she carved that anticipation in two with another strike of the shovel, slicing straight through the empty space and into the dirt below before tearing out another chunk. This one came easier – the earth less solid, less hardened. The sun had yet to bake this dirt, and with a dismissive flick Applejack sent the remnants spraying across the grass.
And again, and again, and soon there was a rhythm, soon her actions had started to fade into unconscious automation. The shovel came down empty and came up full. Flick, spray, down again. First carving away the grass and hard surface, and then deeper into real, true dirt. Slicing it out, dragging it up, replacing it with the nothing that Applejack needed to be there instead.
Progress measured in inches, but also in burning muscles and sweat and hard breaths. Measured in the dirt that stained her hooves, growing further up her legs as the hole deepened and widened. Progress measured in time. Strike. Pull. Flick. Spray. Strike.
So absorbed in her work that when a shadow fell across the hole and blotted out the raging sun, Applejack didn’t notice. She was lost to the rhythm.
“AJ?” said the shadow’s voice. “What’re you doing?”
“Digging,” she replied. Strike.
The shadow did not seem to find her answer satisfactory. “What for?”
“Me.”
Big Mac frowned, but Applejack had no better answer to give him. It was, unequivocally, the truth. There needed to be a hole here – an absence, an emptiness – and Applejack needed to be the one to dig it. She had no choice in the matter, it wasn’t a choice at all. In the same way she didn’t choose to be born, the same way she didn’t choose to be an earth pony, or a mare, and she didn’t choose her name or her life or her family or so many other things that simply were. And she didn’t choose to dig a hole, here, under the blazing sun in a forgotten corner of an orchard she didn’t choose to be given.
The hole had to be here, the hole was already here. Had it begun the moment she cracked through the earth or had that simply been the first enlargement, a second strike after all?
Trying to explain all that to her brother would have made Applejack sound as insane as she worried she might be, and so it was out of the question. And so she simply said Me and it was the same answer, really, even though she could tell it did nothing to soothe his troubled confusion.
“How deep do you need it to be?” he asked.
It was a question, she thought. A question that made perfect sense, most of the time. Big Mac liked quantifiables. How many trees are we planting this season? What’s our yield this year? How many apples are we making into cider? Where are we burying Mom and Dad? How is Apple Bloom doing in school?
How deep do you need the hole to be?
Applejack didn’t know the answer. Actually, that wasn’t quite right. She did, and the answer was: deep. It just wasn’t the kind of answer Big Mac wanted, even though to Applejack it made all the sense in the world. But it was the answer she gave him anyway, and he didn’t ask her to elaborate but he scrunched up his muzzle and scowled.
But despite his frustration with her – a frustration that Applejack was sympathetic towards but could do nothing to alleviate – he still asked one more question, the question that a big brother had to ask. “Do you want me to help?”
“Nope.”
“Okay then.”
And it was true, she didn’t want that. Oh, it would have been faster, absolutely. Easier. No one could fault Mac for his physical capabilities, one of the only ponies who could outmatch her in raw strength and endurance. But she needed to dig this hole alone. She was the only one who could dig it, because it was hers.
Big Mac stayed for a minute or so and, even though Applejack didn’t look up from her task as she tried to sink into the rhythm again, she could tell he wanted to say something. Another question, maybe, or a demand that she let him help, or perhaps even just to ask for a better reason. But he didn’t say any of those things, and the next time Applejack stopped to tilt her head back and wipe away the sweat that had soaked the fabric of her hat in unpleasant, cool dampness, Big Mac was gone.
Applejack returned to digging. Back to the rhythm, back to mindlessness, her thoughts drifting but not really to anywhere or anything but back here, water swirling around a drain. This was the focal point where her wandering mind returned every time. A gravitational pull she couldn’t possibly escape. The hole grew wider and deeper, and equally more difficult for her thoughts to leave.
The sky burned deep orange and the shadows crawled across the grass, but they didn’t reach her, or the hole, and still Applejack dug. She’d expected it to get harder as she grew tired, and she was tired. Of that, there was no doubt. Exhausted, more so than she had ever been – a tiredness that settled so utterly into Applejack that it seemed to burrow all the way through and soak into her bones. Digging its own hole as it tunnelled into her. And yet despite that tiredness Applejack continued digging with as much fervour and steadfastness as when she’d begun. The dirt was soft and easier to burrow into the deeper she went, cascading down around her hooves from the edges and filling it back in. Quickly, almost so quick she couldn’t keep up with it.
The ground was resisting. Fighting back. Applejack had sort of known it would. It didn’t want to be carved open, cut into, hollowed. The ground wanted to settle and be whole and rest like that forever. But Applejack wasn’t worried; the hole might take time, but it was inevitable. And the more the earth tried to cover it back up by tumbling dirt off the sides, the wider the hole grew.
All Applejack had to do was throw out the loose dirt that fell and the hole still grew. She shored up the sides with steeper, harder strokes to make them less susceptible to crumbling, the edges more defined, less prone to cascading inwards and covering her hard work.
But the light was fading.
