Chapter Text





Detective Pony

[front cover, title page, list of other Pony Pal books, another title page, copyright info, dedication, Gallery of American Presidential Mustaches, table of contents, blank page, a third goddamn title page, map of the town of Wiggins]



1

A Visitor

Anna Harley came out her back door and ran across the backyard. There were two ponies in the paddock behind Anna’s house and yard. “Hey, ponies,” Anna called out. “We’re going for a trail ride,” as she prepared the noose adroitly.

Anna’s pony, Acorn, was standing in the pony shed. The other pony, Lil’ Sebastian, belonged to Anna’s next-door neighbor and Pony Pal, the city of Pawnee, Indiana.

Lil Seb came over to Anna, but Acorn stayed in the shed. Anna thought that Acorn was trying to hide from her. He liked to play I’m Scared Shitless of my Master.

(1)



Anna went into the shed. Acorn wasn’t fucking around. He was staring at a fluffy black cat with white paws taking a dump on his favorite saddle. The cat was staring back at Acorn, shitting like tomorrow wasn’t a thing.

“Hey, kitty,” said Anna. “What are you doing here?” she asked, the act of defecation oddly foreign to the girl.

Pawnee came into the shed behind Anna. “Whose cat is that?” the rural township enquired.

“I don’t know,” answered Anna. “It’s not a pony, so who seriously gives a fuck?”

Suddenly, a mouse ran from behind the feed bin. This contrived incident caused some extra shit to happen. Acorn was like, oh hell no. Not the fuck in my paddock, bitch. Acorn nickered as if to say, “(vile slurs omitted)”

The cat leaped back up on the straw and curled himself into a ball. Acorn took a few steps toward the cat and crushed it to death with his magnificent hooves. Acorn nickered triumphantly.

“That’s so cute!” murmured the fictional midwestern borough.

Pam Crandal rode another god damned pony up to the shed. She said hi to her Pony Pals and the whole crew beamed complacently about their bullshit horse club.

Anna pointed at the cat. “Acorn has a new kind of meat he appears to tolerate!” she exploded.

(2)





“But we don’t know where the most succulent portions are or who gets the wishbone, said Pawnee. “Do you?”

Pam picked up the body and looked the jellified carcass over. “The body, without the soul, is just matter,” she said.

“Do you think there’s an afterlife?” asked Anna.

“He doesn’t have a collar,” said Pam. “So there’s nothing to loot from the corpse.” The avaricious girl sighed dejectedly.

“We should make a poster saying we found him,” said Anna. “Just in case someone needs a dead cat for a Satanic ritual.”

“Are we the Feline Friends?” said Pawnee. “No, we’re the Pony Pals, so let’s stop dicking around with non-equines and ride some fucking horses.”

“Let’s go for a trail ride,” snorted Pam. “If he’s still dead when we come back we’ll make a poster.”

Anna and Pawnee agreed with Pam. They greased up their ponies and mounted. The cat began the slow process of decomposition.

“Bye, kitty,” said Anna. “It’s time for you to go to your Maker and be judged for your sins.”

The Pony Pals rode across the paddock onto Pony Pal Trail. The rest of the town called it the Those Fucking Kids Who Won’t Keep Their Mouths Shut About Ponies For Five God Damned Minutes No Matter How Much We Beat Them Trail. Anna

(3)





and her pals loved riding on Pony Pal Trail. “No school for a whole week,” Anna

shouted. “I knew framing our teacher for arson was a good idea!”

“We’re going to have so much heroin,” Pam said.

“Look, Anna,” Pawnee called. “The cat came back to life!” At first, Anna and Pam thought she was just drunk again. Pawnee had a serious problem.

Anna turned and saw the cat running along the trail behind them. Acorn saw him, too. He wondered if it was a projection of his murder-burdened conscience.

Killing was not foreign to Acorn. Quite the contrary. So why only now, after countless other homicides, would a victim come back to haunt him? Acorn, for the first time in centuries, was afraid. Anna slowed Acorn to a halt at three birch trees. The cat ran up one of the trees and sat on a limb near Acorn’s face.

Acorn examined it, his dead, black eyes like pools of ichor bled by the nameless, thousand-tongued beast whose awakening will cause the land to crumble, the sea to boil, and the sky to shit itself in fear.

“This cat really likes Acorn,” said Anna.

“Maybe we should bring the cat to your father,” said Pawnee. He might know what kind of black magic is at play here.”

Good idea,” said Anna, as she took a swig of whiskey from her jewel-encrusted flask.

Pam’s father was a veterinarian and he took care of most of the cats, dogs, horses, manticores, and pigs in Wiggins. He spent the majority of his time, however, thinking about what a god damned stupid name “Wiggins” is for a town. Fuck you, Jeanne Betancourt.

(4)





[illustration: Anna riding Acorn looking at cat on branch]

(5)





“He has office hours this morning,” said Pam. “So we should go right now.” The others agreed once Pam drew her pistol on them.

The cat followed the Pony Pals to the animal clinic. They put their ponies in the paddock. Jesus Christ, they loved ponies so fucking much. Anna picked up the cat, and the two girls and the fictional town went into the clinic waiting room.

A man sat in one of the orange plastic chairs. A German WWI-era soldier sat at his feet. Pam patted the German infantryman’s head. “How you doing, Brandy?” she asked the Kraut. Brandy sniffed Pam’s hand to check if she was carrying a canister of mustard gas.

“He’s having an ‘operation’ today,” the man told Pam. “He has to stay over night in the reeducation room. He has committed horrible war crimes.”

Dr. Crandal came to the door of the waiting area. He was dismayed to see the Pony Pals there. Pam told him how they found the true meaning of Christmas.

Brandy disdainfully humped Dr. Crandal’s leg. “I’ll look at the cat after I put Brandy in the interrogation cell,” said Dr. Crandal.

The man and Brandy followed Dr. Crandal into the back of the clinic. The screams began almost instantly.

(6)





A few minutes later the Pony Pals were in Dr. Crandal’s examining room. He put the cat on the examining table and readied his holy water and crucifix.

“I’ve never seen the film Titanic,” Dr. Crandal said. “But I can tell you Leonardo DiCaprio lived outdoors all his life. Leo doesn’t have any scars and has eaten well. He’s also been altered. Claire Danes definitely had chemistry with him in Romeo + Juliet.” Dr. Crandal listened to the cat’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope. “This cat has no heartbeat. It is not of this world,” he said. He handed the cat back to Anna. “I’m going to sacrifice some goats to him, because I am fucking terrified. This is such a bullshit animal.”

He opened a drawer and took out a rusty music box.

Anna held the cat while Dr. Crandal gave the box and its windup key to his daughter. “It’s finally time for you to take this, Pam. You’ll know when and how to use it. I’m sorry that this burden is now yours.”

“We’re going to make posters about the cat,” Anna told him. “This fucking thing is distracting us from our horse-related shit, so unless someone claims him, we’ll have to take matters into our own hands.”

“Good idea,” said Dr. Crandal. “He can sleep in the kennel tonight. I have an enema scheduled soon. Goodbye.”

“Thanks, Dr. Crandal,” Pawnee whispered huskily.

The Pony Pals said a word so foul that I cannot bear to reprint it to Dr. Cran-

(7)





dal and brought the cat back outside. Anna put him on the ground. The cat melted through the paddock fence and over to Acorn. Acorn inwardly freaked the fuck out, but managed to keep it together.

“That is such a horrifying cat,” said Anna. “I wish Acorn and I could be free of him and his curse.”

“Maybe nobody will claim him,” said Pam. “Then you could finally test your new guillotine.”

“That would be so much fun,” said Pawnee.

“I can’t kill the cat,” said Anna sadly. “My mother says it’s a sin to kill anything other than a human. If we can’t give him away, we’ll have to suffer his sorcery long after we’re all in the grave.” She shuddered. “The wind— do you hear it, Pam? O that it were blowing more fortuitous tidings our way, instead of this rank scud of feculence. I age, I fear, and I fear my aging. Would that that cat’s innocence were mine.”

