Pieces of a Grey Cloudby darfChaptersMorningThe Wind and the SignAfter WorkHappyPictureSickCloudsOther PoniesHurtMorningWaking UpWaveMailA SongMorningDerpy wakes up. The Wind and the SignWhen Derpy flies sometimes the wind goes in the right direction but lately it always goes in the wrong direction. When Derpy flies the wind goes the other way and it’s in her face and it makes it hard to fly and she wants to stop, but she can’t or her wings will go the other way and she will too and work is that way so she needs to keep going because she needs to go to work. Derpy closes her eyes when the wind is really big and then she opens them again pretty quick with a tickle in her chest because she knows if she has them closed for too long she might run into somepony. Sometimes she does it when she thinks somepony is nearby and they might be going really fast and maybe hit her and that’s scary, and she worries about it and opens her eyes and looks sideways and has to turn her whole head that way, because she can’t see out of that eye very good, but nopony is ever there. And then she feels weird because sometimes she wishes there was. She squints and tries to read the sign in the distance, but it’s too far away. Derpy thinks too much sometimes. She thinks about why she might close her eyes or why she might want somepony to go fast. She thinks about what she would look like if she got hit and then went up and sideways and then back down and she’d probably keep going until she hit the ground and that would hurt. Her wings feel prickly when she thinks about what would happen if they broke. Sometimes when she’s at home she touches them and feels how tiny the bones are and imagines if she pressed just a little bit harder how easy they would go snap and then she couldn’t fly, and she sticks her tongue out and presses down a little bit but doesn’t push all the way. Derpy squints. She still can't read the sign. She wants to read it. She closes one eye, and it says Cloudsdale Gardens. She opens both her eyes and then she closes one and the sign says /~~~~~~~/~~`~~~’~~~. Derpy squints really hard and sees \l~~s~~l~C’~~|~~g. She doesn’t want to read the sign anymore. Her eyes hurt.. Sometimes Derpy wishes that when she wakes up in the morning, she could read the clock near her bed with both eyes and it won’t look funny. She dreams that one day she’ll get up and her headache will go away and she can see things right all the time. After WorkThe wind goes the wrong direction when Derpy goes home. She has to fly through a rain cloud and she gets wet and that makes the wind worse and Derpy’s eyes are wet but she’s not sure if it’s the rain. Derpy sees shapes in the clouds when she’s flying and she goes by one pony on her way, and she imagines that she could fly up beside them and say hello and they might stop and say hello but she doesn’t say hello. She’s wet, and she wants to go home and the wind is blowing the wrong way. Derpy is excited to get home, but she doesn’t know why. She delivered a lot of mail. Derpy pays attention to the sounds her wings make when she flies home. She thinks about what she might do. She could read a book, or write in her journal, or fly around forever if she wanted to until she has to wake up and go back and deliver mail. She feels like she is flying for a long time and she doesn’t want to do it anymore, but when she gets home she doesn’t know what else to do. She forgot to get a book she liked, and she picks up one that she has lying around but it doesn’t seem very good. Derpy reads The only thing about life in Ponyville is Derpy stops and puts the book down. Derpy’s head feels heavy and her legs feel like big floppy balloons with no air in them and she can’t hold her head up anymore. Derpy goes to bed to go to sleep to her head falling down and the pillow makes her eyes feel funny. She sniffles and sometimes she cries and she cries right now and it’s okay because her pillow is big and soft. She makes noises like she’s crying really hard because she is but she doesn’t want to. And then she falls asleep, and when she wakes up later she isn’t crying, and doesn’t feel like she wants to, but she thinks maybe it made her feel better. After a little while, her tummy hurts again. HappyDerpy has a special kitty, who is a sky kitty who she found who was born in Cloudsdale with other sky kitties who is special because he can stand on clouds. Derpy named her sky kitty ‘Happy’ and she loves Happy but Happy doesn’t love her back. He only says hello when Derpy gets up from bed and then he runs to the door and meows until Derpy gets up to pet him and then he walks away and Derpy feels sad and sometimes she yells and Happy runs outside and Derpy feels worse and sometimes she cries. Sometimes Happy wants pets and Derpy pets him and it feels nice, but it doesn’t feel too nice because Derpy wants to hug him and Happy doesn’t like hugs. Derpy says goodbye to Happy when she leaves for work because she would be sad if one day she came back and Happy was gone and she never said goodbye. Happy makes Derpy sad sometimes. PictureDerpy has a picture on the table by her bed. The table is very dirty. Derpy drinks glasses of water and forgets to put them away sometimes. She doesn’t care because no one else lives there except Happy and he’s always crying at her so Derpy doesn’t care because he’s never happy. Derpy tells herself she might be happier if she cleaned up but her bed is always too comfy and when she gets home she can’t see how messy the floor is and she just wants to have a drink of water and go to bed. Derpy’s picture is bent because she forgot one time to put it away and she sat on it by mistake but it’s okay because it still looks alright, it just has a line in the middle. Derpy has it in a frame that she bought at the store when she went and spent all day inside and looked at different things and she wanted to buy all of them, even the ones she didn’t need, and in the end she got the frame and some food for a couple of weeks and she ate all the food too fast and took the picture out to put it in the frame and forgot about it and fell asleep and there were crumbs in her bed and when she woke up the pictures was bent and she cried. The picture is of her and a boy with a brown coat and black hair and blue eyes and he’s smiling, and Derpy remembers when he used to like her. She still likes him. Derpy remembers when she and the boy used to kiss, and they kissed lots and Derpy’s wings did little flutters and when she thinks about it now her chest feels bad but her lips are happy, but then she closes her eyes and her eyes aren’t happy and they show her because they cry, and then she cries, and she puts the picture away and says she won’t bring it out. But even when she cries she remembers the kisses, and she holds the picture sometimes and wishes Happy would come snuggle with her, and sometimes he does, but he’s not very good to pet when Derpy is crying. He lets Derpy hug him sometimes though, and Derpy feels a little better. Derpy thinks about the boy when she goes to sleep. Her bed feels too big. SickOne time Happy got sick. Derpy came home and he was lying on the bed in a ball and his face was scrunchy and his breathing didn’t sound good. Derpy got scared because she didn’t know what to do, and she had never had to take Happy anywhere before and she wanted to ask someone what she should do but there was no one there but Happy, and when she asked him he sounded so sick that Derpy was so scared she threw up. When she was done she picked up Happy and flew