Other onomatopoeia for the detonation of fireworks
Author's Note
I’ve been meaning to do a Bonfire Night story for literal years, but always left it too late and missed the window and stubbornly refused to do it any day other than the day in question.
That my original idea involved Rainbow Dash (someone I’ve subsequently entirely forgotten how to write for) and now involves one of my patented, uh, same pony but with a new name ‘original characters’ should tell you how long this has been languishing as a concept.
Nothing to stop me from doing it again, obviously. Over and over. Forever.
Other onomatopoeia for the detonation of fireworks
There was something endlessly novel in watching someone with hooves putting on a scarf, or so Sam thought. Certainly, the technique displayed by Treacle Tart was one which he never tired of seeing put into action. Quite mesmerising.
The trick, it seemed, was all in the loop, with most of the trick of the loop being in the flick. Once you had the flick sorted the whole thing was a doddle. Just a simple flick and then it was around snug and knotted loosely, all with nothing but a toss of the head.
It shouldn’t have worked, and yet it did. Fabulous.
“Is there something on my face?” Treacle Tart asked once she’d got done with the flicking and the looping and had her scarf well-placed, finding Sam just stood staring into the middle-distance she happened to be occupying right at that moment.
Called out, he shook his head and stood up straight. He’d been drooping.
“Sorry, just thinking that someone with really great taste must have got you that scarf,” he said. Treacle looked down and pawed at the thing with a hoof, or possibly hoofed at the thing with a hoof.
“You got me this scarf,” she said.
“Did I? Fancy that.”
He got a hard stare for that one. Ponies could often crack these out at a moment’s notice, Sam had discovered, which might have said more about him than them. Most people probably didn’t warrant having them cracked out quite so often.
“Har. Am I going to need more than this? How cold is it outside?” She asked.
He looked her over. That little duffel coat she had had been a good start, the scarf a good addition, but Sam felt she probably needed more. Paid to be overprepared when one was going to be standing around outside in the dark and cold for an extended period of time.
“Pretty nippy. I’d wear a hat if I were you,” he said.
“Right. Hat. Okay.”
She went off, trusting to his experience, he having done this before and she having not. Sam checked the time. From somewhere outside there came a brief series of pops and crackles, the muffled sound of cheers and then silence again.
Sam would have tutted at people starting early, but some people had started before it had even got dark, so that ship had well and truly sailed. Strange people, some people.
Treacle Tart returned presently, replete with a cunning, warm-looking hat.
“Someone with really great taste must have got you that hat,” Sam said.
“Shut up,” Treacle Tart said, albeit while grinning just a little bit.
“Not a lot of mileage on that joke, eh? Fair. Well, let’s get going.”
And get going they did, turning the lights off on their way out and with Treacle trotting circles on the path while Sam locked up. Then they were off. Their destination wasn’t an awful long way but it was a walk, so the sooner the better really.
“So what’s the deal with this, anyway?” Treacle asked, after a few silent minutes of walking.
“Deal with what?” Sam asked, not having a clue what she might be referring to.
As though on cue someone just up ahead let off one single, solitary firework. Not even a big one. Up it whizzed from their back garden and pop it went in the night air, all on its lonesome. Sam never understood why people did that.
“This night. This whole thing. Why is it happening?” Treacle asked, clarifying her original position. Now the question made sense. To Sam, at least.
“I didn’t explain it?”
“A bit, but not really. You mostly just kept looking me dead in the face and saying ‘fireworks’ and hoping I’d be on-board which is, well, you weren’t wrong, but I am still curious about this tradition of yours. And don’t you burn someone alive? When does that happen?”
Something may have become muddled or else Sam’s original explanation to her might have been more lacking in detail than he initially thought. Perhaps a bit too heavy on the fireworks indeed, and a little light on the useful information. Or maybe she’d heard from outside sources. Either way, this was one thing that needed correcting.
“Uh, well, technically that kind of already happened. In the past. We burn a representation of that guy. Sometimes,” he said.
And, really, looking back on it, the burning had been the least of the fellow’s worries at the time. If anything it had probably come as something of a relief following everything else he’d been through up to that point. Not a great day for him, all things considered.
Not that Sam had told her any of those particular details, or indeed any of the details, really, beyond there being a celebration. A prolonged conversation about the gruesome punishments that mankind had often meted out (and sometimes still did, sometimes) on transgressors of this or that Very Important Law was not a conversation he really wanted to have with her.
Not even getting into getting into the specific historical background, either. There was a lot of context involved and he’d been knackered at the time.
Treacle didn’t mind, or even care overmuch. What she’d been told had been enough for her to go on. As she’d said, fireworks had been enough to get her on board.
“That’s still pretty harsh. Humans are weird,” she said.
Sam grimaced. She didn’t know the half of it.
“We have our moments, and those moments will differ depending on where you are. This only happens here. Sometimes these days we burn something satirical, if we’re feeling saucy. Unpopular contemporary political figures, that sort of thing. All in good fun though,” he said, adding the last part as a hurried afterthought, just in case she was starting to get the wrong idea.
