El Pegaso del Parque (The Pegasus of the Park)
The cool breeze wakes me up, as every morning does ever since I came into this place. Or at least as cool as it gets, because it’s been pretty warm lately. Still, it’s cooler and more pleasant in the morning as of late because fall season is slowly making its presence known.
Here on Earth, seasons happen on their own, and sometimes they are lazy or hesitant to come, as nopony forces them to happen. I have been here for a couple of weeks, and I couldn’t decide if it was summer or fall, because it kept going back and forth with really hot days and then the cool chill of autumn.
But whatever, I’m pretty sure it’s fall already if I had been keeping track of time correctly, then again, I might be wrong or this place could be messing with my inner clock with how weird it is. I stretch my wings and look around. The sun is making his presence known on the horizon, but it’s still not coming up. If this was Equestria, Celestia would have risen it already, but it is not, so it comes slowly out of his hiding spot. The perfect time to leave my perch and wake up properly.
Humans don’t come around unless it’s daytime. In the night, only the occasional car comes by to check if everything it’s okay, and I’m okay, so they don’t need to find me. That’s why I always choose a particularly dense or tall tree in order to not be disturbed or discovered as I sleep during the night. Every night I choose a different location from my favorite ones in the outskirts of the park.
After stretching and my morning preening, I take flight and do a couple of lazy laps around, looking for something to do. I don’t usually make any plans, unless I want to explore a particularly far away area.
I am hungry, so I look for breakfast. The orange trees have little green balls that will turn into delicious oranges, but right now they aren’t pleasant to eat. There are a lot of orange trees around here, I bet humans around here love oranges.
Okay, breakfast… The little house in the middle of the park that makes food is still closed at this early hour, so that would have to wait. There are some trees with acorns too, and I snack on some of those, but not much, they are hard and bitter, and after a couple of them, I decide that I’m in the mood for fishing.
The park is near a river, and there are ducks and other birds living here, but most important, there are some fish to be had. A road follows the opposite bank of the river where no cars are allowed, but humans love to walk on it, or run, or even ride bicycles. Sometimes, humans bring fishing rods and catch fish too, so I guess it’s okay if I get some fish too.
I fly tracing wide circles just above the water surface until I dive and catch a fish with my mouth and then climb up high, bank to the right and towards the park. I land on top of one of the tallest trees, near a gravel trail in the park, and enjoy my meal there while I take in the sights of the wide river and the city beyond.
Human bridges are weird.
They could absolutely build a proper archway bridge across the river, but nope, they like to be creative.
To my right as I gaze into the river, it’s a bridge that has a really tall, white, inclined tower on one shore. The tower would fall on its own, and the bridge would too, but both are linked with metal ropes so if the bridge or the tower tries to fall, the other pushes it back up.
It looks kind of funny. The first time I arrived in here, I laughed at that particular bridge. It looked like the very park was happy to see me.
So, I stayed the day and explored a little bit, then I spent the night, and the next day, and the next too, and it’s been a few weeks already. I’m not very good at counting.
To my left there is a much more modest bridge supported by proper pillars, but it is really thin, so cars are not allowed there either, and it’s silent and nice to stand on it and look down until I catch a glimpse of a school of fish when I’m feeling lazy and don’t want to fly around too much. Later in the day, many humans use that bridge to come and go in and out of the park I now live in.
Further to the left, the river ends, and I was really confused, but after exploring, I found the real river near this one. This river happened to be a fake one humans made, because the real one comes around the other side of the island, which is also not a completely real island either because the river is blocked with ground. The fake river happened to be a very long pond instead.
Further to the right there is another bridge that has a white arch, but instead of being under the bridge, they made it over it, and used more metal ropes to make it stand over the river.
To the south there is another park like place, but there are a lot of rides and kind of looks a little bit like Las Pegasus, and humans look more frantic to get to this or that place, and have to make long queues to the rides. Too noisy and busy for me, I would have stayed in Las Pegasus if I wanted to live in a place like that. Although it is good to know it is there, just in case I’m in the mood.