up high and went to the vet, on account of she was flying with Happy and her neighbour saw her and told her where to go and she felt so much less scared and wanted her neighbour to come with her but she was scared to ask him so she went by herself. When she got Happy to the vet, the vet said it was good she brought Happy because he was very sick. Happy would need a lot of care and attention to feel better, and he might not feel better at all. That made Derpy feel worse but also better because she had flown really fast. The vet had told her that they would watch Happy overnight and she should come back tomorrow, and Derpy had gone home. She had looked at her bed and saw a little bit of fur and the spot that Happy had left and she had cried and hit the wall and bit her tongue by accident on purpose and it hurt a lot and Derpy was really mad. She yelled at herself and then took all the blankets and threw them around because she was mad at them too, and she was mad at everything but she couldn’t afford to be mad because if she was too mad she would hit something and it might break and she wouldn’t be able to fix it. So she tried to calm down and her face felt hot and her eyes felt hot and wet and then her cheeks burned up but got cooled off by her eyes when they cried, and she bit her pillow and fell asleep. When she went back the next day, Happy was okay. The vet said he would get better, but she would need to give him some things, and Derpy had nodded and felt better and the vet had said take all these bottles. There were five of them. The doctor had said goodbye and then Derpy had remembered to pay for bringing Happy in and the person at the desk of the vet had asked Derpy for a lot of money. She had some because she’d been saving, but the visit was a lot, and Derpy remembered she was going to buy a new bed or a new book or a trip to somewhere that was sunny and Derpy could sleep in all day and stop delivering the mail for a week but she had Happy and Happy had come first so she paid the money and hugged Happy and the vet desk person had said not to hug him because his stomach was hurt, and Derpy had apologized and felt very bad and her stomach hurt too. She carried Happy home and put him on the bed and Happy looked upset, but he also looked better. Derpy had tried to give Happy all five of his medicines, but Happy didn’t want them, and Derpy had cried when he wouldn’t take one. She had yelled at Happy, and asked if she was doing something wrong, and Happy had just looked scared like he didn’t understand what Derpy was saying. And Derpy had cried some more, and finally gotten Happy to take his last medicine, and she had fallen asleep right then. Her work called later asking where she was and she said she was sorry and fibbed about where she was because she felt bad she was only at home because of Happy, who was starting to feel better. Derpy didn’t sleep very much for a few days. She gave Happy his medicine, and one time she hugged him even though she wasn’t supposed to. CloudsOne day when Derpy was on her way to work she started thinking about clouds. She passed a really big cloud and even though she couldn’t see it too well she thought it was pretty. She looked at all the different ways its shapes were smooshed and they came out on that side like this and on the other side they looked a bit like Happy and Derpy smiled. She had tried to think about the cloud all day and most of the time she did, and when she was eating her lunch she imagined that the cloud was a bunch of different things, and she had felt really excited about it and wanted to go home so she could try to write down all the things about the cloud. She had flown home really fast, and the wind wasn’t even that bad, and she had thought about clouds some more, and the way they looked different in the night, and how every cloud was different, and how all the millions of shapes and sizes and assemblies of clouds and their properties and weight made up the building blocks of the sky and Derpy lived in the sky and she was just a fragment of the giant picture of white blankets that draped over the horizon that shone every night in different colours and the clouds were part of those colours and everything was a part of them, and everypony’s coat and mane and cutie mark were their own shape like clouds and the clouds changed over time and so did ponies and Derpy had all of this in her head and wanted to write it down. She got home and pulled out her notebook and started writing. She got down a few things but they didn’t look right. She didn’t like the word cloud when she wrote it down. She started imagining if she showed her cloud thoughts to someone else that they might think they were really pretty, and they might laugh or clap, and Derpy would feel a big swell in her chest like she felt when she was thinking about it right now, and then she would be happy she had written down about clouds. She had been too tired to finish, and she had told herself she was so excited she could wake up the next day and write all of her cloud thoughts. But then she had slept in, and the shower was too warm and when she got to work she couldn’t remember everything about clouds, and then her mailbag spilled at work and she delivered something to the wrong person and she forgot her lunch and had to eat sugar cubes that tasted like paper and when she was on her way home she saw a sky kitty but it ran away from her when she stopped to pet it. And when she got home she couldn’t find her notebook, but she said it was okay, because she couldn’t remember about clouds, and she would write down her cloud thoughts tomorrow, on her day off. But her day off came up, and she didn’t even though she found her notebook again, because her head felt heavy and her chest felt funny, and she felt sad. She put the notebook away and didn’t think about clouds anymore. Other PoniesDerpy likes to make other ponies laugh. When she makes them laugh her chest feels funny and she doesn’t squint at them to remember they’re there, and her headache goes away from squinting too much when other ponies are happy. She tries to tell them jokes and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they just look at her funny and she says a ‘la la la’ song under her breath that no one hears and tries to think of a better joke later. Derpy thinks about her flute song or her cloud writing or Happy and how they might make other ponies happy, and she wants to show them, but she doesn’t. Other ponies laugh when she’s at work with them or when she brings them mail, but she doesn’t ask them to come laugh with her anywhere else because she’s scared. She flies home and thinks about what she’ll say the next day. She feels good when other ponies are happy. When she gets home, sometimes she closes her eyes and dreams that she might have somepony who wants to make her happy. HurtOne day Derpy felt very bad. She woke up and felt so bad she didn’t know what to do. She had never felt this bad, not in all her years of mail or all her days of icky stomachs or stuffed chests or smiles that hurt too much. Her head felt so heavy, and even her bed didn’t feel nice, and she wanted to sink away into the covers and melt into the cloud and go away into dark forever. When she closed her eyes they felt big because they were wet, and she opened them and she was crying and she didn’t know why, except that she hurt too much. Derpy had to go to work. When she was in the shower she held up her hooves to the water and cupped it against her chest and let it fall away, and