Boulangerie
It was pouring rain in Zephyr Heights, a city not quite far enough above the clouds to escape it. For so many of the Pegasi who lived there, that was a shame, as they all learned to fly again not but two weeks ago. Many didn’t let it stop them, streaking through the stinging drops regardless and struggling with the stubbornness of soggy wings. Many more instead took the day to let their hearts grow fonder for it, like the two princesses at the corner cafe up where the heights meet the cloudline.
The ivory coat of the elder sister, Zipp, could nearly blind as it was hit by the wet, gray light from the gold-hemmed window so clean, dripping with the youngest raindrops you ever could find. The younger, with her phone set on the mirror marble table, as if it was an adorable precipice, stared down into it. They were silent against the trickle of the ivy fountain that filled the room when the warm trumpet’s harmon mute did not, other than the occasional dull tap of Pipp’s hoof upon her phone’s screen.
“So,” Zipp broke the silence, “Fly into any more windows, lately?”
She had a way of getting her sister’s attention, who glared up at her unconvincingly, as hard as her soft eyes could, “You know, while you’re staring at that thing.” Zipp added.
“No, I haven’t,” tossing aside the glare like a lock of her purple mane, “Not since mom got me this,”
From beneath the table Pipp procured a purse of such grandeur that she disappeared behind it, and enough glitz to force Zipp to squint as its rustling sequins blared gold. With a swift motion, and a little whistle of her own, Pipp slotted the phone into a perfectly sized pocket camouflaged into its side. She grinned at her sister with a simple satisfaction.
“What’s gonna happen when you finally drop that thing on somepony?”
Pipp thought for a moment, then shook her head and shrugged, “I’ll just buy another one!”
Maybe it’s better she didn’t answer that, Zipp thought, as she watched her sister blankly stare down for a moment at the empty spot on the table where her phone once was before remembering to retrieve it.
Both of their drinks arrived, the ones the need not even order themselves. A light lavender vanilla tea, steamed milk mostly, for the younger. A dark and almondy brew for the elder, steeping darker by the second, unsweetened; the baristas could never get it quite right. Zipp sat still, as she’d learned to, and waited for the clack of Pipp’s camera shudder, a noise that hung about her life like the chirping of an electric bird. But it never came. Pipp set the phone face down.
“What’s wrong?” Zipp asked, “They even put it in that cup you like, the one with the little gold treble clefs on it.”
“Alto.”
“Right.”
“I just...” Pipp turned her cup by the handle, watching the cream-foam heart on its surface distort, “Do you think ponies are really looking at what I post?”
“Who isn’t?” asked Zipp as she gently crushed a sugarcube onto a plate beneath her hoof, beginning to divide the resulting chunks.
“Well, I saw a fan of mine the other day at the ‘Joissance Vous Donneray’,”
“The dance club? By yourself? I guess mom can’t stop you, sneaking out is easier than ever.”
“No, It’s only a dance club at night, it’s a regular tea room during the day. I had just posted a picture of my tea and macarons, as one does,” Zipp nodded admittingly at this, “and while I was flicking through the comments, I saw one that said ‘Beautiful teacup!’. Well, I looked at her profile and I recognized her; it was a lady sitting only a few tables away from me, in the same cafe!”
Smiling and nodding, Zipp dumped the one-and-three-fourths sugarcube into her tea. She knew how proud her sister was of those things, but as she looked up at her, her smile seemed held captive by a tingling worry. “I don’t get it,” Zipp said, sipping cautiously.
“We were in the same cafe. We were drinking out of identical cups!”
Zipp nearly snorted, but restrained herself so she could finally drink. The warmth of the tea was chased by a peppermint coolness, carried on a distant bitter, and a familiar smell. Bridlewood. Izzy’s recommendation was sound.
“Are they really looking at them, or not?” Zipp heard her whisper into her porcelain cup as she stared out the window and down onto the tops of their golden city. On the tower faces, sunken beneath the fog, the holographic screens stretched across their glassy faces flickered from color to color, their pictures blurred, pulsing like boreal fish beneath the sea.