Applejack dug as long as she could, the burn in her forelegs hot and aching. But finally it was too dark, the light too low – she hadn’t brought a lantern with her, and Applejack had no wish to try and stumble all the way back to the farmhouse in pitch darkness. And so she impaled the shovel at the bottom of the hole with a particularly savage slam, lifted her forelegs over the rim, and dragged herself out. Brushing the worst of the dirt off her fur, Applejack paused to admire her work.
It was a good start. A few feet deep, just enough that she had to peer over the edge to see the bottom. It would do, for today at least, but the hole wasn’t finished yet. Not that Applejack was particularly sure when it would be finished, in the same way she hadn’t been particularly sure where to dig until she’d been right on top of it. The hole would be finished when it was, that was all she knew, and it wasn’t yet.
Applejack turned and headed home, head hung low as the stars began to pop into sight above her. She didn’t look back; the hole would be there for her tomorrow.
***
“Big Mac says you’ve been digging all day,” said Apple Bloom, in between mouthfuls of food.
“Yep,” Applejack replied, leaning back in her chair with a long sigh. She had barely touched her meal. “I sure have.”
“Why?”
Applejack shrugged. “Because there’s a hole there.”
This seemed to confuse Apple Bloom. “Well, there’s a hole there now, right? But not before.”
“You sure about that?” Applejack gave her sister a knowing look. “Maybe the hole was already there, maybe it was just all filled in with dirt so you couldn’t see it.”
“That’s not how it works,” insisted Apple Bloom. “If you fill a hole with dirt then it’s not a hole anymore, is it? It’s just… dirt.”
“Then I got a question for you,” said Applejack. “Say I have a deep hole, and I throw a tiny bit of dirt in. Barely enough to cover the bottom. Is it still a hole?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“What if I throw in another little bit? Still a hole?”
Apple Bloom frowned, but nodded.
“Then when does it stop being a hole and start being ‘just dirt’?”
“I don’t know,” said Apple Bloom, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.
Applejack’s serious countenance broke into a wide smile. “Me either.”
“But that’s not the same,” Apple Bloom tried again. “That’s a hole that was already there and you filled it in. This is just a spot on the ground, isn’t it?”
There was a moment of quiet as Applejack stared deep into Apple Bloom’s eyes. She was no longer smiling. “What’s the difference?” she asked.
And Apple Bloom had no answer.
***
Applejack’s shoulders were burning again. Not from the sun this time, but from a hard day’s work followed by another. The burn of muscles asking for rest but given more work instead. An ache that loosened as her efforts wore on, as the tight stiffness began to relax and settle into regime and warmth suffused through them.
Applejack had always enjoyed that sensation – the loosening, the warmth. It was honest, as honest a feeling as one could hope for. Truth, of hard work well done.
The hole deepened.
It was cooler down there, amongst the dirt. The sun ravaged the grass above, but Applejack had escaped from the worst of it as she buried herself both figuratively and literally in her work. The hole deepened, her muscles burned, and the moment she had taken the shovel in hoof again and driven it back into the soil at the bottom of the hole it had brought instant relief.
Back to what she was supposed to be doing, back to what needed to be done. And so she dug and her shoulders burned and the hurt only made her dig faster, plunging the shovel as deep as she could, teeth gritted, sweat soaking her forehead. If the birds were still singing above then Applejack couldn’t hear them, couldn’t hear anything over her relentless digging, the flurry of dirt, hollowed out and flung in a wide arc out of the hole and onto the grass where it would seep in and become part of the soil.
Displaced but never removed, the hole itself merely an absence, not a creation. Not creating, not destroying, just digging deeper, endlessly, and when was a hole not a hole, when had it always been here and when was it ‘just dirt’, and if you took a hole and put two big wooden boxes in them and then covered them back up was it still a hole or was it something else, and if it was always a hole was it waiting for the boxes all along, was that where they and their precious, cold, and still contents were supposed to end up? Was that were they were fated to end up, had they really been there all along?
When. When had the sun gotten so low? When had the air gotten so cool? When had the hole gotten so deep? When.
Applejack didn’t know. She just kept digging. And this time she kept digging until she couldn’t see her hoof in front of her face and her muscles were no longer simply burning but screaming and the loose warmth from before had boiled away.
She didn’t know how she clawed her way out of the hole that night. Applejack was detached, as though sitting some distance away and watching a bedraggled farm mare stumble through her orchard under cold, sparkling stars. Covered in dirt, her mane all matted and messy, and the hat on her head tilted at a strange angle that the mare didn’t even bother to fix.
She watched the mare stumble into the farmhouse and sink down at the kitchen table, and she watched her brother arrive and his eyes go wide with concern as he asked her if she was okay. She watched the mare say I’m fine even though she clearly wasn’t, and she watched the mare decline her brother’s offer of food even though she was starving, and then the mare sank her head down onto the table to nestle into her hooves with exhaustion and then Applejack didn’t see anything anymore.
***
It was still dark when Applejack jolted awake and the chair she had collapsed into scraped loudly across the floor. She couldn’t remember her dreams, or what had dragged her so abruptly from them, but she still knew what they were about. Because of course they were.
There was a moment of panic, of disorientation, the kind any pony feels when waking up somewhere different to what their groggy mind expects: always the familiar comfort of their own bed. And then she remembered and exhaled and pressed a hoof to her face as if the pressure would somehow alleviate… something. Anything.