she fell with it, and she landed on her shower floor and hung her head and pretended the water was turning her into mush. She wanted somepony to show up and stand on her back and hold her down in the shower until the water got cold and her breath went away and she couldn’t breathe and then she wouldn’t have to do anything. It took her so long to turn off the shower that her clock was mad at her when she got out. She pushed the clock and it fell over, and Derpy fell over again because she felt so heavy. She didn’t want to go outside. She was afraid the sky was going to crush her. But she had to go to work, so she flew and the second the wind pushed at her she started crying, but she sniffed up her nose big and spat onto her cloud and her spit tasted like salt, and then she flew to work. She didn’t wave at the pony who she passed by. She closed her eyes as much as she could, and her chest didn’t tingle when she thought about other ponies flying. When she got to work she was almost late, and she didn’t say hi to anypony. She put on her hat and grabbed her mail and it felt like it weighed a million pounds. Derpy didn’t eat her lunch. She went into the bathroom at the post office and sat down even though she didn’t need to go and banged her head against the door and cried. And she kind of wanted somepony to notice, and to come in and ask what was wrong, but she didn’t want them to at the same time, so she held her hoof over her mouth and her crying turned into strange noises and she had to look at herself in the mirror before she went back to work to make sure her face looked okay. She felt a bubble in her stomach all day that kept making her want to cry, but she tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Derpy didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to do anything. She almost fell down in the sky because she let her wings stop, but they hurt even more when she didn’t move them, so she kept going until she got home. When she got inside Happy looked at her and said hello in sky kitty which was ‘meow’, and Derpy cried at him. She felt bad. Everything felt wrong. Her legs and her chest and her wings and her hair all felt wrong, and her eyes kept crying and she wanted to take everything in her house and smash it because it was awful. She took her picture of the boy who kissed her and threw it across the room and it didn’t break and that made her cry more. She took her blankets and threw them out the window so they could fall onto the ground, and she cried. She kicked her bed and her hoof hurt but she didn’t care, and she kicked it more until she started to bleed, and then she thought ‘good’ and pretended she felt better for a second, but she didn’t. And she sat down and thought about her notebook and then thought about how much she hated it, because every time she wrote something in it, it made her words look dumb and ugly. She thought about hitting her notebook, but she didn’t. Derpy got up and went to the kitchen. She tried to read the time on the clock in the wall but it was too fuzzy. She closed one eye and it got even fuzzier, and Derpy got so mad she wanted to scream and punch the clock until it broke into a million pieces. It was the clock’s fault she couldn’t read it. She didn’t want to dream about having unfuzzy eyes anymore. Derpy had a drawer in her kitchen. She opened it and it was full of sharp things. She took one out and it was very long and very pointy and silver and Derpy could see it shining even though she had all the lights off except one in the hallway. Derpy felt the pointy thing with her hoof along the side, and it was very smooth, and cold. Derpy held it for a minute and she thought about clocks and eyes and playing the flute and wished she had learned how to do something other than bringing the mail to ponies. And now Derpy is standing there, and she's thinking. She's standing there and she feels broken. She wants to learn how to fix things. As Derpy holds the pointy thing, she imagines the pointy thing is a screwdriver. She imagines being a pony with a watch and holding a screwdriver to the tiny little gears inside and pushing forward and turning and making them slide into place until the watch is right. She thinks about fixing things. She thinks about the word. She thinks fix. Fix. She fixes. She thinks about fixing. She holds a screwdriver between her hooves. She holds it and fixes. Fixes. She thinks about fixing things. She holds her screwdriver, which is her knife. She takes it up with her hooves. She takes the knife She takes takes the knife the knife She takes the knife and holds it up and her chest feels unstuck and her crying goes away for a second because her breathing gets very slow. She holds the knife up like this and looks at it and the end is very pointy and Derpy has always meant to use it for cooking fancy things but she’s never used it. She holds it up and looks closer. Fix. She closes one eye, and the point of the knife is blurry. She feels a sticky thing in her chest again, and she squints and bites her lip because she’s mad and she moves the knife forward. She feels the cold against her skin and it’s against her nose and it’s against her cheek and then it’s there there there and she can feel the point of it so close to what she’s seeing it with and she squints and then she can’t see it anymore because it’s too blurry and she fix she thinks fix and she wells up all the bad feeling in her stomach and chest and her cries and she p u s h e s t h e k n i f e i n s i d hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hu *e** rt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt* it doesn’t hurt fine fix there’s RED everywhere it hurts it doesn’t hurt Derpy feels the hurt and sick and bad feeling going away and she doesn’t need to squint anymore b e c a u s e BECAUSE Everything is blurry in the crimson cataract pooling through her eye like a blooming flower and she can feel the impossibly thin crystalline edge of the blade digging into her eye digging into her flesh separating her blood vessels and blinding her and opening her eye and helping her see and both her eyes are so wide and she only needs one of them now because she Smiling hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt like it doesn’t hurt right now doesn’t hurt Derpy stands up and the kitchen unfolds underneath her like a tapestry of worms and she stumbles towards the door towards the outside towards anything because she needs to run away from the hurt and she smiles and that doesn’t hurt. She opens the door and Happy runs away from her and she holds her arms up and she can only see one of them and she flaps her wings that are sore and flies into the air. “I’m hurt!” she says to everypony. She says it like a joke. She says it like a laugh. She says it like she’s happy. “I’m hurt!” she says. Nopony looks. Nopony is awake. Nopony is there. She flies around in circles because she can’t remember how to go straight. She goes in circles above her house and she feels like it’s raining but she can’t see a cloud, and then she realizes that she can’t see and she can see a cloud and the cloud is red and it’s spilling out of her eye onto her house and cloud underneath like r m o c i s n r s o e p e t a l s from a thunderstorm. And finally somepony stops to look, because they're there, but Derpy doesn’t feel any better. And then her heart sinks like a weight in a pool of mercury, and so does she. Her wings give out suddenly and she falls. She falls faster than the sky comes up around her. She falls through clouds