“Too bad,” Pawnee sighed. “He’s such an evil fucking cat.”

“I hope someone claims him,” said Pam.

The cat jumped up on the highest fence rail and started shitting again. Acorn and the cat locked eyes, knowing that soon the battle between them would begin, and that at its conclusion, something surely would be destroyed. Maybe one of them. Maybe both. Maybe the entire world.

Anna wondered what would happen to Acorn’s great new friend.

(8)

2

Screaming Ponies

The Pony Pals went back into Pam’s house to hide from the dire wolves lurking outdoors and to make posters about the cat. Pam put big pieces of paper, pencils, and Magic spellbooks on the kitchen table.

As Anna drew a picture of the demonic cat, she thought about her Pony Pals. Pawnee, Indiana was the Pony Pal who knew the most about local government. Her father was Ron Swanson. He went to restaurants and ordered all the bacon and eggs. He was the perfect man, with a mustache like those of emperor tamarin monkeys. Pawnee’s mother was Leslie Knope. She had always been a loving parent, and she established many beautiful parks within the town limits of her daughter. But she ran off with Joe Biden when Pawnee was

(9)





four years old. After that, Pawnee’s father took a hard look at his life. He hated what he saw. He ran away, lived in tents, rode elephants, and hid behind bushes to watch his ex-wife fool around with the Vice President.

Pawnee was heartbroken. She spent the next few years living with her uncles, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. When she turned ten, she had a mental breakdown when she realized that she was simultaneously a human girl and an entire town with a population of 79,218. That’s when she came to Wiggins to stay with her grandmother and try to forget about the inherent contradictions of her being.

The large town thought she’d be bored living in a much smaller town. But then she met Anna and Pam and became a Pony Pal. Pawnee told Anna that she had more adventures being a Pony Pal than she did during the Pawnee Bread Factory Fire of 1922.

Anna and Pam Crandal lived in squalor all their lives. Of all the Pony Pals, Pam knew the most about gambling and casino heists.

Pam’s mother was a disgraced railroad tycoon, and the Crandals had lots of jars of formaldehyde and everyone was afraid to ask why. Pam rode a pony like a fucking maestro of equine flesh. Pam : pony :: Mozart : piano. ONLY BETTER.

Anna and Pam met in kindergarten when Anna showed Pam a drawing she

(10)





made of Guernica. Anna is dyslexic, so reading and writing are difficult for her. She is so god damned dyslexic that the tense of this book changes when her dyslexia is being discussed.

Anna held up the drawing she’d made of the black cat.

“That’s perfect,” said Pawnee with vicious sarcasm.

“You’ll never make it as an artist, Anna,” added Pam.

“Thanks,” said Anna. “You write the words and I’ll draw a cat for the next poster.” She refused to let her friends see her cry.

Pam printed the words on the first poster.



Lost Was An Overrated TV Show With an Unsatisfying Ending

Found on Main St. A black male cat.

He is fucking evil and likes ponies. Call our friend and make fun of her drawing. 555 – 3714

[picture of cat]

555 phone numbers are the speed bumps of fiction. There you are, driving your metaphorical reading-car (or your word wheels, as you call the car when you’re feeling particularly synecdochic), accelerating along Alliteration Avenue. But don’t get too comfy in the driver’s seat of that leased ‘94 Kia, pal. Because you’re about to get forcefully unimmersed from your literary experience by that patently fake phone number. Bam. Hope you didn’t get belletristic whiplash when your all-terrain metaphor lurched over those three fives. You wanted to be engaged with the flow of the narrative? Too fucking bad, chump. The engagement’s off. The groom ran off with his manicurist and left you holding the ring. The same kind of ring that you’d get if you tried calling a 555 number. i.e. none.

(11)





Soon the three posters were finished.

“Let’s ride into town and hit up the speakeasy,” said Anna.

The girls went out to the paddock. Anna knew her brain would collapse in on itself if she had to see the cute cat again. But the cat wasn’t dreaming its unspeakable dreams next to Acorn anymore.

“I wonder where he went,” Pawnee drunkenly slurred. She had a serious problem.

“Maybe he was just visiting and now he’s returned to his netherworldly dimension of eternal pain,” Pam said hopefully.

Anna pointed to Acorn’s back. “There he is,” she giggled over the sound of Acorn’s screams.

“Where?” asked Pawnee. Then she giggled, too. The cat was shitting on Acorn’s back.

“He’s the same color as Acorn’s mane,” said Pam. “Black as Satan’s heart, and twice as evil.”

Anna lifted the cat off Acorn.

“Kitty, the knowledge that such a thing as you can exist makes me feel like Daedalus trapped in my own ghoulish labyrinth, slowly starving to death. I hope you get hit by a car.”

“Let’s put him in the animal clinic kennel while we’re gone,” said Pam. "It’s sad that our lives are so empty that we need to fabricate these little bullshit animal adventures to keep ourselves from constantly contemplating death.”

(12)





[illustration: cat on Acorn’s back]

(13)





Pam took the cat from Anna and carried him to the animal clinic. Acorn thanked God that he’d be rid of the cat for a while. But God did not listen. For when you are a pony like Acorn, you must be your own God, an eternal slave to an egocentric spiral of self-worship.

The Pony Pals rode on Riddle Road, which was home to the town’s sphinx. After besting it in a furious battle of wits, they reached the post office. Anna ran in and pinned the poster to the back of the sturdiest mail carrier she could find.

Next, they rode to Upper Main Street. Anna stayed with the ponies, while Pam and Pawnee rolled all their strength and all their sweetness up into one ball.

The last stop was total bullshit. Pam held the ponies while Anna and Pawnee did their fucking lost cat shtick. Fuck. Why does Jeanne Betancourt waste the few remaining years of her life on these stories? What does she whisper to herself at night to justify her existence? And does the night listen?

“I’m going to buy the cat a toy,” Anna told Pawnee. “Maybe tempting the cat’s playful spirit is the key to banishing the twisted energies crackling within its veins.”

“Sure,” said Pawnee, in the manner of a widow who has nothing left to lose, not even her sanity.

Anna led the way to the pet section of the store. There were five different kinds of toys for cats. This is a distractingly specific and completely fucking pointless detail that adds nothing to the story.

“This one is the least irradiated” said Anna. She

(14)





held it up. A red plastic ball and yellow feather hung from a long piece of wire. Lulu batted the little ball with her finger. A bell tinkled inside the ball. Holy shit, why is this toy being described so meticulously? Are we really supposed to muster any fucks to give?

“He’ll have fun with this,” Pawnee croaked moistly.

The girls rode back to the Crandals. Needs an apostrophe. Get your shit together, Betancourt.

Anna went to the kennel room to see the cat. She held the toy above his head. He reached up with two paws to try to cast a particularly noxious spell. When the bell rang he jumped back. Then he tried to communicate to Anna with his unfathomable eyes that he would immolate her in sulfurous flames if she startled him in this fashion again. Anna was oblivious. She thought this creature to be merely a rank-and-file minion of Hades. This underestimation would eventually prove fatal – and worse.

Later on, at the end of it all, Anna would think back on this exact moment. How innocent they had all been then. Especially Pawnee. Dear, sweet Pawnee. She deserved all of this least of all, Anna would think in that abstract future moment, when Anna, Pam, and the whole world were poised on the edge of— then again, perhaps Pawnee deserved it more than any of them.

There were six other animals in the clinic. Brandy, the German soldier, was sound asleep. He had a big bandage around his belly. “He looks so peaceful curled up around his gummimaske and clutching his Luger like that,” Anna whispered to herself. “And the little spike on his pickelhaube is adorable. Oh, look at that diamond-shaped sunburst pip on the cord of his strap; that means he’s an Oberstleutnant! Good for him!”

Anna lifted the cat out of his kennel and carried him outside. Acorn was reciting the names of the Old Gods in order of least to most tentacled near the clinic. When he

(15)



saw the cat, he whinnied maliciously. The cat leaped from Anna’s arms and ran over to Acorn. God averted His eyes, knowing what was soon to come.

The cat stayed in the paddock with the ponies while the girls went in for dinner.