Still dark, but it was the dark of early morning, the kind full of anticipation for light on the verge of breaking over the horizon. The kind that one could tell was almost over, somehow, even though at first glance it seemed as dark as ever. Applejack wasn’t sure exactly how that worked – the temperature, maybe, or the humidity, or perhaps it was the quiet.
It was always quietest just before the birds started singing.
And in the expectant dark, alone in the kitchen as she tapped a hoof restlessly against the table, Applejack waited. It began slowly, as it always did. A single bird, crying out in the hushed darkness. Applejack imagined it to be the bird atop the tallest tree, seeing the furthest over the horizon, the first to see hints of blue as light returned. And then another, and another, and soon the full chorus. Each one distinct and unique and loud, so loud. Applejack’s head was full of nothing but birdsong, echoing and endless. A cacophony that ate up every thought and made her screw her eyes shut and hold her hooves over her ears as she pressed her head against the wood of the table and tried to shut it out.
Birdsong and holes, swallowing her up.
And, when she could bear it no longer, Applejack stood so quickly it toppled the chair behind her and marched outside towards the orchard. She didn’t remember the journey. Didn’t remember walking, didn't remember climbing down into the hole, didn’t remember taking the smooth wooden handle in hoof. Didn’t remember starting to dig. There was a blankness there instead. She remembered the birds, remembered leaving, and then she was in the hole and her fur was matted with fresh dirt and her muscles were aching again but Applejack didn’t care.
She wanted them to ache.
How long had she been out here? Hard to say. It could have been a few hours, it could have been a few minutes. The sun was still low in the sky, and though the morning was dawning bright and clear Celestia’s sun had yet to have much heat in it. It was getting more difficult to see these things, though. The hole was deep enough now that Applejack couldn’t see over the top of it even up on her hindlegs, and so it was simply a circle of sky above her telegraphing the weather. This morning it was pale and blue and cold, although down in the hole it was always cold, and the thick smell of earth filled the air.
Applejack blinked, and now the sun was much, much higher. Hours had passed. She could feel it in her bones, see it in the hole’s bottom beneath her, so much progress made in what felt like an instant but of course couldn’t have been. Applejack was simply losing time. But that was okay, it wasn’t important time. It wasn’t time she needed to remember. The hole needed to be dug and Applejack needed to dig it, and her memory had already been hazy. Now it was emptying itself of her repetitive, endless efforts. Each individual slash of her shovel so much less important than the sum that there was no point in Applejack remembering them.
If her pace before had been ferocious, now Applejack’s digging was filled with something approaching sheer fury. Teeth clenched, sweat stinging her eyes, dripping down the sides of her muzzles although she barely even felt it.
Each strike into the ground trying to shake away Apple Bloom asking her why she was digging, Big Mac asking if she needed help. They loved her more than anything and would do all they could for her and yet for all that they still didn’t understand. And that wasn’t fair, and it had never been fair, and how could they possibly begin to understand when even Applejack didn’t, when she only knew that the hole called to her but couldn’t explain why she listened to it when she knew she shouldn’t. Couldn’t explain why she was out here with blood on her shovel’s handle from where it had rubbed the soft part of her hooves raw, was out here digging ever deeper no matter the sweat or the heat or the pain.
There were no words for it. There was only digging.
That rhythm, so familiar, so reassuring, so dangerous in it’s submerging comfort. Strike pull flick strike pull flick and don’t think don’t remember don’t do anything but dig and sweat and bleed and dig. Ignore the sting in your hooves, the ache in your muscles, the crushing sensation in your chest. Just dig. Strike pull flick. Don’t watch as the sun sinks behind you, as the light drains from the world. Just dig and tomorrow do it all again, do the same thing, and keep digging because you have to, because you need to, because you can’t do anything else. Doing anything else asks too much of you even if everyone else thinks it would be easier.
Just strike and thud and-
The rhythm was so familiar by now – as much a part of Applejack as her own heartbeat – that when it broke and changed the shock that ran up the shovel echoed and magnified inside her, like those moments just before sleep where Applejack’s mind would insist she was about to fall and she would spasm and catch herself against nothing with cold, impotent panic seeping through her.
She tried again.
Strike, thud.
And again.
Strike, thud.
No. No no no no. Applejack repeated the syllable over and over as she dropped to her knees and tried to scoop away the dirt at the bottom of the hole by hoof instead. It couldn’t be right. It was just a rock, or a tree root, or something. Something she could unearth and deal with and get back to digging, back to her rhythm.
Her hooves met with nothing but hard ground.
She tried again with the shovel, ramming it against the earth, and only the tiniest chip was knocked loose from the juddering bounce, at the sharp cost of another stab of pain through her hooves.
With a snarl of frustration, Applejack tossed the shovel aside and dropped back down into a heap, and all at once the exhaustion that had been kept at bay by her furious efforts flooded into her. The ache in her muscles flared fresh, burning and stinging, and the pain in her hooves was newly sharpened now that she had nothing else to focus on. And, as she sat there, she realised for the first time the need and want to dig was gone. The urge had vanished, as quickly as it had come, but nothing had come to fill the gap it left behind.
Instead there was blankness, empty space inside her that was somehow even worse than what it replaced. Her need to dig had been so all-consuming, eating her up in entirety, and now it was gone there was just… nothing. Nothing at all.
