With apologies to Mr. Calvino
Author's Note
Note to any out-loud readers and audiobook narrators:
Please credit me using a variant of my old (full-length) username for this story. Something like “Next up is If on a summer’s day a mailmare… by the Public Clop Accountant.” If you feel extra formal, try “…by the Public Clop Accounting Firm.”
I leave the decision whether to announce “With apology to Mr. Calvino” as a subtitle, as “Chapter 1”, or not at all up to the reader.
With apologies to Mr. Calvino
You are about to watch the acclaimed animated documentary series on modern Equestria, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Rather, you are reclining on your chaise lounge modeled after the one you saw near the fitting rooms of Rarity’s boutique. Today, you will watch the third season's fifth episode and hope to learn a new friendship lesson. “I have prepared myself well for this moment,” you think as you grab a highball and relax into the prime upholstery. Do you hold a 7&7, a screwdriver, Mr. Tom Collins, or a piscola? Something else entirely?
Today is not one of the days where you wish you had better balance to pull out your yoga mat and watch today’s episode in śīrṣāsana, nor is today a day to whip out the mirrors and enjoy watching the lives of the ponies from the fresh perspective of sarvāṅgāsana. You dismiss the thought of watching TV standing up like the ponies from the comfort of your supine position: your spine informs you that the appropriate times to enjoy an hour of tele with your head propped on your hands in the prone position are either at 4:30 this afternoon—after you had had the chance to attend one of Alone’s asana classes—or after traveling back 20 years to your boyhood. However, you are in the ideal position to watch that screen, reclining into the stack of pillows that prop your head to just the right height for cold beverages to enter while your eyes track the large screen. As much as you would love the full-wall experience of a projector, the guest cottage of Ponyville’s reconstructed library has no suitably dark rooms for such activity at 11:23 a.m. “Isn’t it funny how those miniature horses all measure time using the same system in my home world,” your right hemisphere notes. Your left hemisphere replies that your role as Ponyville’s new librarian is the ultimate sinecure. Not only was the library constructed with an attached cottage for its caretaker, but the town’s decision to build a separate library from the school libraries in the Friendship Academy or Ponyville Primary meant that Rainbow Dash was your only reliable patron. In fact, there are only two reasons for her arrival: either a new Daring Do book was published or she was returning her latest literary conquest and picking up an old familiar favorite to re-read. When you asked her a moon or four ago why she kept the library in business when you knew she readily purchased the signed hardcovers on her Wonderbolts salary (and received the ARCs directly from the author herself), she patiently explained, as if to an intellectually-challenged foal, that those were preserved for maximal resale value and that the library copies were the reading copies.
Nonetheless, it is now time to start the show. The television has completed its boot cycle at long last. When you joined the long-term cultural exchange, importing a smart TV was one of your regrets about moving in. Instead of merely not tracking your every pirated dalliance and profiling your pornographic preferences, it spends two minutes searching for signals in both the Wi-Fi, cellular, and vaccine microchip bands before giving up to permit its audience to view its pixels in privacy. Do you set down your now-empty glass and pick up the remote? Was it in your other hand this entire time? Whichever answer you choose, you now press play.
On the screen, you watch a hooded mare enter a novelty store, not unlike what Spencer’s would be if Earth had magic instead of an industrial revolution. A most curious entry to Equestria’s history, indeed. You wonder why the producers would put in effort to show such a seedy establishment full of gag gifts and prank toys. Perhaps this “Alicorn Amulet” was a motivating element, after all. As always, you stare in a blissed-out daze as the theme song presents you with the melody of the finale to César Franck’s Symphony in D before the equine chorus takes over. Today’s episode is not yet dubbed into English by the official voice actresses. You steel your nerves to ignore the whinnies, nickers, and snorts of the equine VAs and focus on the subtitles. Now that the formalities have concluded, you see Twilight and Spike visiting Fluttershy and her menagerie. You recognize that even without knowing this episode’s place in the series, this scene is from Twilight’s wingless youth.