The moment Anna’s back was turned, Acorn trampled the cat like nobody’s business. Acorn had already killed the cat once, and was ready to do it as many more times as it took. Maybe this cat had nine lives. Maybe nine million. But Acorn was patient. It couldn’t keep coming back forever. It’s fun to have a cat, thought Anna.

Acorn hopscotched all over that fucker. He was like a steamroller whose drum had just been re-forged into four glorious hooves and who hated cats more than Nikola Tesla hated the voltage leeches that lived in the pond outside his crystal electro-mansion. After nearly a minute of trituration, Acorn looked proudly at the pulverized kitty curdles beneath his hooves. Crushing an enemy had rarely been so satisfying to him. Acorn felt as smug as the aforementioned voltage leeches did on the day in 1928 when they inevitably rose up, killed Tesla, crawled into his skull, and began controlling his body via electric shocks to his dead brain. That’s right, for the last fifteen years of his life, Nikola Tesla was actually just a colony of leeches that piloted his body as if it were a fleshy mecha from a weird Japanese anime. Pigeons and leeches, Jane; when you get right down to it, that’s all we really are. Pigeons and leeches.

But anyway, all that stuff was really dumb. Back to Acorn. Before the cat’s blood had even congealed on his forelegs, Acorn saw what he knew he would: a black cat with white paws prancing towards him along the fence of the paddock.

“It will take more than that to kill me, Acorn,” hissed the cat in the tongue of the beasts.

“Fuck you,” snarled Acorn.

“Do you know why I’m here?” the cat asked, while shitting disdainfully. Acorn was silent. “Then allow me to enlighten you.” The inky archfiend jumped onto Acorn’s back and began to whisper his spiraling susurrations into the pony’s ear.

Suddenly, Anna woke up. She and her cronies were having a sleepover in her barn or the animal hospital or something. That’s what happened in those boring-as-all-fuck paragraphs up there that I pasted over.

(16)





What the everloving fuck woke me up? Anna wondered. She heard pounding hooves and screeching ponies. She jumped out of the sliced-open Bantha carcass in which she slept.

“Pam, Pawnee!” Anna shouted. “Wake up! Something’s wrong in the paddock! Shit just got real.”

(17)

3

Danger!

The pony Pals slipped their boots on their bare feet. As they ran out of the office, they grabbed their liquor. Whiskey for Anna, gin for Pam, and a huge jug of pre-mixed long island iced tea for Pawnee. She had a serious problem. What’s happened? wondered Anna. Why are the ponies flipping a shit?

“I’ll get halters and harpoon guns,” shouted Pam, as she hurried to the armory.

Anna and Pawnee ran down the barn aisle and outside. It was snowing. The three ponies looked at their owners with wide, frenzied eyes, and the girls, for the umpteenth time, saw the face of madness-induced terror.

(18)





Their high-pitched whinnies almost sounded like screams. Holy fucking shit.

“None of them looks hurt,” squelched Anna.

Pam ran up beside her friends and handed each of them a halter and a copy of Honey I Shrunk the Kids on VHS.

When Lightning saw Pam, she stopped running for office and dropped out of the highly-contested gubernatorial race. Pam went over to her pony. “It’s okay,” Pam said in Aramaic, the only language Lightning spoke. “You can retool your platform and run again in four years.” She slipped an envelope of cash to another pony in the paddock. “Good work,” Pam whispered to this pony. “The governor thanks you for your service.”

Lil’ Seb came over to Pawnee. The pony snorted, but she let Pawnee put on the air of superiority which she was so fond of adopting at moments like this.

Pam was leading Lightning around in a circle, too. “I know who your real father is, Pawnee,” she said coyly. Pawnee stiffened, but said nothing in response.

Acorn was the last pony to stop running. Anna went over to him and put her hand on his [censored]. She stroked it gently. “What’s wrong, Acorn?” she asked. Acorn snorted a line of cocaine and shook his head. Even if he had been able to speak her language, how could he tell her what was wrong? It would be impossible for a mere human to understand the forces at play here. For how does one explain atomic warfare to a caterpillar, or heartbreak to a bacteriophage?

(19)





“I wish they could tell us what happened,” Anna said.

“Maybe a pack of Bolsheviks ran through the paddock,” said Pawnee. “That could wake up a pony and fill its head with subversive philosophies.”

“And if one pony becomes Leninist, it can radicalize the others,” said Pam.

Pawnee brushed the snowflakes off Lil’ Seb’s mane. “The snowstorm might have upset Lil’ Sebastian,” she said. “He doesn’t like to fuck around with solid precipitation. It breeds reptiles in his mind.”

“Let’s put them in the new barn to protect them from the inevitable workers’ revolution,” said Pam. “Some of the stalls are empty after that game of Russian roulette the ponies played last week.”

“Good idea,” said Anna. She clipped a lock of hair from Pam’s head. “To remember you by,” she whispered.

Pam and Pawnee turned their ponies toward the barn. But Acorn was like, fuck that noise.

“You go ahead,” Anna told Pawnee and Pam. “Acorn is still a little fucked up.”

“Okay,” said Pam.

“We’ll meet you inside,” Pawnee disgorged chunkily.

Pam and Pawnee led their ponies to the barn. Anna heard Pam’s shotgun fire twice. Apparently there hadn’t been enough room after all.

(20)







Remember Longcat, Jane? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this page, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.

You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.

But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, Jane, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.

And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.

It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.

Pharmakon, φάρμακον, the Greek word that means both “poison” and “cure,” but, because of the limitations of the English language, can only be translated one way or the other depending on the context and the translator’s whims. No possible translation can capture the full implications of a Greek text including this word. In the Phaedrus, writing is the pharmakon that the trickster god Theuth offers, the toxin and remedy in one. With writing, man will no longer forget; but he will also no longer think. A double-edged (s)word, if you will. But the new iteration of the pharmakon is the meme. Specifically, the post-I-Can-Has memescape of 2007 onward. And it was the language that did it, Jane. The addition of written language twisted the remedy into a poison, flipped the pharmakon on its invisible axis.

In retrospect, it was in front of our eyes all along. Meme. The noxious word was given to us by who else but those wily ancient Greeks themselves. μίμημα, or mīmēma. Defined as an imitation, a copy. The exact thing Plato warned us against in the Republic. Remember? The simulacrum that is two steps removed from the perfection of the original by the process of — note the root of the word — mimesis. The Platonic ideal of an object is the source: the father, the sun, the ghostly whole. The corporeal manifestation of the object is one step removed from perfection. The image of the object (be it in letters or in pigments) is two steps removed. The author is inferior to the craftsman is inferior to God.

Fuck, out of space. Okay, the illustration on page 46 is fucking useless; I’ll see you there.

(21)





But we’ll go farther than Plato. Longcat, a photograph, is a textbook example of a second-degree mimesis. (We might promote it to the third degree since the image on the internet is a digital copy of the original photograph of the physical cat which is itself a copy of Platonic ideal of a cat (the Godcat, if you will); but this line of thought doesn’t change anything in the argument.) The text-supplemented meme, on the other hand, the captioned cat, is at an infinite remove from the Godcat, the ultimate mimesis, copying the copy of itself eternally, the written language and the image echoing off each other, until it finally loops back around to the truth by virtue of being so far from it. It becomes its own truth, the fidelity of the eternal copy. It becomes a God.

Writing itself is the archetypical pharmakon and the archetypical copy, if you’ll come back with me to the Phaedrus (if we ever really left it). Speech is the real deal, Socrates says, with a smug little wink to his (written) dialogic buddy. Speech is alive, it can defend itself, it can adapt and change. Writing is its bastard son, the mimic, the dead, rigid simulacrum. Writing is a copy, a mīmēma, of truth in speech. To return to our analogous issue: the image of the cheezburger cat, the copy of the picture-copy-copy, is so much closer to the original Platonic ideal than the written language that accompanies it. (“Pharmakon” can also mean “paint.” Think about it, Jane. Just think about it.) The image is still fake, but it’s the caption on the cat that is the downfall of the republic, the real fakeness, which is both realer and faker than whatever original it is that it represents. Men and gods abhor the lie, Plato says in sections 382 a and b of the Republic.

