White Lightning / Black Mud
White Lightning / Black Mud
A stallion twice her size is talking to her. They are tucked together in the rotwood corner of the barn, stallion towering over her—and yet she is the one in control.
It’s more than just the way she carries herself, Fiddlesticks thinks. It’s some innate quality of hers, fittingly electric, that hums just beneath the surface of her skin. It’s a feeling that every hair is standing at attention whenever you draw near her. It’s an energy that arcs from her to you in the blink of an eye. A whiff of ozone that lingers after she’s gone. A scorching heat in your chest that longs for her to return.
Even from up here, with the lights in her eyes and a sea of dancers moving hypnotically beneath her, that Lightning strikes Fiddle.
Fiddlesticks tries to ignore it. She forces her eyes to skate past her old-new friend, repeats the mantra again in her head:
Lightning Dust is not your responsibility.
Lightning’s tail whips across the packed-earth floor. She does a funny half-step back, then a full step forward, and the stallion balks at her audacity. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He thinks he’s in control, flicks his tail just like hers, imitates her half-step full-step dance. Smiles, but only after hers. Laughs, but only once she’s begun.
She’s playing him like a fiddle.
Fiddlesticks closes her eyes, because if she didn’t they would find themselves magnetically drawn to Lightning’s flaring swept-back wings, her easy smirk, her smoldering eyes alive with enigmatic emberglow.
She breathes.
Lightning Dust is not your responsibility.
Her bow saws against the strings of her fiddle as she stands, resolute, on the makeshift apple crate stage. She can feel that she is blushing, perhaps even furiously enough to show, and she digs in twice as hard. Bow to string. Hoof to stage.
Beside her, the dulcimer player whose name she never bothered to learn thuds out a hollow beat with one hoof. His strokes along the thin, taut strings are loose and quick. His eyes are closed, too—but softly.
Fiddlesticks’ eyelids shudder as she fights the will to open them.
The banjo player picks easily, each note falling together into a rich, full texture that washes over the dancers. The percussionist is practically dancing herself as her hooves fly over tambourine and kickbass, stomping and clapping in patterns too complex for Fiddlesticks to identify before they change.
Fiddlesticks plays each note, one by one. Each in just the right spot. A mechanical precision that the others on the stage could only dream of.
She’s practiced, which is both why she’s so perfect and why her mind is able to wander. Her eyes fight to open.
Lightning Dust is not your responsibility.
The music turns, twists, changes, and the crowds whoops and yips and yee-haws as they try to keep up. Dust motes imitate their swirling dance through the beams of burning orange light shot between ancient slats of grey-brown wood.
The barn shudders. Coughs another puff of dust out from the disused rafters.
A smell is roused. An old smell, but not a rotten one. A mix of rain and dust and dirt and age. The softness of wood that is old and eaten through by insects, and yet still stands. A lilt above it that is all fruit-y citrus—punch and lemonade in glass bowls. The unmistakable sweetness of a summer sunset.
And a spark of ozone.
Lightning Dust is not—
But she can’t finish the thought before her eyes are open, in just enough time to catch a glimpse of Lightning’s rump sliding out the barn door and into the evening air. The stallion, of course, slinks out after her.
The dance ends, Fiddle’s final notes lost as she loses her grip on her bow. The dancers, however, hardly seem to notice. They all whoops and holler and stomp on the dirt to show their appreciation. The percussionist waves her tambourine in the air with a magical rattle.
That darkened corner of the barn stands empty.
“I-I oughta go,” Fiddle mutters as she jams her instrument into its beat-up case. “Sorry.”
The dulcimer player shrugs. “Ah, we’re about finished anyways,” he drawls. “Thank you kindly for filling in.”
It doesn’t even occur to Fiddle to respond as she leaps from the edge of the crate and darts into the crowd.
Dancers try to stumble out of her way, but their congestion on the improvised dance floor make that nearly impossible. Instead, Fiddlesticks leaves a wake of ponies toppling over like dominoes, apologies long forgotten.
