Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt XIV
From the journal of Sunburst, August 23, YS 1329:

There’s a surprising number of ponds here in Canterlot, dotting the parks of the city. They’re fed by cold clear snowmelt from higher up on Canterlot Mountain, and the streams cascade down into waterfalls as they drop from one terraced city-shelf to another and flow through them on the way down to sea level.

Today, I was sitting by the shores of one of them, thinking about the things I’ve seen. I thought about Captain Dash, and about Princess Twilight, and them eating stupid fast-food burgers, and laughing at each other’s stupid jokes, and why I had to be stupid enough to see it at all when I knew that was a stupid thing to do.

What was I going to do now? I wondered if my next move would be any smarter.

I watched a snail crawl in the silt of the pond, ponderously creeping along, carrying its spiral shell on its back. What a life, to have the option to just not care, to be able to hide away from everypony else until none of it mattered anymore.

How do snails even get up a mountain to reach a pond this high, anyway? I’ve heard it’s on the feet of birds, usually. Probably ducks. No pond goes long without ducks visiting it at some point. When I was a little filly I used to love to chase ducks (don’t ask, I was a weird kid and it was a boring town), and their response was to fly away. They wanted as little to do with most of the other creatures of the world as the snail does, just with a different way of escaping.

It’s the snails and the ducks I envy sometimes. It’s in them that I see my own longings. I wish I didn’t have to deal with this.

But what I think I really don’t want to face is this fact: that running and hiding don’t solve problems, and it’s not the ducks or the snails I learned the most from.

It’s the swans.

A swan taught me a lot, once upon a time—about myself, about where I came from, about the way I see the world. Now that I’m thinking about it, I realize I’ve never written that story down. Well, this seems like as good a time as any, so here it is:

It was during summer, when school was out. For most foals in a little farm town there were plenty of chores to do, but not enough to keep the local swimming hole from being a busy place on the hottest days.

That is, until the swans decided they liked it. Nopony was sure where they came from, or why, only that one morning, some of us went down to the water, and the pair of huge birds was there. Like a king and a queen, they paddled around the pond, serenely and regally in the golden light coming through the morning mist, surveying all that was theirs.

Or, they were serene and regal, until they saw trespassing little fillies and colts about to invade their sovereign domain. Then they were pure terror in pure snow-white plumage.

They swam for the shore in a beeline toward us until they reached the shallows. There, the cob (that’s what I later learned a stallion-swan is called) burst up out of the water, hissing and flapping, puffing up to look even more huge than he already was. The pen (the mare-swan), presumably his… marefriend? Wife? Swans pair up for life. Wife seems more accurate. Anyway. She wasn’t far behind, and didn’t seem any less hostile, but she was more cautious and stayed in the water, scolding us from a distance. The pair’s unexpected wrath sent earth pony fillies and colts scattering randomly in a colorful stampede of panicking children. A few paused at what they thought would be a safe distance to turn and look back. Most just kept making tracks until they were out of sight.

Everypony ran except this fool, the one writing now so many years later. The irony of being the only pony on the scene with wings meant I should have been able to escape even faster than all the rest, but I was the only one who didn’t try. I guess I didn’t see what the fuss was about; I was a pegasus and I’d run up against pushy birds before. I had enough naïve little punk bluster to think there was no way an overgrown goose was going to get the better of me, descendant of great wingèd warriors, blood of the old Cloud Empire.

And more than that, I saw something I just couldn’t stand.

It was something in the way he stared me down, something in his obsidian dead black eyes, something in the way he hissed and spat threats, something in the way he puffed and posed… I knew what I saw in it all. I understood his kind. Hot anger surged through me, scorching over my mind and burning in my heart as I recognized him for what he was:

A bully.

I saw it as clear as the blue sky. He was nothing but a bully, him and his bitch of a bird-wife, just snowy white petty tyrants trying to take the pond from us.

Something about the rage I felt over the injustice of it kept me there, then pushed me to take a slow step forward toward him. The heat of anger was flushing my skin, prickling me with beading sweat and making the mane on the back of my neck bristle and stand up in my own equine threat display.

He hissed another avian eviction decree, wordless but with unmistakable hostile intention.

I stood my ground. “No, YOU beat it!” I shouted back in a hot-blooded hoarse bark.

The swan stood tall and flared his wings in a final warning.

I reared up and flared my wings in challenge.

Then he charged.

So I charged.

We met in a flurry of whipping wings. Feathers flew, snowy white and bright yellow mixed together and bursting up in a cloud around us.

Real, no-nonsense fights, I learned in that moment, aren’t ‘epic.’ They’re fast and savage and undignified. They start before either party really realizes it, and they’re over almost before anypony knows what’s happening.

Ours lasted maybe ten seconds, if that. It felt like the blink of an eye but also an eternity at the same time somehow.

Caught up as I was in the rush, I don’t remember all the details. Most of what I do remember is throwing hooves and beating my wings for balance and traction while the swan beat his wings for the sake of the sheer violence of smacking me around the ears with them. I vaguely remember a sound like being in the winds of a tornado.