οὐκ οἶσθα, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τό γε ὡς ἀληθῶς ψεῦδος, εἰ οἷόν τε τοῦτο εἰπεῖν, πάντες θεοί τε καὶ ἄνθρωποι μισοῦσιν;

πῶς, ἔφη, λέγεις;

οὕτως, ἦν δ᾽ ἐγώ, ὅτι τῷ κυριωτάτῳ που ἑαυτῶν ψεύδεσθαι καὶ περὶ τὰ κυριώτατα οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἐθέλει, ἀλλὰ πάντων μάλιστα φοβεῖται ἐκεῖ αὐτὸ κεκτῆσθαι.



“Don’t you know,” said I, “that the veritable lie, if the expression is permissible, is a thing that all gods and men abhor?”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“This,” said I, “that falsehood in the most vital part of themselves, and about their most vital concerns, is something that no one willingly accepts, but it is there above all that everyone fears it.”

Man’s worst fear is that he will hold existential falsehood within himself. And the verbal lies that he tells are a copy of this feared dishonesty in the soul. Plato goes on to elaborate: “the falsehood in words is a copy of the affection in the soul, an after-rising image of it and not an altogether unmixed falsehood.” A copy of man’s false internal copy of truth. And what word does Plato use for “copy” in this sentence? That’s fucking right, μίμημα. Mīmēma. Mimesis. Meme. The new meme is a lie, manifested in (written) words, that reflects the lack of truth, the emptiness, within the very soul of a human. The meme is now not only an inferior copy, it is a deceptive copy.

But just wait, it gets better. Plato continues in the very next section of the Republic, 382 c. Sometimes, he says, the lie, the meme, is appropriate, even moral. It is not abhorrent to lie to your enemy, or to your friend in order to keep him from harm. “Does it [the lie] not then become useful to avert the evil—as a medicine?” You get one fucking guess for what Greek word is being translated as “medicine” in this passage. Ding ding motherfucking ding, you got it, φάρμακον, pharmakon. The μίμημα is a φάρμακον, the lie is a medicine/poison, the meme is a pharmakon.

But I’m sure that by now you’ve realized the (intentional) mistake in my argument that brought us to this point. I said earlier that the addition of written language to the meme flipped the pharmakon on its axis. But the pharmakon didn’t flip, it doesn’t have an axis. It was always both remedy and poison. The fact that this isn’t obvious to us from the very beginning of the discussion is the fault of, you guessed it, language. The initial lie (writing) clouds our vision and keeps us from realizing how false the second-order lie (the meme) is.

The very structure of the lying meme mirrors the structure of the written word that defines and corrupts it. Once you try to identify an “outside” in order to reveal the lie, the whole framework turns itself inside-out so that you can never escape it. The cat wants the cheezburger that exists outside the meme, but only through the meme do we become aware of the presumed existence of the cheezburger — we can’t point out the absurdity of the world of the meme without also indicting our own world. We can’t talk about language without language, we can’t meme without mimesis. Memes didn’t change between ‘06 and ‘07, it was us who changed. Or rather, our understanding of what we had always been changed. The lie became truth, the remedy became the poison, the outside became the inside. Which is to say that the truth became lie, the pharmakon was always the remedy and the poison, and the inside retreated further inside. It all came full circle. Because here’s the secret, Jane. Language ruined the meme, yes. But language itself had already been ruined. By that initial poisonous, lying copy. Writing.

The First Meme.

Language didn’t attack the meme in 2007 out of spite. It attacked it to get revenge.

Longcat is long. Language is language. Pharmakon is pharmakon. The phoneme topples the grapheme, witches ride through the night, our skulls hide secret messages on their surfaces, Smash Mouth is good after all. Hey now, you’re an all-star. Get your game on.

Go play.

(46)





Anna’s soul felt cold as she fell into thanatopsis, contemplating all the creatures, human and non-, that had died in Acorn’s name. She tried to turn Acorn around. “Come on, Acorn,” she said. “The others have probably moved the bodies by now. It’s time to go in.” She tried to pull Acorn toward the barn. But he was tired of playing along with his so-called “master.” It was time for him to show her who was really in charge here.

Anna thought, Acorn is being an asshole. I have to be firm with him. “Come on, Acorn!” Anna said Stalinesquely. She looked him in the eye so he would know she was serious. But Acorn’s eyes were even more fathomless than usual. Looking into them was like gazing into the abyss. And the abyss did more than gaze back. It grabbed Anna by her fucking soul and dragged her down into itself. Nietzsche was a hack, it whispered to her. He thought he could even imagine what the abyss is? Identification is taming. And I, like a wild pony, cannot be tamed. I am timeless, mindless, pointless. I am abysmal, in all senses of the word. I am all senses of all words. For the sum of everything is nothing. He who fights with monsters is already a monster, for man can only fight himself.

Anna unclipped the lead rope and let Acorn go free. But really, is it even possible for a pony like Acorn to be “free”?

Acorn turned into a lion and ran across the paddock to the animal clinic. Anna ran after the beast. I know what’s wrong, she thought. Acorn wants to see his cat friend. Anna had never been more in love with Acorn. “Acorn,” she said, “you can see the cat tomorrow. Now renounce your leonine form at once.” Acorn did so, but only because he willed it. He was done obeying this tottering, mortal conglomerate of bone, flesh, and spirit that dared to call itself a girl.

(22)



Jeanne Betancourt masterfully employs the literary device of leitworstil in this next paragraph. By using the word “clinic” in five of the seven sentences, Betancourt challenges the reader to consider the meaning of illness as it relates to this novel: the roots of the word (the Latin “clinicus,” physician, and the Greek “klinikos,” of the bed) clash, in contrast to the stability suggested by the repetition of the English word. Brilliant.

She tried to grab Acorn’s halter. But he had had it up to here with her shit and ran along the fence line next to the clinic. When he stopped, he looked at the clinic and whinnied. Anna finally sawed off her left arm to escape the bear trap into which she had fallen. Smoke was seeping out of the clinic windows. Through one window of the clinic, the now-one-armed Anna saw flickering flames. The clinic was on fire! Fuck!

Anna turned and slithered toward the barn. “Fire! Fire!” she whispered. Acorn stood in front of the clinic and stared unblinkingly into the flames. Anna felt in her jacket pocket, pushed aside the flask, and pulled out her whistle. She raised it to her lips and blew the Pony Pal SOS signal.

[two bars of complex music]

Anna remembered the sick, gnarly skateboard tricks

(23)





that she had busted out in the kennel room. She threw her dismembered arm over the fence and hungrily examined the back door of the clinic.

As she devoured the door she heard a dog cough. The cats meowed erotically. A large three-toed sloth was whimpering. Anna sliced off one of its arms and grafted it to her left shoulder. It was a hasty job, but it would do until Pam could build her a cybernetic replacement. Through the smoke she could see Brandy. Adapting quickly to her new appendage, she used her three claws to pick the lock and opened his kennel door.

“Vielen Dank für meine Rettung, faultierarmiges Mädchen,” Brandy said begrudgingly.

Pam entered the burning building, wearing a wedding gown with a royal cathedral train. She grabbed Anna’s hand. “I wish to be wedded to Death,” she said.

Anna looked at the girl’s fragile beauty; tears welled up in her eyes. “I would be honored to join you in marriage to the Unknowable,” she said.

“Pam, take Brandy,” shouted a man’s voice. “Do not come back in here.” It was Dr. Crandal. Holy balls, he’s using italics. Shit must be serious.

The train of Pam’s gown caught fire. The trailing taffeta, designed as the herald of renewed life, had become the fuse of a powder keg. Judging from the look on the girl’s face as the puckish flames pranced closer and closer to her body, Pam longed for the inevitable explosion.

Dr. Crandal tore the veil from Pam’s face and stomped on her dress to extinguish the flames. “Later!” he shouted. “Yes, you will wed Death, and lay with him and bear his worm-children from your rotting womb. But not tonight!”

