“Pinkie,” Maud piped up as Pinkie shampooed her mane.
“Hmm?”
“Have you ever thought about something, and then it was real?”
Pinkie rolled her eyes, but smiled regardless. It was easy to forget how the minds of foals worked. Her little sister was ten years younger than her, but the gulf often felt like so much more than that.
“Well, sure Maud! I think about the sun rising when I’m working on the fields. And then, after a few hours, it happens!”
“No,” Maud replied. Her characteristic stoicism would have been striking from any other foal. As it was, they’d all gotten used to it, “I mean you made something happen, just by wanting it.”
“You mean making a wish?” Pinkie smirked, “What did you wish for, Maud?”
“Yesterday, I thought that I wanted you to wash my mane for me, and then you did it. If I want something, the next day it happens.”
Pinkie paused for a second. She had come up with the idea after dinner, seemingly at random. How nice it would be for them to bond, a treat for a well-behaved filly. But now, as she examined it, it seemed like all these rationales were being applied after the fact. But after a moment she caught herself, and she shook her head and giggled.
Minds of fillies.
“Tell you what, Maud, if you wish for a few bits, I can buy us all some chocolate the next time I go to the shops!”
“Okay,” Maud replied, a characteristically subtle lilt in her monotone screamed to Pinkie her sister was excited by that idea.
Pinkie felt ashamed; it was something she’d picked up from their mother, those bitter kinds of jokes. They didn’t have enough for any amount of chocolate, and it was unfair of her to get Maud’s hopes up like that.
Both sisters jolted as the door was suddenly opened. Their father stood in the threshold, eyeing them like they’d done something wrong. Like he was waiting for the moment they did, just to exercise his power to demand they stop.
Pinkie’s jaw clenched.
“Bed,” he said simply, and stalked off to his room.
“Yes father,” Pinkie muttered, and started to rinse the suds from Maud’s hair.
When she was a filly, Pinkie loved the farm’s rooster. Brightly coloured, proud and full-chested. The way his crows carried across all the fields. Now, that sound meant work. It meant dragging her and all her younger sisters out onto the field to plough while their father drank.
Now she hated the rooster.
Their mother was no help. She used to be, but one day, a few years ago, she just went catanonic. Now all she did was lay in bed all day. Pinkie thought it must have been a life of stress. She didn’t know whether she pitied, envied, or hated her mother. Sometimes she thought she felt all three at the same time.
The day went by quick, too quick to really pick anything out but backbreaking monotony. More backbreaking monotony. The same she’d had yesterday, save for the stolen moments washing Maud’s mane.
When they were finally done, Pinkie walked into the house and trudged upstairs, replying with a small ‘yes father’ to his barked order about dinner being in twenty minutes. When she finally saw her bed, she collapsed. But there was no respite even then, as when her head hit the pillow, there was a sharp pain.
She knew better than to yelp, she didn’t want to disturb anyone, least of all worry her sisters. Pinkie frowned and reached a hoof under the pillows, and her eyes widened when she felt metal. It was four golden coins, twenty bits. For her, it was a princess’s ransom.
“I wis… wis…”
“Wished,” Pinkie muttered faintly, correcting the little voice behind her. Pinkie hadn’t even heard her enter the room, “Where did you find this, Maud?”
“I told you, I wished for it. Yesterday, in the bath.”
“Maud, did you steal—”
“I wished for it yesterday,” the filly insisted, and Pinkie turned to look in her eyes. They were calm, no hint of mockery or mischief, nor the hot shame of a child’s lie. She was telling the truth, or at least thought she was.
“Maud… I—” but the child had already gone, toddling off to her next adventure. Pinkie turned back to the coins, and wondered whether she even cared where they had come from. Whether she even cared they were stolen. Because they were stolen.
Wishes didn’t come true.
The rooster stole her dreams from her, that was the main reason she hated it. Every morning Pinkie would be somewhere else. Somewhere no one screamed at her, where no drunken, bitter stallion found the chocolate she’d bought for her younger sisters and had gone feral with rage.
Where he hadn’t blackened her eye and demanded to know where she’d gotten the money, whether she’d stolen it, whether she’d debased his family name for it.