The TV loses signal.
“What the hay?” you shout.
“Why the hay have I adopted ‘What the hay?’ into my lexicon,” you wonder silently.
It’s another glitched episode.
No fear.
You press fast forward in calm annoyance. The OLED panel regains signal as you see the animated filly avatars of a trio of local mares on screen. Being human, it is your natural inclination to be too lazy to get up to fix the stream. Some corruption easily corrected by ejection and re-insertion had occurred. Some days, it was more entertaining to let the scenes jumble together out-of-order and imagine a conspiracy gangstalking you to liberate your mind from the propaganda and tell the genuine truth of Equestria. Those days were when to log on to alt.history.alt.equestria and start a thread detailing the history alteration presented in the corrupted footage. First, however, you must finish your viewing session lest you have nothing interesting to share. All the good alt-history nonfiction presented on horsefiction.net, ponypages.org, and equine.news first must percolate through AHAE, as the locals call it. A proper AHAE entry required more observation than “Dearest Princess Plebbit, An HD DVD glitched out; it was spooky, guys.” The other viewers, wherever they are, appreciate effort.
If nothing else, you could enjoy the gratuitous fan service of incessant plot shots. These animated ponies were every bit as unconcerned with showing their quarters to the cameramare as their counterparts are with letting others get a good look IRL: the difference is that the mares were as bare back there as your sister’s Oppenheimer dolls and Barbie action figurines that you beheaded as a child. In fact, not even the animated stallions, on the rare occasions when they deigned to grace the glowing rectangle with their presence, had visible ponuts.
Consider, for a moment, if it is a worthwhile exchange to give up the dexterity of fingers to gain the telekinetic prowess of a horn as you note yet again that your glass is empty. You set down the remote and unscrew two bottle lids before handing the booze to your off hand and lifting the heavier bottle of mixer in your dominant hand. It is time for you to take a sip of mixer followed by a sizeable burning swig of liquor and a longer draught of mixer to chase it all in. Perhaps another round you’d enjoy? Three? Suit yourself. You did enjoy some XL coffee with breakfast. After you set down the beverages, your attention returns to the ponies ahead of you and their silly mishmash adventures full of jump cuts, both inappropriate and inopportune.
Knock knock.
You snort every bit as indignantly as your equine neighbors. Was that a hint of nicker in there? It was probably Twilight Sparkle taking time out of her day inspecting the Friendship Academy to proselytize the six-volume leatherette History of Equestria to you once again. If so, you will tell her, “No, I do not wish to read the History of Equestria; I have the animated documentary on DVD.” If she persists in extolling the virtues of learning the deep past of the ponies, you will cup your hands into ersatz ears, pin them, and sternly remind her that not only does the televised box set have eight volumes (with a ninth reportedly on the way), but this docuseries focuses on modern Equestria and even shows the personalities of ponies you may meet in the flesh.
If it was not the Princess of Books Literature Reading Friendship, a most unlikely case, it must be a surprise patron (Rainbow Dash made her most recent Daring Do resupply yesterday).
Knock. “Delivery for Mr. Anon, please open if you’re home.”
That was not the voice of Princess Twilight Sparkle, archival footage of Twilight from her postdoc in Ponyville, or a home video of her and her BBBFF when she was a filly.
“It must be the local mailmare?” you realize as you pause the motion picture and shout, “Cumming! Sorry! I meant ‘coming!’” before you jog to the door.
One room and six steps later, you confirm it’s the town mailmare. Like all ponies, her boxy lips still looked ridiculous when viewed head-on. It was little wonder why the ponies on TV so rarely directly addressed the camera with anything but their plot. She holds a package atop a clipboard in her left wing.
When you open the door to sign for the package, you are blasted with a full-body steam jet and are instantly grateful for the industrial-strength HVAC that cooled the entire building. Twilight Sparkle had sent you a small box. She must have seen the light in your arguments against literacy: it was just the right size to contain a pre-release copy of the ninth volume of MLP:FiM.