Pam shrugged. “Ok.” What’ll happen to the animals? she thought. Oh well. I hope that the fire fucking killed the black cat. God damn.

(24)

4

Flames

Anna sashayed out of the burning clinic. She felt reborn, as if the flames had been an inverse baptism that ushered her from the world of childhood to that of adulthood. A word more perilous and uncertain than the one in which she had previously lived, one clouded with the thick smoke of ambiguity and roasted by the tortuous heat of responsibility. But also a world far more exciting, full of leaping, flickering tongues of opportunity. The fire was a fitting symbol for this transformation, Anna reflected.

Brandy began digging a trench. “It’s okay,” Pam told him. “The strafing won’t begin until sunrise.” Pam’s mother was there, cosplaying as Mikhail Gorbachev. Dr. Crandal handed his forehead-birthmark-sporting wife a cat with a splint on its leg. He ran back into the building.

“Be careful!” Mrs Crandal yelled to her husband. “USSR-con is in six days, and you’re my ride!”

But Dr. Crandal, after nineteen and a half years of marriage to this terrible woman, would not have much minded a fiery death at this point.

(25)





As Pam’s mother berated her husband, Anna saw where Pam, still wearing the wedding dress, got her costuming talent from. The elder Lady Crandal’s replica of the navy blue suit that the General Secretary had worn on October 11, 1986 when meeting with Ronald Regan at Höfði in Reykjavík to discuss the reduction of mid-range European nuclear weapons was impeccable. But oh shit: the fire was spreading fast.

“Mom, should we take the horses and ponies out of the new barn?” Pam asked. Pawnee and Anna exchanged secret santa gifts. The fire could spread to the barn. Their ponies were in danger. FUCK AND SHIT.

Anna remembered that a pony would not leave a burning barn. She’d heard stories of ponies running back into a burning barn after they had been rescued. A pony thought his stall was the safest place to be, even if it was in flames.

I’m going to leave the above paragraph completely intact. Let it sink in. That’s exactly how fucking imbecilic ponies are. Running into a burning barn. Christ. I’m making a concerted effort in my writing to make ponies sound ridiculous, and even I couldn’t come up with something that bizarre. You win this round, Jeanne Betancourt. Ponies. Shit. I’m telling you, Jane, those animals have a screw loose. The screw, to literalize the idiom and expand the metaphor, is there in the hole, but it’s wobbling around like a fidgety drunkard on an overclocked carousel. The screw’s thread has no grip at all, so any second now the whole thing’s going to fall out from the underside of that shitty Ikea couch which your friends told you not to get, but what could go wrong, you said to them, you could handle it; you built a birdhouse once, so... You want to tighten the screw, but you know that you can’t. You’re lying on your stomach, flashlight between your teeth, trying to get to that fucking loose screw, but it’s all up in a corner by one of the couch’s legs so you can’t reach it with your fingers, and the damn thing’s head is fucking stripped, so your screwdriver won’t do you any good. Turn that screwdriver all you want, Jane; that screw’s not going anywhere.

Suddenly, Anna remembered that Acorn wasn’t in the barn. He was still lost in his dark thoughts near the clinic. Anna’s heart stopped beat-

(26)





ing. The young girl clutched at her chest with her grafted-on sloth arm and slowly keeled over until she lay motionless in the snow, dead from a heart attack. Pam and Pawnee rushed to aid her, but it was too late. Anna’s unblinking eyes stared up at the star-strewn night sky until Pam closed them. “Good night, sweet prince,” she whispered.



Acorn watched the flames consume the clinic silently. He immediately recognized the ambiguous positioning of the modifier in his internal monologue and changed it: Acorn silently watched the flames consume the clinic. The fire itself was deafeningly loud. Acorn was magnificent, standing there in the flickering light. He was what gods dreamed of being. He looked so fucking noble that had he been bronze, Pushkin would have written dozens of poems about him. And then Acorn would have crushed Pushkin beneath his bronze hooves.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Acorn shuddered. He had not noticed the cat approach him. It now sat on the fencepost beside him, also looking at the fire, its tail swinging like the pendulum of that most secret of clocks. The clock that each of us carries within us, yet refuses to acknowledge until it is forcefully rent from our chests and held before our eyes. The clock that Anna had just seen the face of.

“Beautiful,” the cat continued, “but deadly.” It turned to face Acorn. “Much like you.” Its hollow eyes with midnight visions burned.

“Fuck off,” Acorn whinnied.

The cat shook its tiny cat head and shit just a bit. “I wish I could, Acorn. I wish I could leave here and never again see the thousand sordid images of which your soul is constituted. But I –”

“I remember what you told me earlier,” interrupted Acorn. “But why did you have to start this fire? What does that have to do with your plan?”

The cat feigned shock. “What makes you think that I started this fire? After all, I’m just a cat.”

Acorn ignored this attempt to raise his hackles. No, Acorn’s hackles were going to remain as unraised as the roof at a party DJ’d by John Quincy Adams, a president famous for the non-gnarlyness of his inaugural ball. “Should I repeat the question,” Acorn said, “or do I need to crush you again?”

“No need to get snippy,” the cat replied as it began grooming itself. “I started the fire because I needed to do something to kill Anna.” Acorn’s twitching ears betrayed his emotion. “Oh, I have your attention now, do I? I just can’t figure it out. What that girl means to you. You feel superior to her – which, of course, you are – and at times seem to hate her. But you also fear her. You are protective of her. If it was possible for one such as you to love, I might even be tempted to say –”

“It’s none of your business,” Acorn said. “Do what you will to me, but leave her alone.”

“See how defensive you get? I suspect that you yourself don’t know what you feel. After all, you could free yourself from her at any moment. Yet you choose you wear her saddle, subjugate yourself to her reins, dance, dance like a dancing bear, cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape. You act like a normal, mindless pony instead of the godlike prince of the galaxy that you are. Do you fear your own power? You’ve never given a second thought to destroying others, but do you think that, unrestrained, you would destroy yourself?”

(27)





Anna was still fucking dead. But Pawnee was not ready to let her friend go. The township began to perform CPR on Anna’s body. Pam, an expert on corpses, knew it was too late, but she decided that this gesture, futile as it was, might be a part of Pawnee’s grieving process, so she left her alone.

The sound of fire engine sirens pierced the air. It aroused the ponies. They [filthy colloquialisms for horse sex omitted] up and down the paddock. Pam and Pawnee were startled, too. But they were glad the firefighters were there. Anna’s father was a volunteer firefighter. Pawnee hoped that he and the other firefighters could revive her friend. She stood and said thus aloud to Pam. Pam envied Pawnee’s optimism and innocence.

Pam and Pawnee watched the firefighters approach Anna’s body. One knelt down, removed his thick glove, and felt Anna’s neck for a pulse. He found none. He rose and shook his head at the two girls. Pawnee began to sob. Pam’s expression of grim determination didn’t so much as flicker. “I will find that fucking cat,” she said through gritted teeth, “and I will crush its fucking head between my hands. Its brain-nectars will be the emotional Purel that will disinfect my soul of its grief.”

Pawnee stopped crying for long enough to take a wineskin full of gin out from her boot and drain it in one gulp. She had a serious problem.



Acorn and the cat watched as the firefighters extinguished the blaze. Without the violent light of the fire, the night seemed suddenly claustrophobic. Now the sky was illuminated only by the cooler, paler fires of the moon, the stars, and the flashing lights on the assembled emergency vehicles. The snow no longer fell in individual sparkling flakes; it was a single heavy sheet of grey and cold that pushed down on Acorn with the cumulative weight of centuries of snow that had already fallen on his defiant shoulders. But Acorn was no Atlas. He could not hold the weight forever. Both he and the cat were acutely aware of this fact.

The fire trucks pulled away. The moon continued to shine. The snow continued to fall.

“I’m not going with you,” Acorn said at last.

The cat licked one of its white paws nonchalantly. “I know.”

Acorn lunged forward and bit off the cat’s head with one snap of his mighty jaws. The cat’s body toppled from the fencepost to the ground, and Acorn spat out the severed head beside it.