This park I now live in is huge, I couldn’t decide if it was a farm, a park or a forest. It’s as big as a small forest, but there are so many orange trees it looks like a farm, yet I don’t see any farmers, and all kind of humans come in and out of it, and make parties in the open, and human foals play ball, just like a park, so it could be an old farm turned into a park maybe. The thing is that as it is so big, there is a place for every creature in there, well, mostly every human and me, and the animals and birds, I guess.
Oh, speaking of farms, there are tiny farms where some humans cultivate vegetables. They are so small that the farmers would immediately know if somepony stole some vegetables from them, so I’m a little bit self-conscious about doing that. Just imagine that a wandering pegasus like me just comes by and steals the only tomato plant you have been taking care of for months, that would be rude.
Instead, I just come by when there are humans working. They are usually older humans and human foals there, maybe their elders are teaching the fillies and colts how to farm. When they saw me for the first times some of them were scared, but after a week, I became a regular sight for them, and I started to scare away the birds that wanted to steal the food, and some of the humans thanked me giving me some kale to munch on. As time goes on, more and more humans come to the tiny farms and give me food as a thank you gift.
There are parks inside the park with low fences and humans like to bring dogs to them and make them climb logs and stuff. I guess they are training them, and the dogs get to play with other dogs, and everypony is happy.
There is a train locomotive on display, it looks old and abandoned, but at the same time it looks way more advanced than our equestrian ones. And there is a miniature railway, with miniature trains for humans to ride on. Humans definitely love to ride things…
“¡Mira, mamá, es el pegaso del parque!” My ears rotate and catch a human filly calling for me.
I look down and spot a mother and a foal, both now looking up at me. I smile and wave at them, the remnants of the fish I just ate forgotten and thrown back into the river. My mouth is dirty and I become self-conscious about it, but I’m on top of a high branch, and humans don’t have a very good sense of smell. I hope my muzzle is not too stained. The humans don’t seem to notice, as the filly pulls on her mother’s foreleg towards the tree I’m sitting on.
“¡Tenemos que hacer que baje, mamá! ¿Cómo hacemos que baje? Quiero verlo de cerca.” The filly says.
“No seas pesada, Lucía, déjalo tranquilo, que si no se va a ir.” The mother tells her daughter.
“¡Vamos a comprarle comida! Si le damos chuches seguro que viene.”
“I’m sorry, girls, I have to wash my mouth!” I excuse myself and take flight. They don’t understand Harmonian, but I always talk back to them, because that seems the polite thing to do.
I fly a couple of lazy circles around the two humans for the delight of the little one, who giggles and cheers at me. Then I climb up high in the sky and turn towards the river, then I dive and get a big splash and a mouthful of water. I gargle in the air and spit it back. The two humans look at me the whole time until I fly away and disappear from their sight.
The first morning joggers and cyclers are starting to come, so I take the opportunity and fly around with them. Some of them get startled when they see me flying over their heads, but others have already met me and just wave and greet me, and I wave back.
There are some metal posts that have a button that, if you press it, it squirts water and become a fountain for a little while. After watching a human pressing the button and drinking, I got the hang of how it works, and after my flying workouts I drink some water from them while they are cool in the morning. In the afternoon, after the sun has been heating them up the whole day, the water comes out warm and disgusting.
After a few hours, the human families with foals start to come. You have to be cautious, because human fillies and colts are unpredictable, but I like to play with them nonetheless, if they are pleasant.
Sometimes, specially back when I didn’t know how human foals would react to me, some of them managed to climb on my back and ride me, and that was cute… for a time. They seem to never get enough of it, so, when I’m tired, I look for their parents and lie down on the floor in front of them to make the foal understand he or she is not going anywhere on top of me anymore. If that doesn’t work, I start to wriggle until the foal gives up and leaves me alone, or their parents intervene and take them away.