Before you can add it to your to-watch pile in the makeshift theatre—why did the designers of modern adult libraries neglect to add such a necessity as a communal viewing room?—your eye catches a glimpse of long gray wings spread in the shade of your oak tree. Your eyes follow them to the beautiful uniformed grey mailmare resting and visibly hyperventilating in the shade, her head occasionally bobbing to take a long swig from the pond before returning to panting.
You set the package on the postal reception desk and head into the sticky heat. Wearing nothing most summer days but a t-shirt and long boxers allowed you to earn extra spending bits by beating HVAC emissions goals. You assume nudity will ruin the sofas, couches, chairs, and chaise lounges from excessive skin contact for no measurable gain in energy reduction. Besides, the ponies generally expect your species to wear at least a dignity towel to compensate for your lack of tails. Even though they are not shy about showing all, it’s impolite not to swish a tail to obscure it every few seconds when in the company of ponies from whom they are not seeking conjugal relations. You feel three steps of hot, crunchy gravel beneath your feet before stepping onto the warm, damp grass. This morning’s rain that turned the big blue room enclosing Ponyville into a big blue steam room—possibly a pegasus at the factory wanted an all-day steam bath—had also made the grass pleasantly soft. “At least it’s not scratchy,” you affirm to nopony in particular.
Derpy’s—Equestria’s names being equally bizarre as Earth’s racehorses never stopped amusing you—unkempt straw mane flew haphazardly as it hoped to escape her cap. Just like the horses on earth, the ponies of Equestria are beautiful by default, unlike most humans (especially those in your hometown). Her brown uniform matched her cap; her saddlebags lay hastily set aside. An ear of hers flicks to track your footsteps while the other lazily scans the pond.
You now have her attention. “Why don’t you join me inside to cool off?” you offer.
She cranes her neck halfway back before responding, “Office rules. It’s unprofessional for somepony else’s mail to go inside another pony’s cottage, even if it’s in the bag. It’s even worse if I leave the bags here where anypony can rummage through them.”
“Take a swim in the pond?”
“That’s a drinking pond, gross.”
“Swim in the koi pond next door? It’s still shaded.”
“Eww, fish poo!”
“Can you at least take off your uniform for fifteen minutes?”
Her wings twitch; her head returns forward and stretches up as she seriously contemplates the offer.
She shocks you with a counteroffer. “Can you please use those monkey paws with their nimble claws to massage my wings?”
Surprised, you ask, “You’ve been spending breaks with Zecora when not in my shade, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about my feathers, just the muscles on the bony parts.”
You step around her body onto the pond’s shore and start massaging her left wing near its tip before asking, “Why don’t you want me to help take off that sweat-soaked uniform?”
The air smells of dirt, fresh water, and a tint of salt.
“Taking it off to cool off would just make it clammy and disgusting. It’s better to leave it on and stay sweaty,” her answer reaches your ears while she swings her head to nuzzle your hip.
Speaking of sweaty, your pride in pleasuring pegasi takes a marked drop now that your hands are close to her body and her feathers mix with fur. You feel the horse sweat as foam permeates the bits of her coat interspersed with plumage. Gross, gross, eww.
Now finished with her left wing, sympathetic nervous system engaged from all the equine perspiration, you gently attempt to step over—
“HEY!”
Your word leaves your mouth before you feel what startled you so strongly. A horse muzzle rests just below the tip of your now-exposed penis, your underwear pulled down to just above your ankles.
The air escaping her flared nostrils with each breath somehow manages to be hotter and wetter than the ambient air. Your blood pumps in new directions. Each breath now coincides with a twitch of your member as your attention redirects itself into pure desire, a desire shared by the mare when she flicks her tongue up to make contact after yawning and dropping the boxers’ waistband.
Instinctively, you reach for the back of her head before you hesitate. You are smart enough not to put your most manly member, now stiff enough to be a prominent prick, into a pony’s mouth like a carrot. Nonetheless, your hands had made it far enough to feel her mane light lubrication of natural horse oils and sweat.