The hole had been dug.
At least dug as far as the ground itself would allow her. There was nothing more, and, as she stared up at the small circle of afternoon sky through the hole’s aperture, the futility began to set in. There was supposed to be fulfilment, wasn’t there? Some kind of satisfaction, the kind usually felt after a job well done? The same way that her muscles’ aching had been accompanied by contentment before, but now there was none. They simply hurt. And for what? So that she could sit a few feet deep in a hole and look up and wonder why?
She’d thought there’d be answers, further down. She’d thought as long as she kept digging, it wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t. It was a direction, a place to go, a thing to do. She couldn’t remember how she’d decided on digging, or if maybe it had decided on her instead, but Applejack had still expected… something. Some truth that would become self-evident, some answer to a question she wasn’t even sure of.
Something.
But just a hole. Just a pony, battered and exhausted and hurting, sitting at the bottom and staring up and wondering what the point was. Wondering if there was anywhere to go from here, now that she had reached as far down as she could.
She drew her legs up to her chest and curled up tight, and the circle of sky above grew first vibrant orange and then began to dim, and Applejack made no effort to move or even stir. Even as the cold sank into her sore limbs, even as she first of the stars began to twinkle, Applejack sat and stared and stayed.
“AJ?” came the voice from above as a silhouetted poked its head into the circle to stare down the pit. “You down there?”
“Yup,” she called back, and her voice was hoarse and fractured even though she hadn’t used it. Perhaps because she hadn’t used it.
“You okay?” Big Mac asked.
“Yup.”
This, of course, was not quite true. But it was true in the way Big Mac’s question meant. Are you hurt? Are you stuck? Do you need help? And yes, yes to all those things, and yet not enough. Not like he was talking about.
Big Mac remained unconvinced, peering down at her. “It’s late,” he said. It wasn’t judgemental, or complaining. It was simply stated as fact, in the way that he was so very good at. The apples need bringing in. The sky is blue. Mom and Dad are dead. It’s late.
“I know,” Applejack said. She did.
She heard his slight exhale of frustration. Mac liked things to the point, and they both knew she was dodging it. It wasn’t necessarily intentional; her answer was as true as him saying it was late in the first place. Just because his statement held an implicit question she didn’t answer didn’t make it her fault.
This time Big Mac left no room for avoidance. “You coming in soon?”
Applejack took a moment to answer, staring up at the stars behind his silhouette, sparkling down upon them. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.
“There’s food on.” Another statement, another buried implication. Asking without questions.
“Thanks, but I ain’t hungry just yet.”
“It’ll get cold.”
Applejack shrugged, and even that little motion forced a wince as her stiffened shoulders clicked. She hoped he couldn’t see it, down here in the dim. It was hard to say from his silhouette – if his face gave it away she couldn’t tell.
“I don’t think I’ll be hungry later, either,” she said.
“Oh.”
There was a long silence. Applejack didn’t mind it, though. She was content to sit back and watch the stars. It was what she was spending her time doing before Big Mac showed up, after all, and his presence did nothing to deter her. He was obviously less comfortable with the quiet, and some small, savage part of Applejack took a kind of delight out of his discomfort. But also a longing for him to change it.
Say it, that small part dared him. Say it and stop hiding behind buried questions and silence. Say what you’re thinking, what I know you’re thinking. Say it so I don’t have to pretend everything is okay anymore. Say it so we can move on.
But of course he didn’t, and instead he simply stood in silence and tried to think of one of his irrefutable statements that could ask the question he was trying so hard not to voice. For once, Applejack thought he might be stumped.
“I’ll leave a light on, then,” he said.
“I know how to get home, Mac.”
“Maybe,” he replied, “but I’m starting to think you ain’t coming.”
That was better. Closer. If Applejack listened closely she could almost hear the tinge of frustration in his words. Practically imperceptible, and Big Mac would have denied it, but she could sense they were there. He was very good at not allowing it to leak out, but he was still a pony, and he still had feelings. Even the ones he didn’t think he was supposed to have, or show. Even though Applejack knew he deserved them.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she said. “I’m gonna watch the stars for a bit.”
The silhouette craned its head upwards at the sparkling canvas above them. “Since when were you into stargazin’?” Big Mac asked.
Since I dug this hole and looked upwards and they were the only thing I could see. Since you blotted them out with your shadow and I realise how much I missed them. Since Mom and Dad died and I looked for the pairs of shooting stars that you’ve never noticed and I’m not even sure if they’re real or if I’m just imagining them. Since all those nights when I couldn’t sleep and went over to the window to clear my head and managed to empty it of swirling thoughts and instead I filled it with stars.
Since always.
“It’s a perspective thing,” she said. “Thousands of them out there, so many you can’t even count them, and Twilight told me that each of them is so big you could fit the whole of Equestria in them so many times you can’t count that either and still have room to spare. But from all the way over here they’re just tiny little dots that most ponies barely notice.” Applejack sighed. “Makes me feel small. You know, the scale of it.”
“And that’s a good thing?” Mac asked.
“If you’re small it is,” she said. “Better to know that you’re tiny than think you’re big when you ain’t.”
“We’re not small, AJ.”