“No, no,” Zipp drew her sister’s wide green stare away from the endless view, “she was looking at your picture. She wasn’t looking at her own cup. She was distracted by you, not from you.”
“That’s sweet.” Said Pipp, her feathers fluttering a bit, “But it’s different now that we can all fly. Everything is. Maybe they shouldn’t look so close anymore.”
“Whoa, Pipp,” her sister laughed nervously, “are you feeling okay? I mean, let’s not kid ourselves here, would you even do with yourself without any of that?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to end my entire social life. All I’m saying is now that we can all fly again, I want ponies to pay attention, but not THAT much attention. That’s not too much to ask, right?”
“Oh, it is,” Zipp said without hesitation, not unfamiliar with her sister’s meticulous fantasies of a perfect world, “But what does that have to do with everyone flying? What does that change?”
“Well,” Pipp recomposed herself in her seat, “I’ve been practicing my routines. Now that we’re not using wires to fly, I’ve had to relearn them. Every swoop, and spin, and glide.” Pipp shimmied gracefully in her seat, dancing in her head, dodging adoring flowers tossed from an imaginary audience, “It’s hard! It’s hard without the wires. Now that our magic is back, flying isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it IS what it used to be. Now that everyone can do it, everything is turned on its head. Everything! I was the only Pegasus in Zephyr Heights who could sing and fly the way I did.”
A whine had crept into Pipps voice, then she stopped. Zipp didn’t let her. “And?” she urged her to talk herself out of that glumness, the same way she talked herself into it.
“And it’s impossible.”
If not for the tremble in her voice, the one Zipp only ever heard muffled behind doors closed for Pipp’s quiet consolations with her mother, she might have even teased her for such an easy defeat.
“You can sing or you can fly, nopony could do both. You and I have been ‘flying’ our whole lives. I can do either, but both? I’m out of breath before the second verse! It’s impossible. So you know what?”
Zipp was refilling her cup, avoiding her sister’s eyes that she suspected, with the intensifying of her voice, to be wettening. Something she hated to see.
“I’m going to bring back wires,”
A splash of pale, unsteeped tea sloshed over Zipp’s cup. A grin glanced her face, but she hid it, “oh shut up,” she said quietly laughing.
“Watch me. I slammed my face into a window midair, remember? Now everypony’s recording themselves slamming their face into windows. They love it! What’s the difference if I fly into a window with wires or without? Same with recitals. I’m up there, swooping, shining,” her eyes closed, sweetly witnessing, “arcing through the air. That’s what they come to see Zipp. It’s not a novelty act, I’m not jumping hoops and swallowing swords. It’s an art, an image, a painting in motion.”
“It’s distracting.”
As if something had slipped out, Pipp’s delicate dove wings clutched to her sides.
“The wires, I mean. Everyone knows we used them. Now they’re going to be looking for them. If they see them, they’ll never un-see them. Just take the air show down a notch, they’ll still watch. Like you said, they’re there for YOU, aren’t they? Better yet, come fly with me for a while, I’ll get you in shape.”
“Since when I you been flying? I never see you flying.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because I practice... Up top.”
“Up top?” Pipp’s reach for her phone was cut short, “you mean, UP TOP, up top?”
For a moment Zipp thought she heard some admiration in her sister’s voice. “Zipp,” she teased, her head slightly shuddered, her features falling like marionette’s limbs into a demeaning stare not wholly unfamiliar. Her head tilted down, coyly examining her older sister with raised eyebrows over a pair of invisible sunglasses. Zipp could only laugh at her facsimile.
“You know that doesn’t work on me,” she chuckled, “especially not when you do it.”
Persistently, Pipp’s eyes narrowed into a tenser squint, her lip curling, doubling down with a confident intensity that could catch Zipp’s mane alight. Finally she brought her phone to eye level, examining her scrunched face in the reverse camera, and finally relaxing with a sigh.