You are not Derpy’s first human. She shoves your thigh with her nose and an “I don’t bite” to push you a foot to the side before your mind is overcome with initial bliss as the lovingly steamy environment of her mouth contrasts the oppressive atmospheric steam. Endorphins rush through your body as her tongue contacts your glans. Her lips are tighter than the lower lips of any human (or mare!) you’ve enjoyed; her gums in her dental gap bring the contact points to three. Your heart pounds at the tripartite stimulation, the wettest and softest handjob—no, even better than sliding yourself up a cunt. Why have you not tried the horse blowjob earlier? You have been in Equestria for long enough and even bedded several ponies. If he knew what he was doing, you can now overlook a future lover being a stallion. Your hands knock her hat onto the grass when you scratch her ears. It takes all your self-control not to grab her head to control the side-to-side sway into the exact rhythm that will finish you in ten seconds flat. Thankfully for Derpy, the perspiration on her mane cools your imminent orgasmic enthusiasm; you push through the disgust at coating your hands with oily horse sweat to continue to scratch her ears: she is giving you a semi-public blowjob, it is the least you can do for her comfort.
Suddenly, she fully opens her mouth, pulls away from your junk, and stares at you with a beautiful, expectant, rectangular pupil. Even in the shade, the midday sun has constricted it into the narrow mail slot to her soul. Equine eye contact is more natural than human head-on positioning.
“Help me turn Dinky into a B.F.B.F.F.,” she commands.
“BFBFF?” Your focus rests on the intricate detailing of the inner edge of her iris.
“Big filly best friend forever. Slide your cock up my cunny and don’t pull out.” Her tail proudly arced up and to the right. “Fuck me in the cunt.”
“I don’t think that would work.” You attempt to recall mitosis, gametes, and chromosomes but draw a blank. “Something about mitochondria?”
She spun in place, her legs dangerously close to your body. “Then we enjoy a good-faith effort.”
Your primal desires guide your hands into place as if they were the front legs of a mounting stallion; you feel the damn uniform. “Derpy, you need to take this thing,” you shake her uniform, “off, or else I can’t keep it up.”
“Wait ten minutes,” she replies, grabbing the mailbag and kicking off into the sky.
“Derpy!—” you call after her to no avail.
How do you choose to spend ten minutes of downtime? Do you play with your privates, hoping you don’t overstimulate and cockblock yourself? Go inside to use the bathroom and pour another highball? Whatever your choices, Derpy’s time away passes shockingly soon.
Your shirt is removed to avoid an anticipated sexercise-induced heatstroke when Derpy returns with a neatly folded bag in her mouth. “What the hay?” you think, “She’s still wearing that damn thing.”
Derpy lands and sets her mailbag aside, then places the mouth purse atop it.
“Derpy,” you say to get her attention. She points her muzzle straight at you, a goofy toothy grin on her lips and unequal slits in her eyes, “I thought you left to take that thing off.”
She is too cute to upset you, especially when she says, “I’d be gone 20 minutes if I had to take it off myself. Besides, I want to feel your touch.”
You also would like to undress her and feel her horse hair brush the backside of your hands. If only it were clean and dry.
You lean forward and unzip her uniform under her right wing, then feel her cheek and jowl rubbing the small of your back. So soft and comforting. Progress is slower than either of you expect—you hope she views the sluggishness as extending time in foreplay as your fingers deftly try to avoid directly touching her damp coat as much as possible. Soon enough, the freshly dampened brown cloth was free of her right wing. You reach under her barrel with your right hand to pull it over her body. Unfortunately, you overextend halfway through and catch yourself with your left forearm, landing on her back. Planted firmly in the wettest part of her coat, sun-heated and moisture-trapped. As it turns out, equine sweat is considerably less disgusting when you shove your entire arm in it at once instead of gently brushing the tips of her damp hairs.
“I don’t know what went wrong,” you say in chorus with her.
“Fuck, that spooked me. I want to feel that weight each time you pound my pussy,” she continued.