and through a song she can’t remember anymore and through something that hurts so much more than her eye and her wings and her stomach and she wants to be sick but the world is moving too fast. She remembers a kiss on her lips but she tastes blood. She thinks she feels a hoof touch her. Somepony she knows who reaches out his arm, just enough to touch the tip of her wing, but it shatters away from him like her whole body is falling apart, and he doesn’t follow her. And then there’s the ground, and it says hello, and Derpy says hello back, and she laughs like squeezing a sack of sour milk and then the knife touches the point in the back of her head so far away she thinks it’s her soul and her whole eye opens up and she can see the sky in the ground and she can see herself reaching and crying and she can see the knife through the knife and it’s cutting a hole in a black cloud and Derpy can see through and there’s somepony on the other side smiling that looks like MorningDerpy wakes up. Waking UpDerpy doesn’t want to get up. Her stomach feels funny and the clouds feel warm and she knows that if she lies down she can go back to sleep and her tummy will feel better and when she closes her eyes she’ll have nice things behind them. Derpy gets up. She feels scratchy and dirty and she knows she needs to take a shower and there’s things on the floor that she should have cleaned up a week ago. Derpy looks in the mirror for a second and her hair is a mess. She doesn’t have a brush. Derpy goes to the shower and the water feels warm and she wants to go back to sleep. She closes her eyes and thinks about clouds and flying away and sunshine and her wings and holding a bundle of warm things up against her chest and how loud she can hear her heartbeat in her own ears and she flaps her wings and water flies off them like a sprinkler and she smiles a little bit. Derpy tries three times to turn off the shower but her hoof misses the thing to make the water go away. She closes one eye and tries again and she gets it, but she thinks she could see it fine anyway. She can’t be sure. Derpy is cold when the water stops and her stomach feels funny again and her eyes are still wet. Derpy looks in the mirror. She looks sad, and then her eyes get big and she doesn’t want to look anymore. She shakes her head and her hair gets water everywhere but it doesn’t matter because nothing there doesn’t want to get wet. It’s already wet, and Derpy is wet too, but she dries herself off. She wants to go back to bed. Derpy sits down and looks at the clock. It says that it’s time to go to work, but she only knows it says that because Derpy hears the clock too fast, so Derpy knows it’s really not time to go to work yet. She sits for a little bit and closes her eyes and thinks about fluffy things, and for some reason that makes her tummy hurt, so she stops. She opens her eyes and it’s really time to go to work. She closes her eyes. She leaves for work five minutes late, but she knows that’s okay because she’ll make it there on time. When she closes the door she checks her mailbox, but she doesn’t find any letters. She thinks the metal door on the mailbox sounds grumpy when she closes it. It looks a little bit like a frowny face. The frowny face makes Derpy’s tummy hurt. She tries to ignore it. She flaps her wings and goes to work. It’s a long way away. WaveDerpy passes by a pony on the way to work. She recognizes him because he has a fancy hat on and he’s wearing a blue jumper. He’s going fast in the other direction, because the wind is helping him. Derpy wants to be mad at the wind, but she gets mad at her wings instead because they don’t flap hard enough. She flies to work every day and her wings are still silly and not too strong. Derpy waves to the pony flying in the other direction. He doesn’t wave back. Derpy smiles at him. He goes by really fast. Derpy doesn’t think she saw him smile. She turns around to see him but she can only see a blue blob. She closes one eye, but he’s on the other side, and suddenly Derpy remembers other fast ponies and she jerks her head back forward and then to the other side but there’s nopony there. Derpy keeps flying to work. The wind calms down a little bit when she gets there. Derpy is a mailpony. She delivers mail. Derpy is early for work. She puts on her hat and walks inside the post office. MailDerpy walks into the wrong thing when she gets to work. She’s worked at her work for years and she still can’t remember where everything is. She read the sign on a door wrong and then she read the door wrong and her hoof read the doorhandle wrong and she walked into the door and it hurt and she bit her tongue. She tried to walk away from the door but she felt bad, because even though she knew the door wouldn’t tell, it hurt her tummy when she walked into it. Derpy made up a little ‘la la la’ song as she walked away from the door, the kind she did when she didn’t want to think about something, but then the time she was in her school play and said the wrong words remembered her, and she remembered it too and it felt bad and then she wanted to cry a little bit but she didn’t. Derpy delivers the mail. She delivers it really well even if she sometimes mixes up and when she mixes up her stomach hurts but no one is ever mad at her. And sometimes her boss says good job and he says you’re the best mailpony we’ve ever had and someone said thank you and they got you this big basket of muffins, and Derpy smiles and eats them and they taste good but sometimes they taste like dirt and Derpy doesn’t want them anymore but she can’t say that. Derpy works with a lot of other ponies. They smile at her. Her smile hurts, but she smiles, and then sometimes she can’t see things and she trips a little bit and they laugh. They say ‘oh Derpy’ and Derpy’s smile hurts more but she laughs and then goes to deliver her mail. Derpy has a lot of mail to deliver. When she picks it up she thinks about how she felt when she woke up. Her bed was soft, and her eyes were dark, and her stomach didn’t hurt. Derpy wanted to be the head mailpony when she started at her job. Now she just wants to go home. A SongDerpy doesn’t remember yesterday because it was Wednesday and the day before that was Tuesday and then Monday and she doesn’t remember those days because there’s nothing about them that remembers her. She delivered mail. The mail doesn’t remember her either. Sometimes the ponies with the mail do, and Derpy smiles at them, and her smile doesn’t hurt as much. Derpy remembers a song sometimes. She can’t remember where it comes from, or maybe if she made it up in her own head, but it’s a nice song and she sings it especially when she’s in the shower and it makes the water feel a bit warmer and she wishes somepony else knew it because she wants to hear them sing it, and then they could sing together and maybe it would be a nice pony Derpy could kiss and the kisses would make her lips feel tingly. Derpy doesn’t think she knows how to sing. She wants to play an instrument, like the flute. She likes the flute. She saw a concert one time and a pony there played the flute and he was so good that Derpy felt sad for a bit, and then she felt happy because she forgot to feel sad because he was so good, but then when he was done Derpy went home and pretended she had a flute and she did it for a few seconds before her house felt too quiet and then she hit something with her hoof and went to sleep. Derpy thinks if she could play the flute her song would sound really pretty. But she’s scared that it might not.