The sound of the dance fades away as Fiddlesticks squirms out of the barn door and into the wet warmth of the world beyond, replaced by the rasping songs of katydids and cicadas. The never-ending distant rush of wind in trees, somewhere outside the farm’s bounds, fills in silences like rain.
And, somewhere beneath it all, conspiratorial murmuring. Two voices intertwined.
Fiddle pricks her ears and swivels them about, catlike, finding the source. After a moment, her hooves carry her around the right corner of the barn.
It's familiar, of course. A tangle of multicolored hooves. Murmurs fading into breathy moans of delight, real or otherwise. Lightning underneath him, yet pawing at him in a way that was outright directive. Pushy.
The mares lock eyes.
Lightning's naughty sparkle dies in an instant. In the next, the pair is thrown apart. Magnetically, as if they were like poles brought together.
"Fid," she says, toneless and swollen with meaning.
"Light," Fid replied, much the same.
The stallion wipes his mouth with the back of one hoof. He laughs, a mischievous and husky chuckle that he probably thinks sounds very imposing. "You lookin' to join in?" His voice is heavily accented. A regular at the dances. "I don't mind a third."
"Hey." Lightning gives the stallion a scalding glare.
He laughs again. "What?"
"You know what," Lightning grumbles.
The stallion is left frozen, mouth hanging open, trying to find his next words and failing miserably.
Lightning doesn't wait. Instead, she turns on her heel, mutters one final "idiot" over her shoulder, and stalks past Fiddle into the light spilling out from the barn doors.
Fiddle tries to stand in the way, but Lightning only roughly clips her shoulder.
"The hell is her deal?" the stallion wonders, mostly to himself, but loud enough for Lightning to hear.
"Beat it, Storm," Fiddle calls back to him.
He calls something back, but it is drowned out by a rumble of stomping from inside the barn. Fiddle decides she doesn't care nearly enough to ask him to repeat himself.
After another moment, he realizes he isn't the most important stallion in the world just now, and takes off in a huff. Straight into the air. A puff of dust lingers behind him.
Fiddle gives him a few points for late-stage self awareness.
When she turns back, Lightning is standing in a pool of yellow-blue lamplight. The two don't quite combine to make green. They just fall on her—some candles, some lanterns, some bug zappers—and paint her in an ever-shifting pattern like the surface of lake water.
Fiddle wants to compare it to herself. Blue and yellow and all over Lightning. But she doesn't let herself.
"You alright?" she asks, her accent rounding her words into a soft mush.
Lightning doesn't reply. She's staring into the barn—or perhaps through it. Her eyes don't flick about like someone truly watching a crowd. They only gaze straight ahead, glassy and unmoving.
"Light?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
Still, she doesn't answer.
She thinks about it, certainly. One hoof almost kicks the dirt, but stops in its earliest tremble. Her wings slide open ever so slightly, feather on feather, but stop before flaring to their full span.
Fiddle sighs. "Look, I wasn't tryin' to—"
"I know."
Lightning, at last, blinks. Once, then many times, as if trying to clear something foreign from her eyes. Her gaze lowers to the dusty earth beneath her hooves. She still says nothing.
"I grew up with Storm," Fiddle says.
Lightning gives her a head-cocked look.
"The stallion," Fide explains, pointing around the side of the barn. "Not the sharpest tool in the shed, I'll tell ya."
"Well, I wasn't planning on talking philosophy with the guy."
Fiddle nearly chokes. "I-I know."
But you're smart. Smart in the way that no one appreciates. Whip smart. Sharp as a tack and twice as precise. Lightning smart, but someone needs to stand there and draw it out of you and he would never.
Never.
"I just…" The words jumble on the back of Fiddle's tongue. "I dunno. Nevermind."
Lightning stares into the barn for another moment, then turns to look to Fiddle. "You always say that."
It wasn't accusatory. It could have been. Should have been, maybe. Could have been sad, too.
The mares lock eyes for a long moment.
Fiddle was the first to look at the ground. Lightning's gaze drifted back into the barn.
"I guess…" Fiddle sighs. "I guess I just think that you can do better."
Lightning laughs. Dry and rough. "That's really, really not the point."