When removing the jacket from her left wing, you work quickly. Sex with her will cover you with her perspiration and coat oils; there is no denying this anymore. You embrace the (surprisingly clean, in the grand scheme of things) filth.
Her moist uniform now cast aside, you nervously position yourself directly in the kick zone. “This may be sudden,” you warn her before mentally preparing yourself as if to jump in a cold river. A large inhale later, you lurch forward to press your bare chest on her sodden topline while your arms wrap around her barrel. It was a most fortuitous decision to wrap your arms tight. She instinctively bucks at the sudden mass attacking her. The benefit of such an intimate connection was how her hooves slid along your legs during the buck instead of kicking you. Such a buck forced an inhalation after landing, your face buried in the last strands of mane at her withers. Salt, sweat, hay, some indescribable umami scent. Her aromas gradually came into focus with each passing breath. The natural mane oils conveyed the distinctive smell of a horse barn, the subtle bits that gave ponies their unique signature compared to the similar stink of other livestock. Acrid, but differently so; more mild, too. A drop runs down your right arm as you rub them close along her warm body to position yourself; something hot—perhaps even steaming—runs down your left leg as wordless nickers invite you to rut her senseless.
“Fuckin’ slide it in; I’m ready,” she declares with your stiffy’s tip mere centimeters outside her entrance (the proper one, not her ponut). “Just like that, right in the cunny,” she narrates as relaxing energy floods your body.
Every few seconds, her strong interior muscles treat you with their pelvic massage. You are too far forward for her to swing her head back to kiss you. Still, seeing her nostrils silently flare and retract in the opposite rhythm of her winking provides you motivation from her enjoyment. Despite your lack of mind reader training, you understand she holds back the desire to ask you to smack her with your hips and call her a bitch. A bead of sweat rolls down your back and between your cheeks before disappearing into your butthole and making it wink. Today is not the day for such vigorous lovemaking. You instead savor the dampness between your chest and her coat, aware but unconcerned that it is no longer pure pony perspiration. Instead of thrusting to slam your lower horn against her innards, you gently keep your thigh connected to her plot cheeks and thighs each time you push forward and relax back.
Something feels correct in the human-horse connection. The organic aromas heighten the sensations of her fur interacting with your chest hair. The commingling of your perspiration and breath reinforces your biological drive and need to breed. Derpy has given up silence in favor of unintelligible wickering. You may be quietly grunting from her body increasing the velocity of each expulsion of breath. Such unity between different creatures is surprisingly more common than unity between specimens of the same species with significant differences. It is a comforting congress you share, especially as the short hairs near the base of her dock tickle your hips.
Curious that the trick worked, you put your weight into your left arm and hook it across her shoulder and breastbone. You reach your right hand up and stroke her patagium as your hand makes its way under her barrel toward her udder. Sadly, your fingertips just barely graze her teats. That was enough to pierce your ears with a staccatissimo squeal followed by loud nickers. You strain your fingers to again touch her erect nipples. That was enough for her to buck you off with an interrupted whinny.
You stumble seven steps back and catch your balance.
She commands you to “slam your hips into my ass and make it sound like a whip,” and you obey, only pausing after the first thrust to giggle at the squelching sounds you otherwise would’ve assumed were farting if you did not already know better.
The stink of sweat is now subservient to the unmistakable musk of a horny mare. While you cannot quite get a whipcrack, no matter how much you adjust your timing, each thrust produces a deliciously juicy plap augmented by a microsecond of Derpy’s squeal. You focus on thrusting your way to climax before your legs cramp from dehydration.
Between each thrust, Derpy’s dirty talk takes a turn for the bizarre. “I… I think… think that in your b—… your backward… world’s backward laws,… they call this loving some—! Something like ‘zoosexual rape.’ Do that.”
She emits a long, muffled whinny as you hit something good in her.
“Breed me forever until you make me a filly. Fuck me silly.”