Applejack smiled, but there wasn’t a trace of humour in it. It was the smile of a pony who knew her brother had heard everything she said and ignored every word, not out of malice but simple, blunt immutability.
“We are to the stars,” she said, and as she looked up at the sparkling sky a pair of trailing lights blazed across it.
***
Applejack woke, and groaned as the stiffness in her joints settled itself and her rear suddenly found prickly sensation rushing back into it. She didn’t remember falling asleep. Not that ponies ever did, she supposed, but this gap in her memory was wider than usual.
She didn’t remember Big Mac leaving, didn’t remember the moment when she decided to stay out here, didn’t remember when she’d given up her cosy bed for the hard dirt surrounding her and cold stars above. Maybe there wasn’t one, maybe she’d already decided all those things long before the hole was even finished (although calling it finished felt like a lie to her; it was only done because there was no deeper to go).
Still, as she blearily struggled to wake and her legs were all stiff and she dislodged a stone that had spent the night pressing awkwardly against her back, Applejack found herself wondering what she was even doing out here.
It was a question that didn’t quite make sense though, like asking why the sky was blue or what flavour were apples. Some things simply were, and always had been, and couldn’t be anything else. The hole had to be dug. Applejack had to be the one to dig it. And now she had nowhere else left to go. Nowhere else she wanted to be, nowhere else she could be. The hole was hers, and sitting at the bottom felt… not right, exactly, but inevitable. Inescapable.
Applejack was at the bottom of the hole because that was where someone who dug a hole ended up.
Her already hazy memory seemed to be getting worse down here, too. Like the ground itself was eating them up, swallowing them so that only fragments and vestiges remained, memories of memories that were no longer there, and maybe had never been there at all. Applejack’s mind had given up on filing them properly and had simply started casting them all on the floor in a big pile marked ‘unimportant’.
Memories of birdsong. Memories of Big Mac trying to persuade her to come out again, memories of his absence after he’d given up, memories of Apple Bloom trying the same. Memories of the sun as it burned its way across the sky and Applejack watched hues change and transform and ripple against the sides of the hole. Watching every little detail as the shadows shifted and changed and picked out all the cracks and roots in the earth, an ever-changing kaleidoscopic landscape. Watching the walls crawl with teeming life – ants and beetles and worms and all manner of other bugs, countless, crawling in a seething mass and was there even a wall at all or was it all just bugs packed solid where the earth was supposed to be, and then Applejack blinked and they were all gone and it was just earth again and Applejack couldn’t even tell how much was in her head and how much was just the way things were, the truth no one wanted to talk about. The weather’s nice today, did you hear what the neighbours have been up to, isn’t it weird how there are millions of bugs crawling under our hooves right this second, living their own lives as oblivious of us as we are of them, and how’s your mother doing?
But that was thinking about scale again. The other way, this time. Too much perspective, perhaps. Too much to think about, too much scale, too much feeling small or outnumbered or both at once. Better to let her mind drift and not think about the bugs or how many Equestrias you could fit into a star or how many bugs would be in all those Equestrias you stuffed in there together. A number that swept understanding to the side, a number Applejack couldn’t even begin to comprehend.
Too many.
So birdsong and won’t you come back to the house and come on AJ it’s time to give this up and we’re all worried about you, and then saying I’m fine even though she didn’t think she was, and listening to big heavy hoofsteps crunching across the grass above her. Away. Back home. And dirt and bugs and darkening sky, and big blue eyes in front of her and-
Wait, what was that last one?
Applejack blinked, and the eyes remained stubbornly in view, earnest and wide and stretched at the corners by a smile.
“Hey!” said their owner.
“Uh, hey, Pinkie,” Applejack replied.
Pinkie Pie leant forward so that there was nothing left of the dirt and the hole and there was only blue and white and pink. “Whatcha doing?”
Applejack thought for a moment. “Sittin’,” she said, eventually, taking a page out of Big Macintosh’s book.
“Oh.” Pinkie leaned back, seeming to acknowledge her surroundings for the first time, like she hadn’t even realised they were at the bottom of a hole. Perhaps she really had materialised out of thin air as she’d appeared to – Applejack wouldn’t have put it past Pinkie Pie to manage something like that. “You know you’re in a big hole, right?”
There was a pause. “Yes, Pinkie, I know.”
“Are you stuck?”
“No.”
Pinkie frowned. “Because Big Mac said you were stuck.”
“I ain’t stuck. I can climb out whenever I want.”
“That doesn’t mean you aren’t stuck,” Pinkie said.
“That’s literally what it means.”
Pinkie was smiling again, beaming wide as if she had solved some kind of puzzle. “Not if you never want to leave. Then it’s exactly the same as if you couldn’t climb out. Then you’re stuck!”
The jubilance with which Pinkie made her declaration grated against Applejack’s mind.
“That ain’t how it works,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Pinkie leaned closer again, their muzzles nearly touching. The air smelled sweet and sugary. “Are you sure you’re sure?”
“Yes.”
Pinkie’s smile faltered just a little bit, the creases around her eyes softening, although maybe Applejack only noticed because Pinkie was so close. Mercifully, Pinkie took this defeat as an opportunity to drop back and glance around the hole’s walls again, and Applejack finally got to ask her nagging question.