The rooster took it all away. It took her one safe place and forced her to wake up and protect the only thing that mattered to her— little foals who didn’t know any better. But all Pinkie wanted was, for once, to look after herself.
“What?” Maud said from behind her.
“Nothing, Maud,” Pinkie sighed as she dragged the plough.
“You said something, you shouldn’t lie.”
“Please Maud—”
“Mother always said that good fillies tell the truth and—”
“I said I hated the cockerel, okay? Are you happy now, Maud? I said I wanted the cockerel to go away and to never come back and to let me dream!”
Pinkie looked around, wincing as the sun glared in her swollen eye. All her sisters had stopped working, and were staring at her. Scared. Had she been shouting?
They couldn’t stop working, not when their father could look out any moment. Because then he’d shout, and all her sisters would be terrified, like they always got when he shouted. And Pinkie couldn’t have that, she couldn’t see that, she couldn’t be that.
They can’t be scared of me.
“Haha,” she barked out, forced and humourless, “I’m sorry girls, ploughing all day makes Pinkie a bit grumpy! Come on now, let’s just get back to work. Not much longer now!”
The fillies returned to their jobs, immediately satisfied with the explanation. The minds of foals after all. But not Maud. Maud kept staring for a while, until Pinkie spoke up again.
“Maud, sweetheart, please get back to work. It’s not much longer now, I promise.”
And after a couple of seconds, Maud did just that. But not before some prolonged stare, communicating something Pinkie didn’t quite understand.
Pinkie was on a beach and there was no one anywhere. There was no one to be afraid of, no one to look after. Pinkie was on a beach, by herself. And she was crying for reasons she’d never cried before. Some catharsis, a realisation of something she’d only been able to wish for. Pinkie wanted this to never end.
Pinkie wanted so, so many things.
But Pinkie wasn’t on a beach, she was in her bed, groggily rubbing sleep from her eyes. Fuzz turned piercing and heart-wrenching as the sound of her father’s spittle laden howls filled the room against a backdrop of children’s weeping. Like finding music in radio static.
Why were they not in the fields, did they not know what time it was, did they not care? Why hadn’t Pinkie gotten them up? She didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, she only knew the pain when he pulled her out of bed by her mane and dragged her down to the fields. And the chorus of her sisters’ despair only intensified as they followed. Their mother’s catatonic silence was like the oblivion of death as her father pushed Pinkie into the sun, blinding her.
She knelt in the dust and filth, gently weeping as the door was slammed shut. She faintly heard Marble and Limestone. They were sobbing, but old enough to know not to bother her right now. So instead they just went to collect their tools.
Maud, on the other hoof, remained close, studying her. Pinkie could feel her presence without seeing her. Something intangible, like a ghost. Like a wish.
“Maud… please just go and get your tools,” Pinkie said, fighting to keep her voice even.
“Do you wish?” the filly replied, voice as inscrutable as ever.
“What? Maud, I told you to get your tools.”
“I wished for you to wash my hair, and I wished for money, and then the next day they came true. Yesterday, I wished—”
“Maud, this isn’t the time.”
“Do you wish?” Maud repeated, more firmly this time.
“YES! Of course I wish! You think I like this? You think I want this?! No, you don’t get it because you’re a child, Maud. And in your mind, you make things happen by wishing, even when you steal money from Celestia knows where. You know, if I believed I could do that too, for even a second, I’d spend all my time wishing. I… I do spend all my time wishing!”
“What do you wish?” Maud said again, a quiver of something Pinkie would have feared was terror were she not beaten and bruised and filthy and crying.
“To be free! Of this!” she spat, wildly gesturing around to the farm and everything on it, “To be free of all of this, Maud. That’s what I wish… Now go and get your tools.”
Maud looked at her again, and her mouth moved like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. She did as Pinkie said, because she’d been screamed at. Just like Pinkie did what their father said.
Pinkie thought about her beach as she followed Maud to the tool shed.
“What do you think it is?” Marble babbled fearfully. The chicken coop stank. To the untrained, it would have been some nondescript foulness. But Pinkie had worked her whole life away on this farm. She knew what it was.