The Wind and the SignWhen Derpy flies sometimes the wind goes in the right direction but lately it always goes in the wrong direction. When Derpy flies the wind goes the other way and it’s in her face and it makes it hard to fly and she wants to stop, but she can’t or her wings will go the other way and she will too and work is that way so she needs to keep going because she needs to go to work. Derpy closes her eyes when the wind is really big and then she opens them again pretty quick with a tickle in her chest because she knows if she has them closed for too long she might run into somepony. Sometimes she does it when she thinks somepony is nearby and they might be going really fast and maybe hit her and that’s scary, and she worries about it and opens her eyes and looks sideways and has to turn her whole head that way, because she can’t see out of that eye very good, but nopony is ever there. And then she feels weird because sometimes she wishes there was. She squints and tries to read the sign in the distance, but it’s too far away. Derpy thinks too much sometimes. She thinks about why she might close her eyes or why she might want somepony to go fast. She thinks about what she would look like if she got hit and then went up and sideways and then back down and she’d probably keep going until she hit the ground and that would hurt. Her wings feel prickly when she thinks about what would happen if they broke. Sometimes when she’s at home she touches them and feels how tiny the bones are and imagines if she pressed just a little bit harder how easy they would go snap and then she couldn’t fly, and she sticks her tongue out and presses down a little bit but doesn’t push all the way. Derpy squints. She still can't read the sign. She wants to read it. She closes one eye, and it says Cloudsdale Gardens. She opens both her eyes and then she closes one and the sign says /~~~~~~~/~~`~~~’~~~. Derpy squints really hard and sees \l~~s~~l~C’~~|~~g. She doesn’t want to read the sign anymore. Her eyes hurt.. Sometimes Derpy wishes that when she wakes up in the morning, she could read the clock near her bed with both eyes and it won’t look funny. She dreams that one day she’ll get up and her headache will go away and she can see things right all the time.
After WorkThe wind goes the wrong direction when Derpy goes home. She has to fly through a rain cloud and she gets wet and that makes the wind worse and Derpy’s eyes are wet but she’s not sure if it’s the rain. Derpy sees shapes in the clouds when she’s flying and she goes by one pony on her way, and she imagines that she could fly up beside them and say hello and they might stop and say hello but she doesn’t say hello. She’s wet, and she wants to go home and the wind is blowing the wrong way. Derpy is excited to get home, but she doesn’t know why. She delivered a lot of mail. Derpy pays attention to the sounds her wings make when she flies home. She thinks about what she might do. She could read a book, or write in her journal, or fly around forever if she wanted to until she has to wake up and go back and deliver mail. She feels like she is flying for a long time and she doesn’t want to do it anymore, but when she gets home she doesn’t know what else to do. She forgot to get a book she liked, and she picks up one that she has lying around but it doesn’t seem very good. Derpy reads The only thing about life in Ponyville is Derpy stops and puts the book down. Derpy’s head feels heavy and her legs feel like big floppy balloons with no air in them and she can’t hold her head up anymore. Derpy goes to bed to go to sleep to her head falling down and the pillow makes her eyes feel funny. She sniffles and sometimes she cries and she cries right now and it’s okay because her pillow is big and soft. She makes noises like she’s crying really hard because she is but she doesn’t want to. And then she falls asleep, and when she wakes up later she isn’t crying, and doesn’t feel like she wants to, but she thinks maybe it made her feel better. After a little while, her tummy hurts again.
HappyDerpy has a special kitty, who is a sky kitty who she found who was born in Cloudsdale with other sky kitties who is special because he can stand on clouds. Derpy named her sky kitty ‘Happy’ and she loves Happy but Happy doesn’t love her back. He only says hello when Derpy gets up from bed and then he runs to the door and meows until Derpy gets up to pet him and then he walks away and Derpy feels sad and sometimes she yells and Happy runs outside and Derpy feels worse and sometimes she cries. Sometimes Happy wants pets and Derpy pets him and it feels nice, but it doesn’t feel too nice because Derpy wants to hug him and Happy doesn’t like hugs. Derpy says goodbye to Happy when she leaves for work because she would be sad if one day she came back and Happy was gone and she never said goodbye. Happy makes Derpy sad sometimes.
PictureDerpy has a picture on the table by her bed. The table is very dirty. Derpy drinks glasses of water and forgets to put them away sometimes. She doesn’t care because no one else lives there except Happy and he’s always crying at her so Derpy doesn’t care because he’s never happy. Derpy tells herself she might be happier if she cleaned up but her bed is always too comfy and when she gets home she can’t see how messy the floor is and she just wants to have a drink of water and go to bed. Derpy’s picture is bent because she forgot one time to put it away and she sat on it by mistake but it’s okay because it still looks alright, it just has a line in the middle. Derpy has it in a frame that she bought at the store when she went and spent all day inside and looked at different things and she wanted to buy all of them, even the ones she didn’t need, and in the end she got the frame and some food for a couple of weeks and she ate all the food too fast and took the picture out to put it in the frame and forgot about it and fell asleep and there were crumbs in her bed and when she woke up the pictures was bent and she cried. The picture is of her and a boy with a brown coat and black hair and blue eyes and he’s smiling, and Derpy remembers when he used to like her. She still likes him. Derpy remembers when she and the boy used to kiss, and they kissed lots and Derpy’s wings did little flutters and when she thinks about it now her chest feels bad but her lips are happy, but then she closes her eyes and her eyes aren’t happy and they show her because they cry, and then she cries, and she puts the picture away and says she won’t bring it out. But even when she cries she remembers the kisses, and she holds the picture sometimes and wishes Happy would come snuggle with her, and sometimes he does, but he’s not very good to pet when Derpy is crying. He lets Derpy hug him sometimes though, and Derpy feels a little better. Derpy thinks about the boy when she goes to sleep. Her bed feels too big.