I usually have to preen afterwards, because they like to touch my wings, so I avoid it to happen as much as I can, but sometimes they are sneaky or lure me in with snacks. Humans are crafty, but I’m getting the hang of it. And if I’m lucky, the parents give me extra snacks for the inconvenience.
Still, I like human foals, not all of them are as mischievous or annoying. Sometimes they are nice and shy, and I like to get closer to those. It’s funny how they want to pet me, but just jump away at the slightest twitch of my fur as if I would sting them.
After my first week living in the park, I started to see some humans were coming back, looking for me. They usually bring food and they talk to me, and I talk back to them, but of course we don’t understand each other. Some of them also scratch my back and neck, but I have to be careful to avoid my wings being touched and messed up.
As days go by, some of those humans became my friends as they come regularly and start to get what my favorite snacks and foods are, and how to properly scratch my coat and what are my favorite spots. I love when they scratch my back and behind my ears.
I go to the pond in the middle of the park and land on the shore in front of a wooden shed humans like to visit. The shed is in a secluded area, surrounded by vegetation, bushes and trees hiding the tile road that leads to it, so humans can sneak towards it without any critter noticing. It has only three walls and the front one has a long horizontal window where humans crouch and look through into the pond. There is a sign depicting all kinds of critters and birds there are in the park, and humans like to play the game of what animals they can spy through that window. I like to sit in front of it, so they can see me too.
I sit there in the sun, preening and cleaning myself after the splash in the river, shacking the water out and drying in the sun and the now not as cool breeze.
Mornings are usually slow, and I’m hungry again, the fish was kind of a small one, but I don’t go fishing or foraging or grazing anymore, because I want to save my appetite for what’s to come. Today is Sunday, and a lot of humans are going to come to the park.
The house where they prepare food it’s going to be full and humans are going to be everywhere having parties and picnics, and all of them want to see me, and their foals want to play with me, and they are going to give me more food than I’m able to eat. I wish I had an ice box to store some nice human-made food for the slow days. If I can get a human to understand what I need, they are probably going to bring me one, but I have no idea how to tell them, and stealing one seems pretty rude.
After my mid-morning preening and cleaning session I take flight again and I get reminded of how uncomfortable, inconvenient and ugly are those metal towers that have metal ropes attached between them. Humans have electricity running through the metal ropes so I have to be careful, that was in the Pegasus on Earth pamphlet I got when I first came to Earth.
There is also an airport near here, and flying machines are always coming back and forth, so I have to keep my flight low to not disturb them, that was on the pamphlet too. Before coming to Earth, they made a pretty big deal for pegasi about not flying very high here, as those huge metal flying machines are scary and can bump into you. There are a lot of rules you have to follow, but they are very complicated, so I keep low and watch what the birds are doing. Humans don’t seem to have problems with birds, so I do what they do. Flying near the treetops is what I usually do, always lower than the funny tower bridge.
I spot a group of humans playing ball and net. It’s a sport some of them like to play, but in different ways. My favorite one is when they put a big net between the two teams and they try to pass the ball to the other side without it hitting the ground. If you send the ball too far away, over a rope on the ground, it’s also your fault, and your team can hit the ball three times before sending it back and trying to hit the other team’s ground, but not too far away, just inside the rope square.
The first time I saw them, I watched a few games from a nearby tree to know the rules before coming down and asking to join the game. They allowed me to play, and after some time, I became a regular. Every time I see them playing, they are happy to let me join a team as a player. It’s a cool sport because humans and ponies can play together. I don’t use my wings, because that would be cheating, and we have kind of an unspoken agreement on that. I have to learn what humans are like by looking and trial and error, because I can’t speak their language.
I always gather a small crowd of humans watching me play. When the games are over, I’m a little tired and really, really hungry, so it’s time to move on to the next spot.