“What are you even doing here?”
Clutching a hoof to her chest, Pinkie gasped dramatically. “Oh! Big Mac came and got us and said you went and dug a hole and wouldn’t come out no matter how much he asked, so I said Oh my goodness she must be stuck come on girls let’s go rescue her and then I ran here as fast as I could and then I fell down this hole and there you were! And then I said Hey and you said Uh hey Pinkie and looked at me like you didn’t even know what you were looking at and then I said Whatcha doing and you said-”
Applejack reached out and clasped Pinkie’s mouth shut. “Yeah, I remember that part, thanks.” She relinquished her grip, and Pinkie was still beaming as though nothing had even happened.
Pinkie glanced left and right before muttering conspiratorially in Applejack’s ear. “Honestly, I knew something like this was going to happen. I had a really bad itch at the tip of my left ear when I faced north-northeast at three in the afternoon, and we all know what that means!”
“...we do?”
Pinkie nodded solemnly. “It means one of my friends is stuck.”
“I told you, I ain’t stuck!” snarled Applejack, with more venom than she’d intended.
“Then climb out,” said Pinkie.
A moment’s pause. “I don’t want to.”
“If you don’t climb out, how do you know you can?”
“It’s not that far,” Applejack insisted. “I could do it.”
Pinkie gave her a knowing look. “But?”
“But nothin’.” She crossed her hooves over her chest and flopped back against the side of the hole, letting the dust spatter against her fur. “If I wanted to, I could. End of story.”
“So why don’t you want to?”
Applejack was quiet. The hole had a way of eating sound like it ate memories, and when she fell silent it was so much quieter than the surface, any hint of sound soaking into the earthen walls and draining away. Above, the late evening sound of chirping insects could just be heard, but by the time it filtered down to the pair of them the walls had eaten so much of it that it was little more than background static.
“Because,” said Applejack.
“That’s not a reason, silly.”
“It’s the only one I got.”
“I don’t think you’d come out here and dig a big ol’ hole without a better reason than that,” Pinkie said. “I know my friend Applejack, and she isn’t like that.”
“Maybe she is. Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think you do.”
Pinkie shrugged, entirely unconcerned. “Maybe. But I think I know my friends pretty well. We saved the world together like a hundred times.”
Applejack gave up. “I had to get out of the sun,” she said. She was expecting some kind of confusion at that, but there was none, and perhaps it was wrong of her to expect it in the first place. This was Pinkie Pie, after all. “I had to dig to get out.”
“Because it’s cool down here?”
“Because it’s cool down here,” Applejack affirmed. “Because when I’m down here you only get the sun for a little while. Most of the time it’s cool.”
“That makes sense,” Pinkie said.
Did it? Applejack wasn’t so sure it did, not to anyone except her. But she also didn’t think Pinkie was lying to her, or saying it just to make Applejack feel better. After all, she’d suggested the answer in the first place.
“And it’s quiet,” Applejack continued, “and if anyone wants to talk to me they do it from all the way up there, and it ain’t so loud. And neither are the birds. And then at night I still get to look up and watch the stars and think about how small I am. And then I’m okay. Then everything’s okay.”
The smile had yet to return to Pinkie’s face. It was such a permanent part of her features that it always made Applejack a little anxious when it fell away. Even when Pinkie wasn’t grinning from ear to ear there was usually some kind of suggestion of a smile there – an ease, a contentment. Not now. Not here.
“Is it okay?” Pinkie asked. “Because you don’t look okay.”
Applejack ran a hoof idly through her mane, catching on the knotted tangles that had gone so unheeded. “It’s okay as long as I’m out of the sun.”
“Yeah, but…” Pinkie gestured around them. “It’s kinda small, don’t you think? There’s not even room for a small party, let alone a really fun one.”
“That’s sorta the point.”
Pinkie Pie shook her head vehemently. “No, I don’t think so. It only seems okay down here because it’s too small to fit the bad stuff in. There’s just you and dirt and nothing else. No noise, no sun, no anything.”
“So?”
“So of course it feels okay, silly. You didn’t leave any room for anything not okay down here, did you? But don’t you see the problem?”
“Nope, that sounds perfect to me,” said Applejack.
Another furious shake, Pinkie’s mane bouncing in eclectic spirals, in motion almost endlessly after Pinkie’s head stopped. “If there’s no room for the bad stuff then you didn’t leave any room for the good stuff either. How’s it supposed to fit down here? Even I’m all squished up, and I’m super good at fitting into tight spaces. Twilight did tests. She said I’m ‘anomalous’, which means special!”
“That ain’t quite what that word means, Pinkie.”
“Eh, tomato potato.” Pinkie suddenly fixed her with an intense, burning stare. “Hey, let me show you something.”
“What?”
Pinkie raised a hoof straight up, pointing towards the surface. “It’s up there.”
“I said I ain’t-”
“It’s okay! The birds are asleep and the sun’s not out. It’s quiet. I just want to show you something, I promise it’s not far. And afterwards if you still want to, you can come right back down here again. I won’t stop you or anything.”
“This all seems like a plan to ambush me the moment I climb out.”
“Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye. Pinkie promise. You’ll like it.”