SickOne time Happy got sick. Derpy came home and he was lying on the bed in a ball and his face was scrunchy and his breathing didn’t sound good. Derpy got scared because she didn’t know what to do, and she had never had to take Happy anywhere before and she wanted to ask someone what she should do but there was no one there but Happy, and when she asked him he sounded so sick that Derpy was so scared she threw up. When she was done she picked up Happy and flew up high and went to the vet, on account of she was flying with Happy and her neighbour saw her and told her where to go and she felt so much less scared and wanted her neighbour to come with her but she was scared to ask him so she went by herself. When she got Happy to the vet, the vet said it was good she brought Happy because he was very sick. Happy would need a lot of care and attention to feel better, and he might not feel better at all. That made Derpy feel worse but also better because she had flown really fast. The vet had told her that they would watch Happy overnight and she should come back tomorrow, and Derpy had gone home. She had looked at her bed and saw a little bit of fur and the spot that Happy had left and she had cried and hit the wall and bit her tongue by accident on purpose and it hurt a lot and Derpy was really mad. She yelled at herself and then took all the blankets and threw them around because she was mad at them too, and she was mad at everything but she couldn’t afford to be mad because if she was too mad she would hit something and it might break and she wouldn’t be able to fix it. So she tried to calm down and her face felt hot and her eyes felt hot and wet and then her cheeks burned up but got cooled off by her eyes when they cried, and she bit her pillow and fell asleep. When she went back the next day, Happy was okay. The vet said he would get better, but she would need to give him some things, and Derpy had nodded and felt better and the vet had said take all these bottles. There were five of them. The doctor had said goodbye and then Derpy had remembered to pay for bringing Happy in and the person at the desk of the vet had asked Derpy for a lot of money. She had some because she’d been saving, but the visit was a lot, and Derpy remembered she was going to buy a new bed or a new book or a trip to somewhere that was sunny and Derpy could sleep in all day and stop delivering the mail for a week but she had Happy and Happy had come first so she paid the money and hugged Happy and the vet desk person had said not to hug him because his stomach was hurt, and Derpy had apologized and felt very bad and her stomach hurt too. She carried Happy home and put him on the bed and Happy looked upset, but he also looked better. Derpy had tried to give Happy all five of his medicines, but Happy didn’t want them, and Derpy had cried when he wouldn’t take one. She had yelled at Happy, and asked if she was doing something wrong, and Happy had just looked scared like he didn’t understand what Derpy was saying. And Derpy had cried some more, and finally gotten Happy to take his last medicine, and she had fallen asleep right then. Her work called later asking where she was and she said she was sorry and fibbed about where she was because she felt bad she was only at home because of Happy, who was starting to feel better. Derpy didn’t sleep very much for a few days. She gave Happy his medicine, and one time she hugged him even though she wasn’t supposed to.
CloudsOne day when Derpy was on her way to work she started thinking about clouds. She passed a really big cloud and even though she couldn’t see it too well she thought it was pretty. She looked at all the different ways its shapes were smooshed and they came out on that side like this and on the other side they looked a bit like Happy and Derpy smiled. She had tried to think about the cloud all day and most of the time she did, and when she was eating her lunch she imagined that the cloud was a bunch of different things, and she had felt really excited about it and wanted to go home so she could try to write down all the things about the cloud. She had flown home really fast, and the wind wasn’t even that bad, and she had thought about clouds some more, and the way they looked different in the night, and how every cloud was different, and how all the millions of shapes and sizes and assemblies of clouds and their properties and weight made up the building blocks of the sky and Derpy lived in the sky and she was just a fragment of the giant picture of white blankets that draped over the horizon that shone every night in different colours and the clouds were part of those colours and everything was a part of them, and everypony’s coat and mane and cutie mark were their own shape like clouds and the clouds changed over time and so did ponies and Derpy had all of this in her head and wanted to write it down. She got home and pulled out her notebook and started writing. She got down a few things but they didn’t look right. She didn’t like the word cloud when she wrote it down. She started imagining if she showed her cloud thoughts to someone else that they might think they were really pretty, and they might laugh or clap, and Derpy would feel a big swell in her chest like she felt when she was thinking about it right now, and then she would be happy she had written down about clouds. She had been too tired to finish, and she had told herself she was so excited she could wake up the next day and write all of her cloud thoughts. But then she had slept in, and the shower was too warm and when she got to work she couldn’t remember everything about clouds, and then her mailbag spilled at work and she delivered something to the wrong person and she forgot her lunch and had to eat sugar cubes that tasted like paper and when she was on her way home she saw a sky kitty but it ran away from her when she stopped to pet it. And when she got home she couldn’t find her notebook, but she said it was okay, because she couldn’t remember about clouds, and she would write down her cloud thoughts tomorrow, on her day off. But her day off came up, and she didn’t even though she found her notebook again, because her head felt heavy and her chest felt funny, and she felt sad. She put the notebook away and didn’t think about clouds anymore.
Other PoniesDerpy likes to make other ponies laugh. When she makes them laugh her chest feels funny and she doesn’t squint at them to remember they’re there, and her headache goes away from squinting too much when other ponies are happy. She tries to tell them jokes and sometimes they laugh and sometimes they just look at her funny and she says a ‘la la la’ song under her breath that no one hears and tries to think of a better joke later. Derpy thinks about her flute song or her cloud writing or Happy and how they might make other ponies happy, and she wants to show them, but she doesn’t. Other ponies laugh when she’s at work with them or when she brings them mail, but she doesn’t ask them to come laugh with her anywhere else because she’s scared. She flies home and thinks about what she’ll say the next day. She feels good when other ponies are happy. When she gets home, sometimes she closes her eyes and dreams that she might have somepony who wants to make her happy.