Then what is the point?
"Oh," Fiddle says.
Lightning fluffs her wings. The almost-white tips of her feathers prickle in a sudden explosion of motion, then fold neatly back at her sides.
She steps out of the light of the barn. It is here, in the darkness, that her colors become clear. True.
Bright yellow-orange mane, brighter than the sickly pastel barely-yellow of Fiddle's coat. So strong. So powerful. Even in the low light and the blueness of evening, it seemed to shine like the sun.
And her coat. That perfect aquamarine, like daylight sparkling on lake water.
Lightning approaches Fiddle, and Fiddle can feel her every hair stand on end as the electricity permeates the air.
"Did I, um… are you all done?" Lightning asks, nodding towards the barn.
Fiddle shrugs. "The set's finished, if that's what you mean."
"Right…" Lightning's tongue clicks. "Sorry I missed it."
"You didn't."
"I did." Lightning shakes her head. "I'll do better next time."
"You don't gotta—"
"I will, though," Lightning says quickly. "I will. Promise."
It's… warm. But quick. Hurried.
The song inside the barn ends, and another chorus of whoops and hollers and furious stomping rings out through the fields. Before long, though, it fades, and the crickets take over.
Lightning stomps her own hooves in a little fidgety dance.
"You okay?"
"I'm wired," Lightning says.
"Mhm."
"I'm never gonna be able to sleep like this," she says. "You?"
Fiddle hefts her instrument case up. "I dunno. I'm pretty beat. Plus, I've got another one of these tomorrow."
"Well, all the more reason to stay up a little later, right?" Lightning says. "Sleep in tomorrow morning?"
"Mm…" Fiddle kicks at the ground. No matter how hard she tries, she can't pull her eyes up to meet Lightning's. "I really should get back and—"
"C'mon, Fids."
Lightning steps towards her.
The prickly feeling grows. Lightning passes in and out of the yellow-blue shafts of barn light, and she is just so indescribably there. So different from the world around her, so picked-up and plopped-down. So out of place.
Fiddle could smell her. She smells not like electricity but like rain.
"Look, I… you brought me here to show me around, right?" Lightning says. "Where you grew up?"
Fiddle shrugs. "I guess."
It feels stupid now. It feels like I'm playing you a song that I remember loving, but my love of it is tied up in memories you don't have. The music is weak and the lyrics make me cringe and I want to turn it off because you're not enjoying it. You're not having fun. You're just pretending to.
"So show me something," Lightning requests. "Don't you know where the cool kids hang out?"
The places I was always too scared to go. Places I avoided like the plague, like your superstitious granny fussing over a broken mirror, tossing salt over her shoulder.
Fiddle scoffs. "I weren't exactly one of 'em."
"I don't believe that."
Lightning gives Fiddle a friendly nudge to the ribs with her wing, and the electric feeling leaps into Fiddle's chest. She stumbles backwards a half step.
"There's gotta be some convenience store parking lot, or… or an abandoned something-or-other," Lightning goads. "We can get slushies! Or, uh… snowballs, or whatever it is you guys eat in the country. Corn or something."
"Corn?" Fiddle repeats.
Lightning snorts. "I dunno, dude."
Fiddle laughs a bit, but it's a goofy laugh. It bubbles up from some place genuine and sounds like a little kid giggling at a lightly obscene joke, and so she bites it back.
But Lightning laughs too. "Shut up!"
She reaches over and gives Fiddle an affectionate—if overly strong—noogie.
Fiddlefights back against Lightning's hooves, batting away the swipes and grabs as they grow stronger, and their limbs tangle together, and they are very nearly on the ground when Lightning suddenly stops and pulls back.
A wild grin remains on Fiddle's lips a moment too long.
Lightning looks at her, and it shoots a cold bolt of fear into her heart.
You’re enjoying this too much.
"Uh." Fiddle clears her throat, trying to shake off the flush in her cheeks. "There's a swimmin' hole."
Lightning snorts. "For real?"
"For real."
"Where?"