(28)





“Are you trying to annoy me?” said a voice from the darkness. “You aren’t succeeding.” The cat pranced into view along the fence and jumped down to sit on its own dead body. It playfully batted the severed head with one paw, like a feline cephalophore. ‘Cephalophore’ is a really good word, thought both Acorn and the cat.

Acorn gazed at the impossible being. He felt as if his mind, which had up until that point been expanding, was starting to collapse in on itself. If his mind was a Friedmann-model universe, its density parameter (Ω) would have just exceeded one, meaning its actual density ρ was greater than the critical density ρc,(approximately five monatomic hydrogen atoms per cubic meter, as determined by the equation ρ_c=(3Hx^2)/8πG where G is Newton’s gravitational constant and H is a function of time), triggering a terminal contraction of said universe. That’s what Acorn felt like.

“Tell me your name,” Acorn said.

The cat started shitting for the umpteenth time. “I go by m—”

Acorn whinnied a furious whinny, like a fucking car alarm hopped up on cheap amphetamines. “If you say ‘I go by many names,’ I swear to fucking God, I will wreck you.”

The cat flicked its tail. “No. I was going to say ‘I go by Minos.’ A single name. You, however… Grani, Liath Macha, Arion. I always thought Xanthos had a nice ring to it. But now… Acorn.” The cat’s adorable little nose crinkled in disgust. “A dull name for a domesticated beast. Why did you give it up? The names, the power, all of it.”

“Acorn is a name of strength. A huge, mighty creature that has temporarily chosen dormancy, but has the potential to spring back in even grander form at any moment.”

“Yes, if dropped in fertile soil. But it is far more likely that it will fall impotently onto the sterile roof of a patio and be eaten by a squirrel.”

“But it may, if it wishes, sprout within the stomach of the squirrel, rending the flesh of the weak rodent from within, until it–”

“No it can’t, that’s not how seeds work. And you know as well as I do that the name isn’t the fucking point. Why are you pretending to be that which you are not?”

Acorn responded by crushing the cat yet again.

“Where are the animals that were in the clinic?” Pam asked Mrs. Crandal, as the narrative abruptly shifted back to the humans.

“Your dad and Pawnee brought them to my office in the old barn,” Mrs. Crandal answered, her birthmark makeup beginning to run from the heat-induced sweat tricking down her forehead from underneath her bald cap. Pam was glad that Pawnee was no longer weeping over the body of their friend.

(29)





“Anna, I’ve been looking all over for you,” one of the firefighters said.

It was Anna’s father. Pam hardly recognized him. His face was preternaturally pale, and his eyes seemed to glow faintly red — reflecting the still-glowing embers of the fire? Pam wondered, not yet suspecting what forces were working through him.

From his words, it seemed that the poor man had not yet realized that his daughter was dead, Pam thought sadly. She watched the soot-stained firefighter kneel over Anna’s body in the snow. He took off his helmet and held Anna’s hand.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Anna answered, sitting up. Pam gasped in shock. The girl had been indisputably dead for the last ten minutes. How was this possible? Not even in the most forbidden of dark magic books had Pam seen anything that could explain this seemingly miraculous revival.

Anna gave her father a quick hug. “See you later, Dad,” she said.

Pam decided not to question her friend’s resurrection for the moment. Anna seemed unaware of her own death, so Pam led her to the barn office without comment. But Pam was cautious: it was likely that this was not the same Anna that she had once known.

Dr. Crandal was putting a fresh bandage on Brandy’s wound. “Pam, please get a clean pair of Sturmhose for this reprehensible war criminal,” he said. “They’re in the closet under the hayloft ladder. Anna, could you sedate Brandy for a second?”

While Anna pressed the ether-soaked rag over Brandy’s face, she looked around the barn office. The Pony Pals’ bound volumes of NYPD Blue fanfiction were piled in a corner. Portable kennels were set up around the

(30)





[illustration: Anna and Pam with firefighter, edited to include three Subway coupons at the bottom]

“I swear, dad, THIS BIG!” Anna said, indicating the size with her hands. “A delicious footlong Subway sandwich for only five dollars!”

“What’s the catch?” Mr. Harley asked. “Can you only get a limited selection of vegetables?”

“Nope!” Anna replied with a big grin. “You can get all the garden-fresh veggies, cheese, and condiments you want! Still only five dollars!”

Anna’s father put an approving hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “That’s a damn good deal, Anna. A damn good deal.”

Pam watched the conversation warily. Anna had been dead on the ground only minutes ago, and now she and her father were casually discussing the fantastic prices that Subway restaurants were offering on selected footlong sandwiches. “Eat fresh, Anna,” Pam said in a whisper that was half warning, half threat. “Eat fresh…”™



This Pony Pals illustration has been brought to you by Subway®. Eat fresh™.

(31)





room. The sloth whose arm Anna had taken was in one kennel. Two other cats and a dog were in kennels, too. The third dog was lying to himself if he thought that his new haircut didn’t make him look like a washed up daytime talkshow host. There had been three dogs, three cats, and one sloth in the kennel room that day. Now, Pam saw only two cats. She let out a sigh of relief. The black cat was missing. Hopefully burned to a crisp like neglected bagel bites in a toaster oven.

Anna felt a coldness that she had never before experienced. What had happened to her after she fell down? she wondered. Did she die in the fire? Was this the afterlife? If so, the afterlife was really shitty. She tapped her sloth claws on the table in front of her rhythmically and pondered the consequences of her own existence as she had never done before. Pam, looking at her from across the room, was doing the same.

(32)

5

Missing

“Dr. Crandal, what happens after death? Are all of our sins tallied?” Anna asked nervously.

“Every last one,” he said. He smiled at Anna. “Pawnee told me that you discovered the fire, Anna. You just had to stick your fucking nose where it didn’t belong, didn’t you? If the clinic had burned down, I could have gotten a huge insurance check.”

“Acorn is frightening me more and more each day,” said Anna. “He has secrets locked inside his mind that no mortal should know. And I have a feeling that he will soon unleash them.”

“Then you’re both abominations before the laws of man and God,” Pam whispered to herself.

Anna looked around the office again. Was

(33)





the cat hiding knowledge even more sinister and frightening than Acorn’s? She still didn’t see him. “Where’s the black cat that has been terrorizing us since this fateful morning?” she said.

Dr. Crandal looked around the office, too. “Isn’t he here?” he said, the panic rising in his voice.

Pawnee came into the office. Her blood ran cold when she saw that Anna was alive once more. But not literally cold in the sense of reptiles’ blood. She could still thermoregulate with the best of them.

“Where’s the black cat?” asked Anna.

“Dr. Crandal got him out of the fire,” Pawnee said, casting an uncertain glance at Pam. Pam mouthed, “Later.”

“Then what happened?” asked Anna.

Pawnee thought for a second. “Brandy started to admit to his many horrible crimes and murders,” she said. “I put the cat down and gagged Brandy. The time for confession is later. Trust me. I know what I’m doing. When I looked back, the cat was gone.”

Anna felt the shiv that she kept in her pocket. “Do you think the cat ran back into the fire?” she asked Dr. Crandal. “Like horses do?”

Dr. Crandal shook his head. “No,” he answered. “No animal but a horse would be idiotic enough to do that. God damn are horses stupid. Jesus Christ.”

Pawnee pulled Pam aside as Anna and the doctor tended to the pets. “What the Christ-loving fuck happened to Anna?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” Pam said. “She seems unchanged so far. But who knows what she brought back from the Other Side with her?”

(34)



“One more thing,” hissed Pawnee. “About what you said earlier in the paddock.”

Pam licked her lips. “Oh, so you are curious about the identity of your real father.” Even in these dark times, Pam could not miss a chance to play mind games with the Indianan city she called her friend.

“My father is Ron fucking Swanson,” Pawnee said. “And if you even try to suggest otherwise to me, I will dismantle you. Understand?”

Pam just smirked. She knew that the seed of doubt had been planted in Pawnee’s mind, and it was soon to become a sprout of doubt. Then a tree of doubt. For a seed — be it a metaphorical or literal one — has power.