It seems that some families are starting to go to the restaurant in the middle of the park. You can buy food there, but if you have a plastic colorful square, you show it to a machine and if it likes it, you can eat for free.
I don’t have any money, and I don’t know how to get one of those squares, so I can’t get food on my own, but that’s not necessary, as humans are always willing to share their meals with me.
Some colts and fillies are playing nearby as their watchful parents keep an eye on them while they order food. I land near them and I immediately gather the attention of the foals. There aren’t too many of them yet, and today they seem nice enough. There is a wooden playground, and I get there and just relax a little. Foals come timidly to pet me, and I let them. I don’t see any problematic foal; they seem pretty tame today. I also come here a little bit early, so there aren’t too many and I can keep an eye on them.
Human foals are the first ones to go to their parents and bring me snacks, mostly chips. Then, the bartender calls for me and when I get close, she gives me a plate of deep-fried bits for free. I don’t know what kind of food they are, but it’s one of my favorite ones, and she knows it. They are savory with a crunchy exterior and depending on which one, there is something slightly different inside.
As more and more humans start to come by, I have to be more mindful of foals trying to touch my wings or trying to ride me. They have wooden ponies to ride in the playground, but of course they prefer to ride me, the real thing, so I have to be careful. When I feel there are too many, I just fly away to one of the nearby pine trees and watch them from a distance. Those pine trees are high enough so I don’t get bothered and their branches are comfortable enough for a nap.
Now it’s the time to check on the sparse wooden tables that are nearby, under the orange trees. Humans use those to have lunch too, but they bring food of their own too.
As time goes on, humans start to finish their meals, take their reluctant foals and drag them away. Then the real feast begins.
When there is again a comfortable number of humans left, I come down and they offer me their leftovers just to have me nearby. The smartest humans have figured out my favorite foods and one father has bought me another plate full of fried bits. I sit on the table with the family and the son and daughter are delighted to have me with them for a few minutes. I even get a drink from them, a rare treat, as I usually only drink water from the metal fountains or from the river.
When lunchtime is over, I have my back, neck, chin and ears freshly scratched, my belly so full it hurts and I’m a little dizzy. I manage to fly back to the pine trees for a nap, as I don’t feel like going anywhere too far away.
On second thought, I shouldn’t get an icebox. If I ate like this every day, I would get fat.
Something startles me from my sleep. Something cool and wet. I look around, rub my eyes from the sleep and swivel my ears. I hear some giggles, near the tree. Looking down I see a human colt with a toy that squirts water.
He giggles and shoots water at me again, but he misses as I take flight. It’s one of those colts… I watch from above as the group of foals he belongs to have a little water battle with water balloons and water squirting toys. When their games take them into the overgrown part of the park near the bird spying box, I plot my revenge.
The tile trail is surrounded by a wall of vegetation, and the little ones play mostly on that trail, but I know every nook and cranny of the place, and every spot to hide. I take a splash in the pond, and when they are too busy to notice me around, I sneak on them and come out of the bushes near the colt that woke me from my nap.
One filly points to me, but the colt refuses to look back, as he thinks the filly wants to distract him. It’s too late for him already anyways, as I shake my mane, wings and coat as hard as I can, spraying water all over the place. The colt jumps away and all the other foals laugh at him as I stick my tongue out and fly away before he can react.
I fly around until I find a nice lonely patch of grass to roll on, feeling pretty proud of what I’ve just done. I feel good and refreshed in this slightly too warm autumn afternoon thanks to the dampness of my coat. Then I go to an overgrown area where humans don’t usually come and preen there a little bit more. I don’t have any fancy brushes or feather care products, I can’t afford them and even if I could, I doubt humans had them, so I go full natural wing care and I have to pay extra attention to it every day.