"Back there," Fiddle says, gesturing into the woods behind the barn. "It's a bit of a hike."
"I can take it," Lightning assures her friend. "City kid like me could use some bugs and junk, right?”
Fiddle shrug.
Lightning’s wings fidget at her sides. “Um… has it got one of those rope swings?”
Fiddle scratches at the skin under her bandana. "Yeah."
“Awesome.”
“It’s not all that.”
“But you grew up there, didn’t you?” Lightning asks.
Fiddle makes a small sound and shrugs again.
“Would you quit shrugging already?” Lightning gives Fiddle a just-too-hard punch in the shoulder, and she stumbles, and Lightning almost reaches out to catch her before she catches herself and freezes.
Dust in the air. The light from the barn illuminates every tiny teal hair that stands at attention on Lightning’s snout, and the last reaching rays of the sun turn her mane into a blazing halo of pure fire.
“Well?” she says, and she is breathless in a way that turns Fiddle’s mind to thoughts she won’t ever allow herself to have.
“W-well, what?”
“You gonna show me the way to this swimming hole?”
“Now?”
“Yeah,” Lightning says. “I could use a dip. Plus, I wanna see where you used to swim.”
It’s something in the turn of phrase. Something that makes it all feel very suddenly intimate. More so than spit swapped behind the barn, somehow. Than the breathlessness. Than the light dancing on and through Lightning’s body.
“Come on, Fiddly-Faddly,” Lightning teases.
Fiddle hates the nickname, but she doesn’t mind it when it comes from Lightning’s lips.
She tries to play it cool. An eye-roll and a head-roll and casual step in the right direction. “Alright, alright. We can go to the stupid swimming hole.”
Lightning lets loose a triumphant chuckle and springs forward. “Knew I’d convince ya.”
Though Fiddlesticks knew the way, it was Lightning Dust who led the pair on the short hike through the woods.
She threw a look back towards her companion at each curve and fork, always grinning and excited, wordless in her question of direction. Fiddle only nodded the way ahead. She fought it a bit—the closer the drew to the fabled land, the more the crickets roared in her ears, the more she felt that this was a bridge too far.
To swim with her, in the pool of her foalhood, submerged in it, practically breathing it—
Water is conductive, after all.
“So, how’d you find this place?” Lightning asks. “Or like... Who showed it to you, I guess?”
Fiddle shrugs. “Some cousin of a cousin. Or friend of a cousin. Or cousin of a friend.”
Lightning chuckled. “That could be anyone in town.”
“Shut up.”
The path narrows. Lightning inches further into the lead, and Fiddle falls in lockstep behind her.
“Sorry,” Lightning says. “I wasn’t trying to, uh… well. Whatever. I’m just an ass sometimes.”
“You ain’t an ass.”
“Oh, I am, too,” Lightning says with a scoff. “I know that I am. I’m trying not to be.”
But that’s the dangerous part. The flash-bang-zap that sets it all off electric. The threat of the strike and the rumble of thunder that lingers after.
“Yeah,” Fiddle says. “I know.”
Lightning doesn’t look back, but her step hitches.
The trees are thinning now. Less wood, more shrub. Then cattails—tall and stiff, bobbing slightly in the breeze. Fiddle always thought it was a strange place. A place between places. Wood tuning to marsh, land turning to water. Dirt to sand.
Then wood grows back from the sand, ponymade this time. A dock.
Their hoofsteps suddenly went from silent to clamorous.
Lightning sensed that this meant they were close, and broke into a canter. The dock leapt and bowed under her hooves, floating as it was on the water. It dipped, suddenly and sharply, and Fiddle nearly fell forward onto her face.
The cattails grew in height and and thickness, all of them clustered together as the trees finally fell away and—
It was just as she remembered it.
One enormous red maple, its beautiful strong boughs hang over a pristine and perfectly still pool of blue water. All it still radiates heat, sunbaked as they were through the day, and seem almost to sparkle—even in the darkness. From moonlight alone, the water glimmers. The cattails shine. The whole thing glows from within.