Her idea had been pretty wrong to start with, so too late on that one, but there you go.
“Weird.”
“Have to burn something. Can’t just have a bonfire with nothing on it, not tonight at least.”
“...weird…”
As they walked along, the booms and snaps from the various lesser parties washed over them, coming from all angles, rolling in at a distance, some coming from what felt like right behind them. Smoke drifted, the air was crisp.
All in all quite lovely. If you’re into that sort of thing. Sam was into that sort of thing. So was Treacle, luckily. They kept walking. The more they walked the closer they got, the closer they got the more people they found themselves walking with. Mostly humans, but not overwhelmingly so. There was the usual pleasant scattering of ponies here and there, even a few of the younger ones! Sam spotted a single griffon (gryphon?) also, which was unusual enough to make him raise an eyebrow.
Truly, fireworks were a unifying force. Everyone came out for fireworks.
(Excluding all those people who were staying at home and not coming out, of course).
The destination for all of these people - and for Treacle and Sam as well - was a local football ground, here appropriated for use for fireworks. Crowds were already milling, and they swelled with every passing minute. There was food, too, and some other things. It was one of the other things that caught Sam’s eye a moment after they’d arrived.
“Ooh! Sparklers! I haven’t actually got one of those in years! Wait right here, don’t go anywhere,” he said, putting a hand on Treacle’s head so she’d known which spot she was meant not to move from, a gesture she didn’t especially appreciate.
“Alright,” Treacle said, not really having anything else she could say in the time it took for him to go dashing off. In the time it took to purchase sparklers and come back he’d come back, having purchased sparklers.
“Sparklers!” he declared, brandishing sparklers.
“Sparklers?”
She’d meant this in a lightly mocking way, but Sam was too busy tearing into the packets to really notice.
“How do these work again...ah, here we are!”
More through luck than anything else he got his unwrapped sparkler ignited and it duly started sparklering, much as had been advertised. He took a second to appreciate this then bent down towards Treacle.
“Hey, what-” she had about enough time to say.
“This one’s for you!” He said.
He fiddled, then:
“There you go! Look at you, getting involved!” He said with glowing delight, stepping back to take in the full effect. Treacle just stood there, sparkler held gingerly between her teeth.
Sam smiled at her for a moment or two then began to frown as a nagging doubt nagged at him, as nagging doubts are wont to do.
Slowly but surely the sparkler was burning its way down, as might well be expected. Only instead of gradually burning its way down towards, say, the mittened hand of a child it was here instead burning its way down towards the mouth of a pony.
“Thish dhoshen’t fehl shafe,” Treacle said.
“Yeah, on second thoughts maybe I’ll hold that,” Sam said, stooping and relieving her of the sparkler. Once he had it well in hand he straightened and looked Treacle over again. She looked safer, yes, but now she seemed to be lacking a certain something, a certain flair.
“What?” She asked, feeling appraised and a little worried about what his next move might be, given what his moves had been so far this evening.
“Something’s missing,” Sam said. He then snapped his fingers or at least tried to, the gloves he had on preventing this from doing anything worthwhile. “I’ve got it! This way.”
“These better be amazing fireworks…” Treacle muttered, trotting after him, following him through the crowds to another, different stall where he was already making a transaction. When he turned around he was holding something new, in addition to the still-lit sparkler. How he was juggling all of this stuff was anyone’s guess.
“What’s this?” Treacle asked warily, nodding to this new packet even as Sam was tearing his way into it with his teeth. From it he produced something she did not know. He cracked them, and they started to glow - in a variety of colours, no less.
“Glowing tubes!” He declared, delighted.
“The level of excitement you have for all this stuff has gone through slightly embarrassing all the way to kind of cute,” Treacle said, grinning at him.
This flat-footed Sam for a moment.
But he got over it.
“...you can make a loop out of them!”
This he proceeded to do, and once he had a loop made he promptly slipped it on over Treacle’s head so it ended up dangling glowingly about her neck. Once again he stepped back to admire his work and once again he found it good. And this time less of a fire hazard.
“That’s safer. And you look wonderful!” He said.
Treacle looked down at herself. It was hard to see the loop, but not impossible. She gave a shuffle and it swung pleasingly (and glowingly). She looked up at Sam.
“I feel wonderful,” she said.
“That’s wonderful!”
How wonderful.
Further discussion on the wonderfulness of everything was forestalled by a crackling, incomprehensible voice blaring out across a hastily-erected and poorly-run PA system. Despite not a single word having come through clearly it seemed everyone understood what it meant, as almost as one the crowd started drifting in a specific direction. Even Treacle found herself drawn along with the pull.
“This it?” She hissed up at Sam.
“I assume so,” he hissed back at her.
The thickness of bodies soon meant that drifting became more shuffling, and then stopped completely as everyone apparently arrived at where it was they were meant to be - in this instance (though neither Sam nor Treacle knew or saw) on one side of the pitch opposite the other side, where the fireworks were.