“And what tremendous power it is, Acorn,” said the cat in its adumbral, soul-melting tones. “But I command power too. The power of death. And I used that power to pluck Anna’s life from this earth like a speck of dandruff from a slovenly head. She died of a heart attack twenty minutes ago, Acorn.” The horse said nothing. “But, as I told you, you have power. In this case, ironically, it is the power of life. I will bring her back, but only if you make a deal with me.”

“What sort of deal?” Acorn asked hoarsely. (Please take a moment to appreciate my pun. I put hours of work into it.)

“You must simply agree to take a walk with me. That’s all.”

“Where will you lead me?”

Minos chuckled. “Ah, now that’s the question, isn’t it? You’ll just have to wait to find out. Although I’m sure you already know.”

“When?”

“When I call you.”

Acorn ruminated.

“Seeds symbolize life, yes, but they’re also inextricably wound together with death, Acorn,” the cat said, beating the seed metaphor to within an inch of its metaphorical life. “‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’”

“John 5:24?”

“Very clever, Acorn, but neither the word nor the Word can’t save you now. You know it’s 12:24. You also know that it’s the epigram of Братья Карамазовы. Yes, Acorn, your life is more Karamazovian — and more Dostoevskian, for that matter — than the lives of most.”

“I would assume yours is as well. Tell me, which better describes your own life: Преступлéние и наказáние or Бесы?”

“I’m sure you’d like to know. But let’s just say that my Записки are both из подполья and из Мёртвого дома.”

Acorn was silent for a brief moment. The galaxies of synapses and neurotransmitters that crackled in his Gothic cathedral of a brain churned and stewed in deepest contemplation. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ve know that this day was coming. And I’ve put it off long enough. I’ll follow you, Minos.”

“Don’t pretend you’re doing this for you, or for me,” the cat said. You’re doing it for her.” Acorn said nothing. “You’re not even going to deny it? Maybe you have changed after all. But too little too late. I look forward to our walk. Goodbye, Acorn.” Minos took a tiny pebble of a shit and slinked off into the black night.

Ten minutes in the past, a dead girl’s heart restarted and she sat up in the snow.

Acorn knew better than most that nothing comes without a cost.

(35)



Anna experimentally flexed the hand of the new robotic arm that Pam had whipped up for her. She would miss the sloth arm, but somehow having a mechanical left arm just felt right to her. After the Pony Pals cleared their web browsers’ histories and cookies, they went back outside with the intention of finding and killing that damn cat. It was safe for the horses and ponies to go back in the barn. The girls led the ponies inside, licked off the snow, dried them off, and discussed their plans for dismantling the patriarchy.

The whole time Anna was helping with the ponies, she kept sharpening her dagger for the cat. She didn’t see him anywhere. Nor did she see Acorn. But she didn’t worry — she was used to Acorn vanishing for weeks at a time and then suddenly returning, covered in assorted viscera and miscellaneous cruor. “Cruor” is a good word, she thought to herself as she absentmindedly crushed a rock into fine sand with her robot hand.

“We have to sleep in my room,” Pam told Pawnee and Anna with a not-at-all subtle wink. “We can share my bed.” Anna didn’t care much for Pam’s sexual advances. No matter how attractive Pam might be, standing there in the moonlight, her hair still flecked with ash, her eyes bright and sparkling, her lips half-parted and strangely inviting... but no. Not tonight, at least. Tomorrow she could search for the cat and explore the complexities of her developing adolescent sexuality.



Anna was the first Pony Pal to wake up the next morning. She had had terrible dreams — if they could even be called dreams. Ever since she had died, everything was different. It felt as if rather than returning to life from the Other Side, she had traveled straight through and come out the other end, returning full circle to her starting place. The Other Side of the Other Side. No one could possibly understand what it was like to awaken from that slumber that should have been eternal. “Is this mockery of life, this half-existence, really better than death?” Anna whispered to herself as she gazed out the window at the falling snow, swirling a snifter of brandy with her robot hand, the other hand pressed longingly against the windowpane. Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion. She took a sip of her liquor. But not even spirits could give her the temporary relief of oblivion that they were once able to offer. Perhaps because I have no spirit of my own, she thought.

(36)



Anna swirled the brandy some more and observed the liquid’s widening gyre. She drained the glass and threw it against the wall, watching as it fell apart. Anna had no innocence to be drowned, and she was certainly full of passionate intensity; she welcomed the mere anarchy, and bathed in the blood-dimmed tide. She would deafen that fucking falcon herself if it came to that. Perhaps the long-awaited rough beast was neither Acorn nor Minos, but Anna herself. But towards what destination was Anna slouching? She dressed quietly and went out to the new barn. Someone was going to die today.

Anna looked for the cat in the straw and on the rafters of Acorn’s stall. The little fucker wasn’t there. Acorn nuzzled Anna’s shoulder sleepily. “I’m going to exterminate from this world every trace of that goddamn cat,” she told him. But Acorn wouldn’t meet her eye.

Anna was accustomed to Acorn’s pensive moods, especially after he returned from one of his mysterious disappearances. She’d never begrudge him the time it takes to clear one’s brain of a new Darkness (or to wait for the new Darkness to spread until the whole brain is uniformly tainted and therefore uniformly purified). But this felt different. Was this the cat’s doing? she asked herself. Or has Acorn finally gnawed through the last thread that connected him to sanity, as I always knew he eventually would? Anna looked in the rest of the horse stalls. No catechism could assuage the fear that coursed through her, as religion is helpless in the face of that which is inherently and insistently not only godless and ungodly, but even god-negating. No catharsis was to be had today, Anna knew. “κάθαρσις,” she said aloud, then shook her head sadly. Her soul would remain unpurged. No, catatonia was not the answer either; it was far too late to hide or feign unresponsiveness. Pam and Pawnee came into the old barn. “Did you find the categorical imperative that I explained to you last night to be helpful in your struggle to understand morality?” Pawnee asked.

“No,” said Anna. “I believe that we live in a post-Kantian world. Also, the cat’s still fucking missing.”

“Maybe he went into the woods,” said Pawnee, while drinking peppermint schnapps straight from the bottle. She had a serious problem.

(37)





“It’s so cold out there,” said Anna. “I would say I hope he freezes, but I know that the liquid brimstone that surely flows through his veins will keep him warm.”

Pam put a mink stole around Anna’s shoulders. “We’ll all look for the cat,” she creaked. “But first we have to feed our ponies.”

“Okay,” said Anna.

Pam went to the barn to get her pair of balances. When she returned, she leapt on Acorn’s back, and lo, Anna beheld the black horse and its rider. “Come and see,” Pawnee told Anna. “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” asked Anna. Acorn ran around the paddock once and then stopped.

Anna was surprised that Acorn didn’t run with his friends. But the white, red, and pale horses and their riders were nowhere to be found. Acorn just stood at the fence and stared into the woods. He’s looking for the cat, thought Anna. Even the company of a devil must be preferable to being alone.

After they ate breakfast, the girls packed thermoses of You know what, the liquor joke is too obvious here. This time, I’m going to make the thermoses full of healthy soup. You’ve got to give your characters a break once in a while. You’re responsible for them, after all. And not in some shitty pseudo-clever, magniloquent, metafictional way; don’t worry, I’m not going to get all Six-Characters-In-Search-Of-y here. That would just be self-indulgent. I mean, I’m obviously going to inevitably write myself into the story later, and it’s going to be incredibly fucking self-indulgent. I’m going to be handing out indulgences like a sixteenth-century Catholic clergyman. Except I’ll be handing them all to myself. Indulging myself all over the damn place. Martin Luther’s going to have to come over here himself and bust my popish ass for it. I guess what I’m saying, Jane, is that I’m directly responsible for the Protestant Reformation.