A single rope, knotted at precise increments, hangs from the maple tree over the far edge of the swimming hole. It also swings ever so slightly back and forth, as if someone had only just leapt into the warm embrace of the marshwater.
Lightning pauses at the end of the dock and looks over the scene before her.
She doesn’t quite have the words for it. Doesn’t have words like ‘beautiful’ or ‘pristine’ or ‘perfect’. Not for things like this, anyway.
And so she just breathes it: “Oh.”
Fiddle sighs. “I know. It ain’t much,” she says. “It’s just what we knew how to get to and stuff. Not much to do out here.”
Lightning looks back at her companion. “There was a painting that looked just like this in my favorite picture book when I was a foal.”
And it’s poetry.
Better than anything Fiddle could muster.
Struck speechless, Fiddle can only stand and watch as LIghtning Dust slips down into the water. She doesn’t leap, doesn’t splash, doesn’t dare disturb any of it. She just slides off the dock and into the water and vanishes beneath the surface.
Fiddle walks almost to the edge of the dock and sits. She clutches her fiddle to her chest. She waits for her friend to come up for air.
The water ripples with bubbles just before Lightning breaches, breathless again, smiling wide and unbroken.
She doesn’t say anything, just sighs, and Fiddle takes this to mean that she is unhappy.
“I know it’s not as exciting as your usual stuff,” she calls.
Lightning paddles about a bit, her mane limp and sticking to her cheek. “What?” she yells.
Fiddle clears her throat. “I-I’ll find something better for us tomorrow!”
Lightning’s face crumples into a scowl. She begins to swim back across the water, no longer paddling so much as gliding.
“What’s wrong with this?” she asks when Fiddle is close enough to hear.
She reaches up and clutches the end of the dock with both front hooves. She looks up at Fiddle, and Fiddle feels she is unworthy to be looked up at.
Fiddle shrugs.
“You gotta quit shrugging like that,” Lightning chides. “I know you know. You always know.”
“You don’t know me all that good yet,” Fiddle responds.
Lightning can’t exactly argue it. “What’s wrong with this?” she asks.
“It’s not… exciting,” she repeats. It’s the only word she can think of. “Your things are bigger.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Fiddle sighs. “Well, you’re—you’re a daredevil, for hoofness’ sake.”
“I was a daredevil,” Lightning corrects. “And… I mean, believe me. I’m trying to quit.”
“Well, what’s that supposed to mean?”
Silence.
The water laps at Lightning’s sides, and the crickets chirp, and the cicadas hum. It is so much easier to wallow in silence when the sound of the forest swallows it up for you.
After a long moment, Lightning hauls herself up out of the water and onto the dock. Fiddle scrambles to get out of the way and protect her instrument, and the hard wet sound of water on wood drowns out the sounds of the forest.
“Uh…” Lightning mumbles, squeezing water out of her mane. “I mean, you’re right. I’m a daredevil. Like, as a job.”
The hard black plastic of the instrument case presses into Fiddle’s chest.
“But I guess, uh… I guess I am trying to be less… that,” Lightning says. “As a pony. As me.”
Fiddle shifts. “Huh.”
“Agh, it’s really hard to explain…” Lightning grumbles. She paws her hooves through her wet mane, and more water splatters over the dock. “I guess I just got myself in a lot of trouble being reckless and dumb, and I’m trying to be less dumb. And less dangerous.”
“Hm.”
“So… it’s good you took me here,” Lightning says. “It’s nice.”
It’s safe.
You’re safe.
You’re boring.
You’re—
“Is that why you’re always—” Fiddle’s accusation catches in her throat. “Uh. With the stallions?”
Lightning’s brow furrows. “Huh?”
Fiddle sighs. “N-never mind.”
“No, no,” Lightning flips her damp mane back, and Fiddle can see all of the tiny pinpricks of water clinging to her cheeks as the glitter in the moonlight. “What do you mean? What about the stallions?”
“I don’t wanna fight with you about it,” Fiddle whispers.
Lightning scoffs. “Fight?” she echoes. “What’s there to fight about?”
Fiddle thinks about answering honestly. She really does. For a moment, she tries to—the words are right there:
Why do you go with guys who would hurt you?