Your mind narrows concentration into ekāgratā. Your sexual energy rises in a funhouse parody of kuṇḍalinī awakening. The electrified area grows by one vertebra with each thrust. Sound no longer matters. Smell is generically “nice” and “just what it needs to be.” For better grip, your hands adjust to the base of her wings, fingers bathing in the junction’s moisture. Everything beyond her beautiful flicking ears is blurred when the free-flowing energy reaches your cervical discs. Once pelvic energy contacts your skull, you collapse and grab her breast muscles with all your might as your asshole puckers. Her buck at the sudden weight merely intensifies your orgasm as your first spurt fires off with your feet six inches in the air. Your second shoots the instant you land. You bury your head deep in her mane to inhale the now-delicious aroma as you squirt round after round in her body, your swimmers confidently making their way to her womb. The mixed musk turns comforting as the pleasure pulses subside and you relax your grip. Finally, exhaustion catches your legs, and you slide down to sit with the grass tickling your ass and hole.
“Fist my vajooter, Anon,” you hear. Derpy was not done with you just yet.
You raise your arm only to find your whole body weak. She still needed orgasm. You summon the will to lift your other arm and grab fistfuls of her fur that you use as handles to yank her back and slump forward into her cooter. Without hesitation, you lick her winking clit. Your tongue is assaulted by the complex bouquet of the salt from sweat, hay and tea from her arousal, a dusting of ammonia from piss, the piperidine-like flavor of your cum, and the savory base shared by both genital juices. You continue to lick, each passing lick gradually reducing in piss and sweat until only cum, lubrication, and natural horse oil musk remain. Soon, you hear her merry whimpering increase in pitch with each wink.
“Prepare your… your air!” you hear as she attempts to warn you of imminent drenching orgasm.
The key word is “attempt.” You start to drown in maregasm and begin to cough.
FBBFBBBBTFBFTBFTB
A noise like the wettest fart you’ve ever heard grabs your ears back to reality as your frantic exhalation conflicts with her rapid rhythmic contractions. The ear-splitting volume of a whinny at point-blank range escapes your awareness. As soon as your breath stabilizes, you roll back to lie on the lawn. A wing eventually descends to “pin” your belly, and you feel warm nickering breaths against your left ear as you realize she sank to sleep in the afterglow. Your entire body is completely relaxed as her slowing respiration becomes the clock for your lungs.
“Hey!” somepony snorts into your ear, causing your body to jerk awake. Eyes now open, you gradually refocus to see a yellow-maned gray mare poking her goofy horsey head directly at your face. “Wake up, Anon, and help me put on this clean uniform.”
Your arm now knows that the bag she returned with before the fuck session rests atop it. You pull out the clean uniform and wrap it over her wings and around her barrel. The two of you had napped long enough for her coat to dry. Only the mild film of equine oil on your hands reminded you of her previous soaked state. She grabs the strap between her mailbags with her mouth and flings it over her body.
It is now time to bid her the day’s farewell. She has the entire afternoon route ahead of her. Do you come in for a kiss? Give a brief massage to her shoulder? Either way, she licks the dried salt off your face.
“Wash my old uniform and make it a package for me to pick up tomorrow.” she instructs before teasing, “Next time, you had better shove your arm up my cunt, know me from the inside, then put it up my ponut,” and cantering to the next mailbox.
You find your underwear, pick your shirt off the ground, and walk inside to the mail desk. Gingerly, you carefully use the boxcutter once smuggled through the portal to sever the taped banding on the cardboard, utmost care being used to free each flap. The ninth season must emerge unscathed. You are different from the type of person to let scratched discs and bit-rotten disks ruin your experience. Only magical stalker gangs were allowed to cause the ghosts in the circuitry to act like that. Finally, your prize is freed.
“Twilight Sparkle must have taken a course in human literature,” you realize as a copy of famed Italian author Italo Calvino’s seminal novel If on a winter’s night a traveler emerges into your grasp. Out of politeness, you scan the first two pages while sitting at your postal desk. “What a silly concept,” you think, “writing a self-insert novel all about describing the physical act of reading.”