I remember most clearly how it ended: he swung his head forward to try to peck me, but I was quicker and saw it coming, so I darted forward under the blow and bit his outstretched neck. I didn’t hold anything back as I chomped down, either; I was entirely driven by adrenaline mixed with wild animal instinct and the sheer thrill of combat. Still, I was just a little filly at the time, and fortunately for us both, it wasn’t a very solid bite on anything important. I mostly just managed to get skin and feathers, and he was able to yank back and pull his neck out of my jaws without any blood drawn. Regardless, the realization that I wasn’t going to run and I would bite with reckless abandon if I had the chance must have been enough of a scare, because that’s when he panicked and broke off from battle, turning tail and flying away as fast as he could. Seeing her cob make a break for it, the pen took to the air right behind him, and the pair fled together.

I just stood there for a moment or two in the sudden silence left behind once he was gone. Feathers slowly drifted down through the air, settling like big silent snowflakes in summer.

And just like that, I’d taken back the pond. It seemed like no big accomplishment in the haze of the aftermath. I hardly even knew what I’d done. I was, to be honest, mostly just dumbfounded by the noise and rush of what had just happened and the stark contrast of sudden silence and stillness in its wake.

Then the adults started showing up because the foals who’d run away had good enough sense to go for help, like I probably should have done. My mom grabbed me, and the world was a blur of motion and commotion once again as I was being rushed to the doctor’s office.

About halfway there, the adrenaline was wearing off enough that I began to really feel what had just happened to me. I realized that I ached and stung in a lot of places, and when I looked down at myself, I could see blood on my leg, so I started crying.

Somehow, somepony got word to my dad at the town weather management office where he worked. He met us there in the doctor’s waiting room not long after my mom and I had arrived.

He took one look at me and asked in shock what in Equestria had happened.

“Your daughter picked a fight with a swan,” my mom informed him, glaring at me sternly.

Uh oh. The ‘your daughter’ stuff was coming out. It happened when I’d done something too wild and savage, too ‘pegasus,’ for earth pony sensibilities. That’s when I knew I was in for it. Grounded. At least a week. No playing outside. Extra chores. The works.

But she wasn’t wrong. I am his daughter, and I’ll never be anything else. “Whoa!” He went from looking worried to grinning slightly at me. “Didya win?”

“Yeah!” I looked up at him and nodded triumphantly through my tears. At least, at the time I figured I was the winner, the swan having been the one to chicken out first and all.

My mom’s death glare told me she didn’t see things that way, and it told my dad that he’d asked exactly the wrong question. He knew the score as quickly as I did.

“Well, it doesn’t matter who won, you shouldn’t be getting into fights,” he covered, dropping the smirk and trying to look as sternly disappointed as my mom.

I wasn’t fooled, but I also realized it wasn’t the time to act unfooled. I was in deep as it was. Better to just go along with it. There were too many ways to make things worse, and no ways to make them better, not at this point.

“I know.” I sheepishly stared down at the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m just sorry you won’t get the chance to tell that poor swan you’re sorry,” my mother scolded me.

The doctor took me back to the examination room. She gave me a good look-over and declared that I was going to have some impressive bruises and maybe a nice black eye from where I’d been smacked in the face with one of the swan’s broad, heavy wings, but I was lucky and it was mostly superficial. The one thing she was really concerned about was a gash on my right foreleg where the swan had gotten me with his claws. After bringing my parents back to consult with them, she washed out the cut with some kind of crazy-strong disinfectant. She told me to “be brave because it might sting a little.”

‘Sting a little,’ my flank. It was awful; the feel of pure acid on a raw nerve. It felt like I was being branded. I cried again.

After she washed and poked around at the cut a bit, giving it the usual doctor’s routine of thoughtful stares and unexplained wordless ‘hmmmm’ noises, she seemed to reach a decision. “Well, young mare, that leg needs stitches,” she pronounced.

“What’s ‘stitches’?” I asked, pretty sure I already had an idea but hoping with the desperate optimism of naïve youth it wasn’t like the kind I was thinking of.

Yeah, it was pretty much exactly the kind I was thinking of.

I was scared at the prospect of getting sewn up like a ripped sock, but the doctor got out a bottle of some sort of gel and spread it over the cut and it all went numb like magic. With the doctor being an earth pony, I know now with hindsight it wasn’t magic, just lidocaine. Despite my mom holding me in a hug and trying to keep my face buried in her chest fluff so I wouldn’t see what was happening and freak out, I peeked anyway, of course, and I was astounded to see myself getting mended with a needle and thread but not feeling it at all.

Strangely, while I was obviously glad not to feel anything, the lack of sensation was more unsettling than I think pain would have been.

Pain would have made sense, when a needle was being poked through my flesh to sew me up. Pain would have been real.

But this? This… nothing?

It was confusing and just didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem like the truth. It felt like something was being disconnected and covered up.

I guess most of all, it felt like a lie.

And because of that, I hated it. Not that the pain would have been any better; both options were bad, but one was at least reality and the other was not.

What the swan taught me was that I value reality.

What I have to decide now is, what do I acknowledge about the reality of the wounded swans I see in front of me now, every day in Princess Twilight’s palace? Is it better to choose to be numb and pretend there’s nothing there this time?

I don’t know.

I just don’t know anymore.
 
 
Enough about swans for today.