It was death.
“It’s okay girls, go back to work,” she reassured. The day had progressed relatively normally since their spat this morning, they’d even made up lost time. Cleaning up the mess the foxes left would set them back, however. But there was no way she was going to make the fillies do this.
Once they were safely away, Pinkie lifted the roof off, and was nearly sick. The chickens were fine. They walked around, empty and vaccous and stupid, oblivious to the rotting, putrefied rooster carcass in their midst.
It was far too big for a fox to kill, and it couldn’t have been dead more than a day. Pinkie had watched it last night before bed. How was it this rotten, this decayed? It wasn’t possible.
“I wished, yesterday,” Maud piped up, and Pinkie felt her queasy stomach drop further.
“What?” Pinkie replied, blanching.
“You told me. You wanted the rooster to stop taking your dreams away. I wished it would.”
“Maud… no you… this…” The rooster had only been dead a day, it couldn’t have been this rotted already. Pinkie moved away from the coop and grabbed the filly by the haunches, “Where did you get that money Maud, tell me. Honestly now.”
“I wish—”
“No! No you didn’t because… if you… and this…”
Words failed her. The minds of fillies... so blank and impressionable. So untainted by the cruel world they lived in.
But it wasn’t possible.
“Maud, I’m not gonna be mad, okay sweetie? But you need to tell me, Pinkie promise to tell the truth, where did you find that money? I don’t care if you stole it, okay? Tell me where you got it? Tell me.”
“I wished,” Maud replied, a rare break in her armour widening as tears brimmed in her eyes, “Yesterday I wished for Mr Rooster to go away so you could dream. The day before the money, I wished for it. I wished, Pinkie. Like… when I was small, and I wished mum would stop crying all the time, like I wished you would wash my hair… like I wished you’d be free.”
“What do you mean?” Pinkie asked, feeling cold, “What do you mean you wished I’d be free?”
“Like you wanted. Like you said,” Maud replied, sobbing now in earnest.
Pinkie chewed her lip, feeling somewhere between stupid and terrified and desperate. Because her mind was an adult’s and she didn’t believe in wishes. But she cared more about the safety of her sisters than her stupid, adult’s pride. So she acted like a filly.
“Undo it. Maud, undo the wish! I don’t want to be free anymore, Maud, understand me?!”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Maud replied, tears mirroring those that poured down Pinkie’s face as they grappled, desperate, steeping in the odour of death, “It’s one thing a day… you should have told me yesterday.”
Pinkie dropped her, and sat breathless on the field. Marble and Limestone had heard the commotion and started to cautiously trot over. As soon as they saw the tears, they started too. All of her little sisters, all still children, cried as Pinkie tried to compose herself.
A small part of her wanted to order them to get back to work. But, somehow, holding them all, with no care for whatever drunken violent eyes stared at them from the house felt more appropriate this time.
There was no sound, for the first time in so long. And when Pinkie’s eyes finally fluttered open, they did so of their own accord, unmolested by roosters or drunkards both.
The events of yesterday felt like a blur, but when she remembered them, Pinkie sat up in panic. Only there were no sisters to apologise to, no roosters to steal her dreams. The room was empty, save for three small beds.
Pinkie clambered out of bed, clumsy in her terror, and ran downstairs. For the first time in her life she prayed to see her mother or her father, but they too were gone. The house was vacant. Outside, the fields were unruly; nothing would grow here. This wasn’t even a farm anymore. This was a wreck, suitable for only abandonment.
Nothing was tying her now.
She’d wished to be free yesterday.
She was free today.
She was alone.
And all Pinkie could do was slump, inconsolable in the dirt, mourning for three fillies and their beautiful minds and wishes. She didn’t move until she fell asleep again. And, as always, she dreamed.
But this time, she wasn’t on a beach.
No.
She was eating dinner with her sisters, with parents that loved them. That protected them. She saw their smiles, for the first time they were free to be fillies.
But it wasn’t real.
She wanted that kinder world now, because freedom was bitter.
Because she still wished.
But she had an adult’s mind.
