Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt X
From the journal of Sunburst, June 30, YS 1329:

I found Applejack today.

She caught me by surprise from an old issue of Ponyville’s local paper. I turned the page and her eyes locked with mine, her face shining with a smile as bright as the sun.

All I could do was stare back, helpless in her gaze.

When I did, I learned what it’s like to see a ghost.

She ~~is~~ was a beautiful creature. Even through the dotted half-tone of a black and white newsprint photo, every detail jumped out with vividness that struck me like a punch on the muzzle and made hairs prickle on the back of my neck while a shiver ran down my spine. Freckles danced across her cheeks. She had a mane of thick, straw-like horsehair tied back in a messy half-loose tail with a casualness that did nothing to make it any less pretty, the hue obviously a sun-bleached blonde that came through somehow even in grainy monochrome. Her gracile, still-feminine muscles were sculpted from endless summer days of farm labor.

She seemed so alive she could have walked out of the page and appeared in person, and I think I would have believed it.

My mind involuntarily sped away through space and time, beelining back home again to the town where I grew up. She made me think of any of a dozen earth pony farm-fillies I’d known, neighbors and classmates and acquaintances, who for all I knew were still there on the farms of that little town, still working the orchards and fields of their foremothers, now grown mares and ready to have their own fillies who would one day work the same fields in turn.

Unless one of those mares fell for a Cloudsdale pegasus stallion. Unless the dice-roll of heredity fell on the father’s side, and the filly they had was born the odd pegasus out in that little earth pony town. Unless the filly was her father’s daughter through and through, and when she couldn’t stand to live life on the ground anymore, among earth ponies who had no way to understand why her wings were everything to her, she ran away to her father in the cloud city.

Unless that happened, the way it does sometimes.

I shook off the thought and tried to read what I had actually pulled the newspaper from the archives for.

After several tries, I still only barely skimmed through the actual text of the article. Now it seemed unimportant somehow, just so many words scattered about the page like dead fallen leaves in a dreary newspaper-grey autumn, incomparable to the springtime vibrancy captured in the almost-living photograph of the actual pony herself.

Almost-living, but still a ghost.

Still just a remnant impression left behind by a beautiful pony who once was, but is no longer. Still just an image infused with the illusion of anima, but which would never actually move with the true breath of life.

No, the truth is that I couldn’t bear to read the article. The words would just be more relics of the past, more of what she left behind, just more echoes of what was long ago. More of what was lost. More of what can no longer be.

So after a couple minutes of staring at the photograph, taking in her image until it burned in my mind, until I could close my eyes and still see it as clearly as if they were open, I just closed the newspaper again and put it back in its storage slot in the archives of Princess Twilight’s palace library.

And then I left while the leaving was good, while my eyes were still dry, before I could embarrass myself. But when I got home, the tears I had feared didn’t come. I was too tired; tired of thinking about her and about Rainbow Dash and about the ashes of their life together, and about the ghosts of a little earth pony farm town, and found myself too numbed by fatigue from it all.

Some grey clouds just hold gloom, not rain. They don’t bring life to anything. Those are the ones that should really just be pushed away. I was foolish to have touched it in the first place, that cloud. That newspaper. That photo. What did I think could have possibly come from it? All it ever had was ghosts.
 
 
Enough ghosts for today.