Why do you only want sex?
Why dangerous sex?
Why the risk?
But, honestly, she knows the answer.
“Nothin’," Fiddle mutters. "Forget I said anything.”
She tries to stand up, but Lightning catches her.
“Hey.”
Fiddle stays frozen, not meeting her friend's eye, not standing up or sitting down. Just hovering there. Ready to give up and give in.
“I like stallions," Lightning says. "That isn’t a crime.”
“I know it ain't." Strained.
“Why’d you have to come scare that guy off me, anyway?” Lightning continues. "I didn't ask you to do that."
“I-I know.”
"So why?"
"I dunno."
“He was fine," Lightning insists. "I had it under control.”
The fire is there. The spark, the smolder. The danger.
“I know," Fiddle says.
“So then why?”
Fiddle shrugs. “I dunno.”
She braces for something. Not an impact, not a smack or a jolt or anything like that. But her body tenses up in anticipation of whatever is next.
The smolder in Lightning grows. Burns. Glows brighter.
Then fades.
Lightning lets go of Fiddle, and Fiddle wobbles before coming back down to the dock with a thud.
"Sorry," Lightning says.
"It's alright."
"Just being an ass again I guess."
"It's okay," Fiddle says. "I can be an ass too sometimes."
Lightning scoffed. "Yeah, right."
"I scared Storm off," Fiddle says. "And you're right. I didn't need to do that."
Lightning makes a small sound, but Fiddle can't for the life of her unravel what it means. She eases down onto her stomach, reaches down with one hoof, and dips it into the marshwater. The ripples that permeate from that touch are nearly perfect.
“Look, I… I know it’s not exactly ladylike or whatever, but I do have one night stands and… and junk,” Lightning says. She doesn’t exactly sound embarrassed, but she speaks softly nonetheless. She kicks at the water again and watches the ripples spread. “I like the no-strings-attached type of thing. I don’t exactly have a great track record with strings.”
That sort of made sense.
Another piece of the puzzle for Fiddle. Always playing catch-up with that mare.
“Plus, it’s… y’know." Lightning shrugs. "Fun.”
Fiddle laughs. She tries to make it sound genuine, but it comes out sideways.
Lightning gives her a nudge.
“I guess it just seems awful dangerous to me,” Fiddle says. “Daredevil-type stuff. But maybe that’s ‘cause I’m from a place with a swimming hole.”
Lightning snickers. It makes Fiddle’s scalp prickle.
"I just don't want you to do anything you regret is all," Fiddle says.
Or maybe the prickle says it.
She doesn't really know.
Lightning kicks the water again. "Oh."
"Not that I think you need my help," Fiddle says quickly. "I-I just—"
"Do you think I will?" Lightning asks. "Regret it?"
The question catches Fiddle off guard.
For a long moment, she thinks about it. She lets the sound of the marsh swallow her up—the buzzing, humming, singing—and waits for the answer to come to her.
"That depends on why you do it," she says at last. "Because I guess I don't really buy that you do it for fun."
Lightning sits very still.
After a while, she pulls her hooves up onto the dock and stares into the unmoving water of the marsh. The night sky is almost perfectly reflected there, only dyed a bit blue-green.
"I don't really know," she says at last.
Fiddle doesn't reply.
Her instrument case is uncomfortable, though. It's sawing into her neck. She lifts it over her head and places it beside her on the dock with slightly more noise than she would have liked.
Lightning watches intently.
"What?" Fiddle asks.
"What do you think?" Lightning asks.
Fiddle furrows her brows. "About what?"
"About me," Lightning says. "You're smart. Why do you think I sleep around?"
Fiddle laughs. Guffaws, more like. A big loud sound that she, again, wishes she hadn't made. "I ain't that smart."
"Aw, shut up." Lightning shoves her.
Fiddle shoves her back.
It almost turns into a friendly tussle, but Lightning hds back, and Fiddle is afraid to do more than give a single, gentle shove.
"I'm serious," Lightning says, laughter echoing in her voice. "Why do you think I do it? You've definitely thought about it before."