HurtOne day Derpy felt very bad. She woke up and felt so bad she didn’t know what to do. She had never felt this bad, not in all her years of mail or all her days of icky stomachs or stuffed chests or smiles that hurt too much. Her head felt so heavy, and even her bed didn’t feel nice, and she wanted to sink away into the covers and melt into the cloud and go away into dark forever. When she closed her eyes they felt big because they were wet, and she opened them and she was crying and she didn’t know why, except that she hurt too much. Derpy had to go to work. When she was in the shower she held up her hooves to the water and cupped it against her chest and let it fall away, and she fell with it, and she landed on her shower floor and hung her head and pretended the water was turning her into mush. She wanted somepony to show up and stand on her back and hold her down in the shower until the water got cold and her breath went away and she couldn’t breathe and then she wouldn’t have to do anything. It took her so long to turn off the shower that her clock was mad at her when she got out. She pushed the clock and it fell over, and Derpy fell over again because she felt so heavy. She didn’t want to go outside. She was afraid the sky was going to crush her. But she had to go to work, so she flew and the second the wind pushed at her she started crying, but she sniffed up her nose big and spat onto her cloud and her spit tasted like salt, and then she flew to work. She didn’t wave at the pony who she passed by. She closed her eyes as much as she could, and her chest didn’t tingle when she thought about other ponies flying. When she got to work she was almost late, and she didn’t say hi to anypony. She put on her hat and grabbed her mail and it felt like it weighed a million pounds. Derpy didn’t eat her lunch. She went into the bathroom at the post office and sat down even though she didn’t need to go and banged her head against the door and cried. And she kind of wanted somepony to notice, and to come in and ask what was wrong, but she didn’t want them to at the same time, so she held her hoof over her mouth and her crying turned into strange noises and she had to look at herself in the mirror before she went back to work to make sure her face looked okay. She felt a bubble in her stomach all day that kept making her want to cry, but she tried to pretend it wasn’t there. Derpy didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to do anything. She almost fell down in the sky because she let her wings stop, but they hurt even more when she didn’t move them, so she kept going until she got home. When she got inside Happy looked at her and said hello in sky kitty which was ‘meow’, and Derpy cried at him. She felt bad. Everything felt wrong. Her legs and her chest and her wings and her hair all felt wrong, and her eyes kept crying and she wanted to take everything in her house and smash it because it was awful. She took her picture of the boy who kissed her and threw it across the room and it didn’t break and that made her cry more. She took her blankets and threw them out the window so they could fall onto the ground, and she cried. She kicked her bed and her hoof hurt but she didn’t care, and she kicked it more until she started to bleed, and then she thought ‘good’ and pretended she felt better for a second, but she didn’t. And she sat down and thought about her notebook and then thought about how much she hated it, because every time she wrote something in it, it made her words look dumb and ugly. She thought about hitting her notebook, but she didn’t. Derpy got up and went to the kitchen. She tried to read the time on the clock in the wall but it was too fuzzy. She closed one eye and it got even fuzzier, and Derpy got so mad she wanted to scream and punch the clock until it broke into a million pieces. It was the clock’s fault she couldn’t read it. She didn’t want to dream about having unfuzzy eyes anymore. Derpy had a drawer in her kitchen. She opened it and it was full of sharp things. She took one out and it was very long and very pointy and silver and Derpy could see it shining even though she had all the lights off except one in the hallway. Derpy felt the pointy thing with her hoof along the side, and it was very smooth, and cold. Derpy held it for a minute and she thought about clocks and eyes and playing the flute and wished she had learned how to do something other than bringing the mail to ponies. And now Derpy is standing there, and she's thinking. She's standing there and she feels broken. She wants to learn how to fix things. As Derpy holds the pointy thing, she imagines the pointy thing is a screwdriver. She imagines being a pony with a watch and holding a screwdriver to the tiny little gears inside and pushing forward and turning and making them slide into place until the watch is right. She thinks about fixing things. She thinks about the word. She thinks fix. Fix. She fixes. She thinks about fixing. She holds a screwdriver between her hooves. She holds it and fixes. Fixes. She thinks about fixing things. She holds her screwdriver, which is her knife. She takes it up with her hooves. She takes the knife She takes takes the knife the knife She takes the knife and holds it up and her chest feels unstuck and her crying goes away for a second because her breathing gets very slow. She holds the knife up like this and looks at it and the end is very pointy and Derpy has always meant to use it for cooking fancy things but she’s never used it. She holds it up and looks closer. Fix. She closes one eye, and the point of the knife is blurry. She feels a sticky thing in her chest again, and she squints and bites her lip because she’s mad and she moves the knife forward. She feels the cold against her skin and it’s against her nose and it’s against her cheek and then it’s there there there and she can feel the point of it so close to what she’s seeing it with and she squints and then she can’t see it anymore because it’s too blurry and she fix she thinks fix and she wells up all the bad feeling in her stomach and chest and her cries and she p u s h e s t h e k n i f e i n s i d hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hu *e** rt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt* it doesn’t hurt fine fix there’s RED everywhere it hurts it doesn’t hurt Derpy feels the hurt and sick and bad feeling going away and she doesn’t need to squint anymore b e c a u s e BECAUSE Everything is blurry in the crimson cataract pooling through her eye like a blooming flower and she can feel the impossibly thin crystalline edge of the blade digging into her eye digging into her flesh separating her blood vessels and blinding her and opening her eye and helping her see and both her eyes are so wide and she only needs one of them now because she Smiling hurts sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt like it doesn’t hurt right now doesn’t hurt Derpy stands up and the kitchen unfolds underneath her like a tapestry of worms and she stumbles towards the door towards the outside towards anything because she needs to run away from the hurt and she smiles and that doesn’t hurt. She opens the door and Happy runs away from her and she holds her arms up and she can only see one of them and she flaps her wings that are sore and flies into the air. “I’m hurt!” she says to everypony. She says it like a joke. She says it like a laugh. She says it like she’s happy. “I’m hurt!” she says. Nopony looks. Nopony is awake. Nopony is there. She flies around in circles because she can’t remember how to go straight. She goes in circles above her house and she feels like it’s raining but she can’t see a cloud, and then she realizes that she can’t see and she can see a cloud and the cloud is red and it’s spilling out of her eye onto her house and cloud underneath like