“You’re right, I can’t do it like her. What am I missing?”
“Hmm, dignity?”
“Ha-ha,” Pipp faked, “you’d get the real deal if mom found out you were flying above the cloudline,” her voice then drooped into gushing worry, “What if you fall, Zipp?”
“It’s not gonna happen. I’ve been preparing for this longer than you or mom know. Don’t tell her that, either. The clouds catch our fall, it’s part of our magic. You can only punch down through them at the right velocity.”
“What about going UP through them?”
The question was one Pipp must have longed to know since, despite being lost again in her phone, it came quite punchingly. What lie above the clouds, Zipp remembered the the days she asked that question, too. What will it be like to finally crash through that dark blanket on a stormy day and demand to see the sun. To her, the blue sky was like a friend she always wanted, vying for its attention with brazen acrobatics and practicing on her gust machines. Now she could fly up and meet it, face to face. She didn’t listen when they told her to never meet her heroes.
She remembered tumbling. She remembered the roar of free-fall. That late night she snuck home was the closest she had ever come to watching a passion die. Perhaps Pipp would forget her own questions in the depths of her phone, Zipp thought, but her sister’s stolen glances proved that wrong. The smell of metal came back mockingly like a whisper, “remember me?”, the hot red drip amiss.
Pipp had begun to stare now. Zipp had some banal and technical answer ready for her, until she saw her sister grinning. Wildly. The puff of her cheeks encroaching her eyes, swelling with a staunched laugh.
“You did, didn’t you?” She looked like a pink balloon nearly popping, “You smashed your face against the overcast?”
Beneath Zipp’s eggshell coat a red blush grew, tinting her the color of a kitten’s nose. Just a touch paler than her own sister.
“No, no I didn’t.” Zipp cleared her throat to punctuate her earnesty, “It doesn’t work like that. You’re thinking cloudline is like glass, when it’s more like... Sand.”
If Pipp retained anything, it was her mother’s insight. Her smile seemed permanent, and Zipp clamored to find the secret phrase to break it. Behind those ceaseless emerald eyes, all the humiliating possibilities of Zipp’s mishap were directed like an arrhythmic orchestra.
“My head got stuck in it,” Zipp finally said.
A few other patrons looked over as Pipp’s phone escaped her hoof and clattered to the immaculate floor. A waiflike effort was made to catch it, but Pipp was already laughing beyond the capacity for any sound but an occasional squeak. While Zipp fidgeted, wondering if she said that too loud, Pipp sniffled through her tears and asked, “Wha-? Like an ostrich?”
Tight lipped and stone faced, Zipp said, “Yeah, but, you know...”
She began to illustrate with an upwards streaking hoof, colliding with her other hoof from beneath.
“Upside down.”
As her hooves touched, she stopped as thought it was a rude gesture, but struggled to stop herself from grinning, if at nothing else, her sister’s hysteria, “Hey, you’ll be even worse when you get up there!”
“No I won’t!” Pipp managed to say, drying her face with a napkin, “what do you mean ‘when’?!”
“I mean ‘right now’, if you think you’re so graceful. Let’s go.”
Zipp slid from her chair. Without giving her a chance to comply, she grabbed her sister’s obscenely sized purse as a hostage.
“No, Zipp, but we just got here! It’s scary up there!” Laughing still, Pipp tugged her purse back weakly, surrenderingly drug along with it, “I don’t wanna be an ostritch, too!”
Whatever could that mean, the quiet jet set of the cafe thought as the princesses brigaded out the golden doors and into the rain soaked streets together. A pegasus by the window watched them a while as they walked together to the foggy outlook. As they perched upon its precipice, still glittering with pooled raindrops, that may have been real fear she saw in Pipps face. Maybe in Zipp’s too. But one helped the other remember to breath that air so easy to breath up high, and “with me, ready, go” they dove off and soared after the beams of a slowly goldening sky.
THE END