I like it here. Humans are nice, they give me food, their foals play with me, and even if I can’t talk their language, I feel like I’m now one of them. It’s weird, ever since I first arrived in here, it looks like this very place wants me to stay. Back in Equestria, it wasn’t as nice. I decided to come to Earth to see if I could get my great adventure, follow my dreams, become special, whatever that meant.
Some ponies learned the human language and came here to Earth to study in their universities, but I’m not the smartest pegasus, I barely got my basic studies. I know how to read and write, despite my mouth writing being bad (it granted me a couple of bad marks back in the school days because the teacher couldn’t understand it). I know the basics to go around, but as much as I tried, I only managed to learn a few human words. I didn’t even manage to enter an equestrian university, so, coming here as a student was a far-off dream.
I knew pegasi were in high demand for delivering packages, I thought about becoming a mail mare, but without the language, I couldn’t even get a job on Earth, so coming here as a worker soon proved to be an impossible task as one after another employer told me (through a translated letter) that I wasn’t picked for the job if I couldn’t speak and use their devices (that talked to you in human language).
Earth was the last hope to find my place, something, just anything… I saved up some bits and came here for a trip to see what this place was all about. I got some basic instructions and jumped through the portal with the pony tourist group. I was going to stay here for a couple of days, see what humans were like and then come back to Equestria. The cheapest trip there was available, but I had other plans.
As soon as I was alone, I flew away.
They told me that in America, wandering pegasi were starting to cause trouble. The guide told us to be always identified because humans were starting to take measures after a band of pegasi started to steal stuff from hotel rooms.
There were some ponies already living on Earth in America, so I wasn’t a pioneer or anything. I felt again pretty average, so I paid attention to my pegasus instinct and just flew away, as far as I could, to find something. They were right, humans were hiring pegasus guards to bring wandering pegasi back to equestria, so I had to be really careful and sneaky. Not the life I had hoped for, so I kept flying away, as fast as I could, as far away as the wind would take me.
I arrived in the coast, and remembering the maps, I knew there was land over the ocean, but it was a really big ocean, it was very dangerous to try to cross it alone. Soon I came up with the answer.
There was a big metal ship that was long and was carrying a lot of metal boxes and was heading towards the ocean. One night, hidden in the clouds, I got close and landed on it, and used it to get across.
I spent many days drinking water from the clouds, eating only the fish I could catch, I went thirsty and hungry many times when there were no clouds or fish. And the salt, sun and wind messed up my mane, tail, coat and wings pretty bad, but in the end, after many days of hiding from the humans that were driving the boat, we got to land. The boat got inside a big river and sailed through it, passing some human towns, until it got to a giant floodgate, and then it went into the river that is not really a river, but a very long pond that looks like a river, and the real river flows beside it, creating an island in between. We passed some more buildings until we got to a big city and docked to unload the cargo in a land full of metal monsters.
I took off and flew following the fake river until I found the end of it, and I was exhausted, and messy, and hungry, and then saw the weird bridges and decided that the place looked nice and slept on the treetops.
I’m Sky Meadows, a green pegasus with teal mane and tail, and in Equestria, I was the mare who couldn’t get past basic education. The mare who was the number sixteen in reserve for the Weather Team in Cloudsdale and never got to do any real work there. The mare who had to go to Dodge Junction to do the odd job to get by. The mare who couldn’t afford a house. The mare who couldn’t get a stallion interested in her, they always choose the smartest, the strongest, the fastest, the prettiest… And I’m just me.
But here I’m the only pony, the only pegasus, I’m special, I am, as the humans here call me, ‘El Pegaso del Parque’.
Author's Note
I was riding my bike in the park, as I usually do when I want to do some exercise and breathe some fresh air, when a thought came to me... How would a pegasus' life be like in the park? And then I started to imagine how people would react to them, and how they would treat them, how they would react to people, what would they see, how would they feel...
And then a pegasus took form in my imagination, and she started to fly around and do stuff, and words began to flow, and I had to give her a story, and this happened.