Applejack looked up at the circle above, now dotted with the first stars. Had it always been so far away? Had it always been so small, so constricting that it seemed like she’d have to squeeze through it just to get out? Or was it somehow closing up behind her?
“Five minutes,” Applejack said.
“Five minutes,” Pinkie agreed. “It’s not far.”
It was harder to climb out of the hole than Applejack thought it would be. Not that she’d thought it would be easy, of course. It was a matter of physics – an object at rest stayed at rest. Sitting at the bottom was easier than climbing out even if the climb had been simple, and it wasn’t. The ground seemed to crumble so much more than she remembered, disintegrating beneath her hoof as she struggled for grip. The first time she pressed her hooves in the wall and tried to lever herself up the dirt ripped out with no resistance, sending her tumbling right back down again.
It was almost enough for her to give up on whatever Pinkie had to show her. She lay sprawled at the bottom of the hole, covered in fresh dirt, her back bruised and sore, and every part of Applejack just wanted to stay there. If she stayed, she wouldn’t fall again. If she stayed there would be no fresh bruises, no new hurt. Only the ones she’d already gotten.
But then Pinkie was above her, and her warm, comfortable smile was back and it reached all the way to the reassurance in her eyes as she held out a hoof. No judgement, no laughter. Just a hoof, just help.
Applejack didn’t want to take it.
Worse, though, would be trying to struggle to her hooves and collapsing with exhaustion again, and so she took it anyway and together they helped her back upright, ready to start again.
She was more cautious this time, and as she tested a few spots that crumbled away she unearthed a solidly embedded root. It was enough of a bracing point, wedging her hoof against it to hold most of her weight as she reached up over the edge to drag herself out. The entrance felt narrower than she remembered, pressing against her back as she clawed her way free, dirt staining her fur ever darker until finally she lifted the last of herself clear and collapsed onto the grass.
Pinkie was already up here with her, somehow, but Applejack knew better than to ask how she’d done it. It wasn’t worth expending the brainpower to work out how she managed things like that because the answer still wouldn’t make any sense. Anomalous. Special.
Applejack shivered a little at the cold night breeze that swept across her fur. It was colder here than the hole had been. Blistering heat in the day, icy chill at night. The hole, meanwhile, had remained constant. Reliable. Consistent.
Comfortable.
“Alright, Pinkie,” she breathed, letting her sore, overworked muscles rest. The climb had been harder than she thought, harder than it should have been. Applejack should have been able to scale that height without even breaking a sweat, and yet it had drained every scrap of energy she’d had left. “Where are we going?”
“Not far,” Pinkie repeated from a few steps away, and her voice sounded strangely distant and floaty, as though they were both underwater. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
With a great deal of reluctance, Applejack managed to coax her aching muscles to pull herself over to where Pinkie sat, smiling brightly and watching her struggle to walk.
“Okay,” Pinkie said, as Applejack ground to a halt beside her, a few steps away from the hole’s mouth. “We’re here.”
Applejack gave her a very unamused look, or at least what she hoped was one. “What’s the joke?” she asked. “Because I ain’t finding it that funny right now.”
“It’s not a joke!” insisted Pinkie. “Or a trick, or a scheme, or a ploy, or a-”
“I get it.”
“It’s not any of those things. I just wanted to show you something.”
“Okay, fine. Well, we’re here. Show me.”
Pinkie beamed again, and raised a hoof to point directly upwards. “Look,” she said, simply.
“Pinkie, I could see the stars from the hole,” said Applejack. “That was kinda the point.”
“No, really! Look up,” Pinkie repeated.
Applejack gave up and acquiesced; there was no talking Pinkie out of one of these moods. She looked up.
Stars.
Millions upon millions, the sky almost blazing white from the sheer mass of sparkling light. Each one adrift in veins of darkness, coiling between the twinkling brightness. Some so faint they were only visible if Applejack squinted, others burning so bright that if she looked too long the fainter ones all but disappeared.
She had seen the stars from the hole, but the sheer scale and number had been squashed into that aperture, the ring that sliced a section from the sky and allowed her nothing else as she looked up from the dirt at the bottom. Only here seeing the full scale did Applejack understand what a pitiful approximation that cross-section had been.
It was nothing. From the bottom of the hole she’d seen her tiny circle and thought she’d seen the stars, thought she’d seen and known and understood. But the unfathomable breadth of the night sky dropped her down onto her haunches and then onto her back, nothing able to keep her standing anymore.
Constellations, planets, blazing orbs impossible distances away, each so big that to try and imagine even one would make her head hurt, and here they were countless. Perspective. She saw the wider, thicker band of the galaxy, where the stars bunched tightly together and shared their light with Equestria, and with every passing moment Applejack saw a little more, even more stars. And she lost herself in the endless spirals and sparkles and light, the canvas that had been above her all along as she cowered in her hole and stared up at the tiny circle and naively thought she understood. She’d seen stars from the hole, but as she stared heavenward on her back, Applejack saw everything.
And then the stars began to cascade and shear and dissolve into prismatic shapes as her eyes started to heat at the edges, and the harder she tried to keep herself from crying the more inevitable it became. The air was cold, freezing, so cold it burned, and though the stars were beautiful and they were everything they still seemed to burn with nothing but ice, and she shivered as she cried and she wasn’t even really sure what she was crying for, just as surely as she knew it was for everything, everything she’d ever deserved to cry for and kept back because she didn’t have the means to, couldn’t let her friends see, because if she didn’t understand why then how could they? They would say they did, anyway, and they would tell her they were there for her and they wouldn’t be lying but they would still be wrong.