r m o c i s n r s o e p e t a l s from a thunderstorm. And finally somepony stops to look, because they're there, but Derpy doesn’t feel any better. And then her heart sinks like a weight in a pool of mercury, and so does she. Her wings give out suddenly and she falls. She falls faster than the sky comes up around her. She falls through clouds and through a song she can’t remember anymore and through something that hurts so much more than her eye and her wings and her stomach and she wants to be sick but the world is moving too fast. She remembers a kiss on her lips but she tastes blood. She thinks she feels a hoof touch her. Somepony she knows who reaches out his arm, just enough to touch the tip of her wing, but it shatters away from him like her whole body is falling apart, and he doesn’t follow her. And then there’s the ground, and it says hello, and Derpy says hello back, and she laughs like squeezing a sack of sour milk and then the knife touches the point in the back of her head so far away she thinks it’s her soul and her whole eye opens up and she can see the sky in the ground and she can see herself reaching and crying and she can see the knife through the knife and it’s cutting a hole in a black cloud and Derpy can see through and there’s somepony on the other side smiling that looks like
Waking UpDerpy doesn’t want to get up. Her stomach feels funny and the clouds feel warm and she knows that if she lies down she can go back to sleep and her tummy will feel better and when she closes her eyes she’ll have nice things behind them. Derpy gets up. She feels scratchy and dirty and she knows she needs to take a shower and there’s things on the floor that she should have cleaned up a week ago. Derpy looks in the mirror for a second and her hair is a mess. She doesn’t have a brush. Derpy goes to the shower and the water feels warm and she wants to go back to sleep. She closes her eyes and thinks about clouds and flying away and sunshine and her wings and holding a bundle of warm things up against her chest and how loud she can hear her heartbeat in her own ears and she flaps her wings and water flies off them like a sprinkler and she smiles a little bit. Derpy tries three times to turn off the shower but her hoof misses the thing to make the water go away. She closes one eye and tries again and she gets it, but she thinks she could see it fine anyway. She can’t be sure. Derpy is cold when the water stops and her stomach feels funny again and her eyes are still wet. Derpy looks in the mirror. She looks sad, and then her eyes get big and she doesn’t want to look anymore. She shakes her head and her hair gets water everywhere but it doesn’t matter because nothing there doesn’t want to get wet. It’s already wet, and Derpy is wet too, but she dries herself off. She wants to go back to bed. Derpy sits down and looks at the clock. It says that it’s time to go to work, but she only knows it says that because Derpy hears the clock too fast, so Derpy knows it’s really not time to go to work yet. She sits for a little bit and closes her eyes and thinks about fluffy things, and for some reason that makes her tummy hurt, so she stops. She opens her eyes and it’s really time to go to work. She closes her eyes. She leaves for work five minutes late, but she knows that’s okay because she’ll make it there on time. When she closes the door she checks her mailbox, but she doesn’t find any letters. She thinks the metal door on the mailbox sounds grumpy when she closes it. It looks a little bit like a frowny face. The frowny face makes Derpy’s tummy hurt. She tries to ignore it. She flaps her wings and goes to work. It’s a long way away.
WaveDerpy passes by a pony on the way to work. She recognizes him because he has a fancy hat on and he’s wearing a blue jumper. He’s going fast in the other direction, because the wind is helping him. Derpy wants to be mad at the wind, but she gets mad at her wings instead because they don’t flap hard enough. She flies to work every day and her wings are still silly and not too strong. Derpy waves to the pony flying in the other direction. He doesn’t wave back. Derpy smiles at him. He goes by really fast. Derpy doesn’t think she saw him smile. She turns around to see him but she can only see a blue blob. She closes one eye, but he’s on the other side, and suddenly Derpy remembers other fast ponies and she jerks her head back forward and then to the other side but there’s nopony there. Derpy keeps flying to work. The wind calms down a little bit when she gets there. Derpy is a mailpony. She delivers mail. Derpy is early for work. She puts on her hat and walks inside the post office.
MailDerpy walks into the wrong thing when she gets to work. She’s worked at her work for years and she still can’t remember where everything is. She read the sign on a door wrong and then she read the door wrong and her hoof read the doorhandle wrong and she walked into the door and it hurt and she bit her tongue. She tried to walk away from the door but she felt bad, because even though she knew the door wouldn’t tell, it hurt her tummy when she walked into it. Derpy made up a little ‘la la la’ song as she walked away from the door, the kind she did when she didn’t want to think about something, but then the time she was in her school play and said the wrong words remembered her, and she remembered it too and it felt bad and then she wanted to cry a little bit but she didn’t. Derpy delivers the mail. She delivers it really well even if she sometimes mixes up and when she mixes up her stomach hurts but no one is ever mad at her. And sometimes her boss says good job and he says you’re the best mailpony we’ve ever had and someone said thank you and they got you this big basket of muffins, and Derpy smiles and eats them and they taste good but sometimes they taste like dirt and Derpy doesn’t want them anymore but she can’t say that. Derpy works with a lot of other ponies. They smile at her. Her smile hurts, but she smiles, and then sometimes she can’t see things and she trips a little bit and they laugh. They say ‘oh Derpy’ and Derpy’s smile hurts more but she laughs and then goes to deliver her mail. Derpy has a lot of mail to deliver. When she picks it up she thinks about how she felt when she woke up. Her bed was soft, and her eyes were dark, and her stomach didn’t hurt. Derpy wanted to be the head mailpony when she started at her job. Now she just wants to go home.
A SongDerpy doesn’t remember yesterday because it was Wednesday and the day before that was Tuesday and then Monday and she doesn’t remember those days because there’s nothing about them that remembers her. She delivered mail. The mail doesn’t remember her either. Sometimes the ponies with the mail do, and Derpy smiles at them, and her smile doesn’t hurt as much. Derpy remembers a song sometimes. She can’t remember where it comes from, or maybe if she made it up in her own head, but it’s a nice song and she sings it especially when she’s in the shower and it makes the water feel a bit warmer and she wishes somepony else knew it because she wants to hear them sing it, and then they could sing together and maybe it would be a nice pony Derpy could kiss and the kisses would make her lips feel tingly. Derpy doesn’t think she knows how to sing. She wants to play an instrument, like the flute. She likes the flute. She saw a concert one time and a pony there played the flute and he was so good that Derpy felt sad for a bit, and then she felt happy because she forgot to feel sad because he was so good, but then when he was done Derpy went home and pretended she had a flute and she did it for a few seconds before her house felt too quiet and then she hit something with her hoof and went to sleep. Derpy thinks if she could play the flute her song would sound really pretty. But she’s scared that it might not.