"Why d'you think that?" Fiddle asks. "Like you said, we don't know each other all that good."
"You said that."
"Oh. Well, like I said, then."
"Because I honestly feel like I know you pretty well," Lightning says. "Swimming in your summer swimming hole and stuff."
Fiddle scoffs.
“I’m serious!” Lightning gives Fiddle another daring shove, and Fiddle withstands it. “I feel I can see you here, y’know? Little kid Fiddle, before she got all in her own head about everything, jumping into the swimming hole on that old rope. Singing songs and crap.”
Fiddle giggles and shakes her head. “Shows what you know,” she says. “I was never not all in my own head.”
"Fine, fine," Lightning says. She eases back a bit, stretches, and lays down on the dock, hooves folded over her stomach. "But psychoanalyze me or whatever. Then we can do you, y’freak."
"I ain't psychoanalyzing you," Fiddle insists. "I just… well, you said it. You're a daredevil."
"Mhm?"
"And daredevils do dangerous things. On account of the adrenaline rush." Fiddle pauses and tugs at the bandana around her neck. "And maybe you have these one night stands with these aggressive guys because it's a little dangerous."
Lightning shrugs. “I guess,” she says.
Which is an odd reaction to being accurately psychoanalyzed.
“Yeah,” she goes on, kicking her hoof in the water and sending flicker splashes over the surface. “That makes sense.”
She nods a bit. To herself.
Fiddle can’t think what else to say, really.
“So… can I ask you a question, then?” Lightning says it carefully.
“Shoot.”
“Why is it that you always play these crappy amateur barn dances?”
Unexpected.
Fiddle doesn’t have an answer, and so a jumble of ‘um’s and ‘uh’s stops up her throat, piled on top of one another, cancel each other out. She opens her mouth, but makes not a sound.
Lightning is patient, though. Not like Fiddle. Not blathering on and on to cover for her bad case of hoof in mouth disease.
“Um,” Fiddle struggles out.
Nothing else.
Why does she play these amateur barn dances?
Because you’re not good enough. Or you are, but you’ll choke. Or you won’t choke, but then you can never play them again. Or you will, but they won’t accept you. Or they will, but you won’t accept yourself.
Fiddle closes her eyes, and she can hear the ease—the joy—with which the others play. The dulcimer player hammering freely away. The banjo player who seems to be flying over the strings, and yet all of it still comes together into a rich and purposeful tapestry of sound. The percussionist who dances, rather than drums. Feeling the music much more than playing it. Letting it out.
“I dunno,” Fiddle says.
Which is partly true and partly a lie.
“Because you’re really good,” Lightning says.
Fiddle scoffs.
“I know I don't play an instrument or anything like that, but… I dunno. I know an artist when I see one, I guess,” she explains. Her voice is so that it can barely be heard over the rush of the wind through the cattails, but it makes Fiddle's heart thud wildly in her chest. “Fundamentals or whatever. I can tell that you’re holding yourself back.”
A sound slips out of Fiddle’s lips, but she hardly knows what it means. “So?”
“So… why are you?” Lightning asks. “Why are you holding yourself back?”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” Lightning insists.
Fiddle doesn’t say anything.
“Is it because… you’re afraid of challenging yourself?” Lightning asks.
“No.”
“Is it because you don’t want to fail?”
“No. Leave it alone.”
“But—”
“I think you wanna get yourself hurt,” Fiddle says.
Lightning is taken aback. “Uh. No offense, Fids, but I can’t really see you—”
“Not by me,” Fiddle says. “By those stallions.”
Silence.
Fiddle badly wants to speak. Words pile in the front of her mind, apologies and distractions and total non sequiturs, clever ways out, attempts at—
“Why?” Lightning asks.
“Why?” Fiddle echoes.
“Why would I want to get hurt?”
Why?
I don’t exactly have a great track record with strings
I’m just an ass sometimes.
I guess I just got myself in a lot of trouble being reckless and dumb.
So… it’s good you took me here.
It’s nice.