And then Pinkie was there, and even if she didn’t understand – couldn’t understand – her embrace was soft and warm and unrelenting.
“I know,” Pinkie said. “It’s a lot.”
It was a lot. Far too much. The idea that a pony was supposed to stand beneath these stars and look up and see everything, not just the carved out circle from the bottom of the hole, was terrifying. Before, Applejack had kept her attention firmly to the ground, and discovering what had been above all this time was as invigorating as it was paralytic.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I have to go back.”
Pinkie held her tighter. “Okay, but do you want to?”
“It ain’t about wanting to. I have to.”
“That’s not true,” Pinkie said. “It’s all about wanting, you know that. And just because you can’t see it all from the bottom, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
“But-”
“You don’t need it, silly. And once you get used to being up here you won’t even remember why you dug a hole in the first place.”
Applejack frowned. She already didn’t know, had never really known. All she knew was that she had to dig, had to shrink the sky to a manageable circle, in the same way a bug had to shelter under a rock from the sun. She’d thought, then, that it was mostly the same. To keep the light from burning her. And yet she’d dug the hole during the day, hadn’t she?
She’d dug under sweltering heat, the shovel bouncing and burning, sweat dripping, shoulders aching, and she’d dug and dug and it was only once the sun retreated and the stars had begun to shine that she’d fled back to the house, cool night air wrapping tendrils around her and daring her to just look up, just see, just take it in. All this time, it was the stars she’d been hiding from.
“What if I never get used to it?” she murmured. “What if it’s too much? What if I dig another hole?”
“Then I’ll come and pull you out of it again, duh. And if I don’t, somepony else will. This time I just got here first.” Pinkie disentangled herself but made sure to keep Applejack’s hooves in her own. Hooves still sore and maybe even bloody, and what about Pinkie’s hooves? Had they always been so calloused, had that soft part that pressed against Applejack’s wounds always been so scarred?
Applejack closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Did you see them?” she asked, voice trembling.
“See what?”
“The shooting stars,” Applejack said. “No one else ever sees them.”
Pinkie hesitated. “No,” she said, and Applejack’s heart sank. “But it doesn’t matter. They’re for you.”
That crawling sensation was back at the edge of Applejack’s mind. The unpleasantness, the uncomfortableness, the one that only subsided when the stars were out of view and she was down in the dirt and the bugs and the cool but not cold. When the stars were a small circle and the sun never reached her.
It would be so easy, she knew. The hole was already dug, after all; it would never be so easy to fall right back down there again as it would be right now. So much easier than the first time. And then she’d be safe and alone and the stars wouldn’t be overwhelming and the sun wouldn’t burn.
But then there was Pinkie, and the crawling subsided. Just a little, just enough to stop setting her teeth on edge, to stop making her so desperate to get away from it that flinging herself back down the hole seemed like the only answer.
And it would be flinging, free fall, and it would hurt – she might even break something on the way down – but afterwards she’d be able to curl into a ball against the rough ground and the hole’s sides would press in against her and everything would be okay.
But no room for the good things. No room for Pinkie’s calm and wordless reassurance, no room for the warmth of her hugs and her smiles, no room for all the stars that burned above them. No room for any of those things.
“You’re right,” Applejack murmured. “I don’t wanna go back down there. I missed you guys. I missed all of this.” Her eyes were warming again, fuzziness around the edges. “But I know I’m gonna. Might be tomorrow, might be a year from now, but I can’t stop it. One day I’ll end up right back down there again.”
Pinkie’s smile didn’t even falter, resting a hoof on her shoulder. “That’s okay, we’ll just come and get you again. Every time, as many times as it takes. You know we will, don’tcha? Do you really think we’d just leave you down there?”
Yes.
Except the more Applejack thought about it the less sense her immediate instinct made. It had felt like the obvious answer, down in the pit. Of course they would leave her, why wouldn’t they? She wanted to be down there, didn’t she? Needed to be down there. How would any of them ever notice something was even wrong?
But they had noticed, almost right away, and Pinkie had come and dragged her out of the hole and now the very idea that they would leave her stuck down there–
Not stuck
– Yes, stuck – seemed as ridiculous as the idea that her absence would go unnoticed in the first place.
“I’m sorry, Pinkie,” Applejack muttered. All she could manage: an apology that didn’t even begin to scratch the surface, to say all that Applejack needed and wanted to say to her.
But Pinkie didn’t seem to care. She just hugged Applejack again and Applejack let her and she could feel the damp spots left against Pinkie’s fur as she buried her face against her and Pinkie told her it was okay and look, see, here they come. And the rest of her friends emerged from between the trees, waving excitedly and rushing over to join the hug and Applejack had no strength or desire to stop them.
And as she allowed herself to drift, not really thinking or imagining but just being, the hole’s pull dwindled to almost nothing. The crawling sensation subsided, at least for now. And above, unnoticed by all, two shooting stars flew in parallel across the sky, picking their way between the brightness.