In the darkness of the other side, fleeting figures could be seen darting here and there, performing the final touches. A hush fell, the expectant kind. Oooooh, etcetera.
Then, the music kicked in. Bizarre, slightly off-kilter techno mashups of thirty year old rock songs blared and, in time to these mashups, there came the fireworks.
Zip! Phwip! Fwoosh! All that sort of thing. Followed by, of course, bang! Pow! Crack!
And so on.
The crowd went ‘ooh’, the crowd went ‘ah’. They appreciated the artistry and effort involved in getting it all to sync up so beautifully with the music and the booms and pops. They appreciated the exquisite layout and organisation of the fireworks that let them explode in such wondrous patterns. They appreciated the pretty lights and loud sounds. Really, they appreciated all of it.
Treacle of course was getting to enjoy none of this, because she couldn’t see any of it.
Well, she could sort of see what was going on, but not really. Mostly she could see the top-half of what was going on and any exceptionally high-flying fireworks. Even the music was coming to her muffled. It was not an edifying experience.
This took Sam a minute or so to notice, and he only did when he looked to see how much of a good time she was having and found that she was not having a good time at all, and actually looked to be having something of a bad time.
Since he was the one who’d brought her Sam felt personally responsible. This would not stand!
“Come on,” he said, bending down.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Getting you a better view.”
And before she could fully grasp what he meant by this she herself had been fully grasped and hoisted, hefted up off the ground and, with only a little difficulty, plopped onto Sam’s shoulders. Or shoulder singular, rather - he had considered putting her up with her legs either side of his head but had felt that as far as he was going that might be too far for her, for one reason or another. Not a toddler, after all.
“Whoa, hey, this is- ooooh!”
Whatever protests she might have cocked and loaded about being manhandled so abruptly left her mind the moment she got a proper look at the fireworks. And not just a proper look, either - she was hit with the whole experience. The unmuffled noise and flash and all of it. Huge eyes got hugerer as they widened.
“Ooh!” She went again as a particularly big one went off, thunderous bang rolling over the crowd (the crowd also going ‘Ooh!’ in many places) and making one unseen child somewhere start crying, as children were sometimes wont to do.
“Better?” Sam asked.
“Much!” She said.
And indeed it was. Not that Treacle was a stranger to fireworks or anything like that, it had just been a while was all, and this was a particularly bombastic display and the music - though ridiculous and not really all that good - added just that bit extra to set the whole thing off.
Boom boom kapow fizz and bang indeed.
Sam enjoyed it too, even if he now had to split his time between appreciation of loud noises and bright lights and making sure his friend did not fall off his shoulder. He’d always been adequate at multitasking though, so it wasn’t all that big of a deal. Mostly he was just happy that Treacle was happy. And that there were fireworks because fireworks were great and he loved his fireworks. But mostly that Treacle was happy.
It had to end though, sadly, and did so. The last bang rattled away into the night, smoke drifted, the crowd went ‘Whoo’ here and there and then went ‘Aww’ when it realised that there wouldn’t be anymore. These were the things expected of crowds at such an event, and they were only too happy to deliver.
People started drifting away, and Sam was prepared to do likewise but something nagged. Something was missing. He gently set Treacle back on her hooves but still the feeling that he’d skipped a step was there. What was missing?
Then he got it.
“Where’s the bonfire? Did we miss the bonfire? What on earth is going on,” he said, looking around, standing up on tip-toes for extra height and craning his neck. Nothing appeared to be on fire and people really did look to just be leaving, like the whole thing was over.
Treacle looked up at him and put on an exaggerated expression of crushed disappointed. She really cranked it up a notch when she was sure he could see her, too.
“And I really wanted to see someone burned, too…” she said, making certain her lip was wobbling.
“Shush, you, I told you we don’t do that anymore. Pretty sure it was only his insides, anyway. Oh balls, maybe it was earlier? Before the fireworks? Definitely think we missed it. Knew I should have read the event details...” he said, more to himself than to her, casting his mind back to what the posting in the local newspaper had said.
This told him nothing, as he’d barely read it at the time and couldn’t remember it now.
Rolling her eyes and shaking her head Treacle reared up onto her hind legs, grabbed Sam by his scarf to pull him down closer to her level and then kind of sort of rammed her head into the crook of his neck, there to nuzzle. This was such an inexplicable and unexpectedly affected gesture that it stopped his worrying in its tracks, which had been the whole point of course.
“It’s fine. Next year. This was nice, thanks,” she said.
“Uh, don’t mention it. Just, you know, showing you the culture,” Sam said, somewhere between flustered and shellshocked. Flustshocked?
“I know. I liked it,” she said, grinning at him.
“Good, um - good. Uh, want to see if they’re still selling chips or something?” He asked, pointing to where he’d seen someone selling chips before and where they might still have been selling chips. Treacle nodded.
“Sure,” she said, still grinning.
And off they went.