Fiddle shifts. She sinks down onto her stomach beside Lightning, their sides brushing together, the electricity leaping from rib to rib like a foal playing hopscotch in the midday summer heat. Lightning pulls her wing in towards her side, as if she were trying to suck it all the way inside her body. All to avoid touching Fiddle.
To avoid spreading the rotwood to the rest of the barn.
“I hope you ain’t stupid enough to think you deserve it,” Fiddle says.
She feels Lightning tremble.
“I’m the only one stupid enough to think things like that,” Fiddle goes on, shaking her head. “That I deserve being stuck here in Hicksville, Nowhere. Like playing barn dances is some kinda punishment I earned.”
She kicks her hooves in the water. Ripples and droplets and tiny waves in every direction.
“I never did any of this stuff when I was a kid,” Fiddle admits. “I mean, I came down here with a cousin of a cousin one time, but I was too chicken to get in the water. Because I get in my head.”
Lighting looks at her. “But… you don’t deserve punishment for that,” she says. “That’s just who you are! And I… I like how you are.”
“I guess ‘punishment’ ain’t the right word,” Fiddle amends. “I think I just put this big… big thing on myself. Rules, commandments. I’m not allowed to be an artist, or to play better than a barn dance, until I get out of my head. Until I’m fixed and… finished, or some other.”
It was close. The closest she’d ever come to putting it into words, even in her head.
She looks over at Lightning Dust, expecting to see some expression of shock or amusement—yet another kid teasing her for not enjoying summer vacation, of all things—but she only saw a sort of wistful sadness there. A quiet realization of where the mare before her had really come from.
Fiddle forces a lopsided, not-at-all genuine smile. But the sadness remains.
“You don’t have to wait,” Lightning says.
“Well, neither do you,” Fiddle says. “Quit the stallions. Start treating yourself better, and stop wishing you’d get hurt.”
Lightning chuckles breathily. “Easier said than done, Fids.”
Fiddle shrugs. “That’s what I’m here for, I guess.”
Lightning nods.
For a long moment, she only looks out over the water. Thinking, or maybe not thinking, or maybe trying not to think.
The woods behind the mares thrums with a symphony of nature. A gentle breeze whirs up into a wind, ruffles the water like feathers, cuts through the reeds and the cattails and makes a sound so much like rain that Fiddle would later swear she could smell it.
“What’s that, um… that shape?” Lightning asks.
Fiddle cocks a brow in her direction. “Shape?”
“The swirly one. Black and white. And it’s like… balance, or whatever.”
“Yin-yang?”
“Yeah,” Lightning muses. “That’s right. And it’s like… there’s a bit of black in the white, and a bit of white in the black.”
“Mhm.”
“Maybe I can put some of that white lightning in you,” Lightning says. “And you can put some of that black country mud in me.”
Fiddle wants to laugh, but it’s sort of beautiful despite itself. It shoots that jolt of electricity into her chest once again—that white lightning—and she feels a smolder of something stirring deep inside herself.
Lightning stands up. “Well,” she says. “First things first: we’re getting you in the water.”
“Wh—”
“Take off your bandana and crap,” Lightning instructs. “And we’ll jump in together.”
“But I—”
“No buts!” Lightning shouts, and it booms over the marshes like thunder. “No more waiting! It’s just water!”
Just water.
Water, the greatest conductor there is.
Jump into together.
Shoot white lightning from heart to heart.
Fiddle pulls off her bandana.
Her hat slides off her head and onto the surface of the dock with an easy shake. It floats on its way down like a cherry blossom.
And then, before she knows what’s happening, she’s standing on the end of the dock with Lightning’s hoof wrapped around her own. And she’s counting down:
“Three! Two! One!”
And they’re off the end of the dock, falling, whooping and hollering as they struggle to draw in a deep enough breath as they shatter the unbroken surface of the water.
And the white lightning explodes through the blue-green depths.
And the black country mud is kicked up from the depths.
Fiddlesticks and Lightning Dust lock eyes under the water. Manes suspended. Time frozen.
When they breach the surface, they breathe together.
It smells like ozone and old wood.