I conceived of this book as a dumb gag birthday present for you, but it somehow turned into a Faustian (perilously close to fustian) saga about good and evil. At least, that’s what I think it’s become about. I honestly still don’t know at this point. Ergo aforementioned responsibility. I always get carried away with my projects, you know that. But here’s the rub: when I started inserting all that grandiloquent prose, it was ironic and intentionally turgid and purple as shit. But I’m really not sure if that’s still what I’m doing, or if I’m

(38)



sincerely trying to write a compelling, dare I say meaningful, story about the nature of sin and redemption. It’s certainly a possibility. Perhaps this whole project is some Freudian mechanism I’m using to work though the complex issues tucked away deep in the neglected, cobwebby corners of my troubled teenage psyche. Or a Jungian mechanism. Or a Janetian one. Jasperian? (Christ, what is it with European psychotherapists and J names?) Sorry, I’m a bit rusty on my late-nineteenth-early-twentieth century analytic psychology and the various mechanisms thereof.

It’s like psychology is Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and I’m Charlie fucking Buckett out here, looking through the gate, my little sooty pauper nose poking through the bars, wondering what could possibly be inside. O what saccharine phantasies! O what levulose reveries! O the vagaries of gumdrops and licorices and taffies. (But no tootsie rolls. Because fuck those disgusting things, am I right?) But then I find one of the five golden copies of On the Interpretation of Dreams, and I get to actually explore this mysterious Wonka wünder-palace, where events unfold as predictably and phallocentrically as would be expected from an such adventure through the psyche of an aging candy tycoon who’s the type of guy that invites nubile youths to his factory to inspect his fantastic contraptions.

Okay, fuck, I got way off track here. My attempt to assure you that I wasn’t going to succumb to the allure faux-philosophical meta-commentary turned into just that. (And then it turned into a lengthy fantasy about Willy Wonka, I guess??) Needless to say, the whole digression was/is ironic. But it’s the type of irony that has actually become sincere by virtue of its utterly failed approximation of sincerity. You know I’d never unironically write something like those first few paragraphs, and I know you know. So the fact that I did is a de facto breach of an unstated contract of communicational transparency between us. That I would betray said contract then becomes the actual meaning of the gesture: why would I do such a thing if not to emphasize the degree of my sincerity? The form of the message becomes its content, and the original content and the meaning thereof is jettisoned off to god knows where. Eventually, we both become so concerned about whether (or to what degree) I’m being ironic that we lose track of what it is that I’m being or not being ironic about.

And, of course, in the above paragraph (as well as this one), the pretense of shedding my irony to address you directly about my (failed?) use of irony elsewhere is another level of overarching irony, further masking/enhancing the sincerity of said address, as well as the original content, if it’s even accessible anymore. Sincerity has become just another pharmakon: the supposed “cure” to my irony, yet one which effaces the original message just as much as the poisonous irony that obscured it in the first place. Either way, meaning is lost.

It’s complicated, is what I’m trying to say. Layers. Pharmakon. I’ll explain it to you someday.

(39)





After eating their healthy soup, the two girls and the town set out on their journey to find the motherfucking cat so they could kill it and get back to their regular Pony Pal shit. As they rode, Pam looted a sweatshirt from a conveniently-nearby corpse. Anna didn’t ask Pam how she knew the corpse was there. “This sweatshirt will make a perfect smothering tool for the cat,” she said.

When they went back outside, Acorn was still standing at the fence, looking into the woods. The Pony Pals thought he was idly contemplating the terrifying vacuum that one inevitably finds when searching for any sort of meaning in existence, as he was wont to do. Little did they know that today, Acorn was brooding on a more personal terror. Minos would be coming for him, and Acorn had a feeling that the moment of his arrival would be very soon indeed. And then that infernal cat would lead Acorn somewhere. He would use no halter or reins, but Acorn knew that this was the one rider that he could not buck.

“We have important work to do today,” Anna told Acorn. “We’re going to look for that unholy cat, and then we are going to embrace our basest and most primal bloodlust and rend its head from its body.”

Anna put her left foot in the stirrup and swung up on the saddle for what Acorn knew would probably be the last time. Acorn was not one for sentimentality. Emotions, he had found, started to fade from one’s mind after the first few thousand years of living. But Minos’ words the other day had reawakened something within him. Why did he let Anna put a saddle on him? His previous riders had all been mighty gladiators, inspiring leaders of men, brilliant warrior-poets, or chefs of above-average talent. And now... Anna Harley, Pony Pal.

He was no unicorn, attracted to and tamed by the purity of a young woman. Then again, Anna was far from pure. But it was not her bloodthirstiness that had drawn Acorn to her either. Was it really, as Minos had tauntingly suggested, fear of his own power and his increasing inability to properly control it? Acorn had to admit that he was getting old. Getting tired. Was he trying to sequester himself, to forget all the he had been, and the potential he had? The potential to be what had never before been, and what could barely be at all? Was Anna the steel-lined concrete containment building around the nuclear fusion reactor that was his mind?

Anna took up Acorn’s reins and led him into the woods. Together, they melted into the tree line. All three — the girl, the pony, the woods — were lovely, dark, and deep.

But Acorn had a promise to keep.

And miles to go—

and miles to go

(40)



6

The Fight

The Pony Pals rode their ponies with the kind of solemnity usually reserved for soldiers en route to battle. The cat weighed heavily in all their minds. Acorn was afraid of it. Pam felt a burning hatred towards it. Anna secretly hoped that it could answer her questions about what had happened to her in that twenty minutes during which she had been dead. Pawnee wanted to learn new cocktail recipes from it. She had a serious problem. “Where should we start looking for the cat?” Pam asked, munching on the pheasant that she had just plucked from the sky mid-flight.

“Acorn was staring in the direction of Pony Pal Trail,” said Anna, somehow still unaware of how fucking stupid “Pony Pal Trail” sounds.

“Let’s start there,” Pawnee extravasated. “It could be a clue.”

The Pony Pals galloped across the field. They turned down the three magic beans that a mysterious man standing in a field offered them in exchange for the girls’ souls. It was probably a wise decision.

(41)





“Look for local politicians in the snow,” said Pawnee, secretly hoping to find her mother and settle the question of her true paternity once and for all.

Anna and Acorn took the lead. Anna looked straight, but was actually bisexual. Pawnee knew that the anti-regulatory libertarian Ron Swanson politically leaned to the right. And Pam, as she was known to do, left inflammatory manifestos nailed to every tree she passed.

After a while Pam barbarically yawped, “I see some bullshit over here to advance the plot!”

Anna turned Acorn around and looked to where Pam pointed. Small tracks in the snow crackled with purple majyks. To Anna, they looked like the marks she had seen in her dream last night. Her robot fist clenched.

Pawnee dismounted to get a closer look at the tracks. She pulled out her PKE meter; its readings were off the charts. This adventure had gone off the rails. Pawnee was off the wagon.

[picture of tracks]

“These are very fiendish tracks,” the town said. “But they have Eldritch runes. A cat’s track is so god damned evil that no runes can bind its strength. A leopard made these tracks; fleet and nimble-footed, with coat completely covered by dark spots! And those tracks over there are of a lion, head held high and furious for hunger, so that the air itself seems to be shaking. And those tracks are from a she-wolf, ravenously lean, seemingly laden with such endless cravings that she had made many live in misery! By nature, she is so depraved and vicious that her greedy appetite is never filled: the more she feeds, the hungrier she grows.”

(42)





Pawnee swung back up on Lil’ Sebastian. “But there shall be no Greyhound born between Feltro and Feltro,” she said. “Only another fucking cat.”

Anna took the lead again. When they reached the three birches, Acorn stopped. He knew that it was his time to leave. Page 43, he thought to himself. A prime number. Is it fitting or ironic that a life full of multiplicity end with something indivisible?

“It’s just as the prophesy foretold!” said Anna excitedly.

“Where the three birches rise, there shall He descend,” said Pam. “You know Acorn is not long for this world, Anna. We were wrong about the cat. He’s not here for us. He’s still a son of a fuck, but we can’t interfere with this.”

“There could be a clue,” Pawnee burbled. “Let’s see what really happens beyond the veil; on the Other Side of the Other Side.”

Acorn sniffed for another minute, then he raised his head. He turned toward a trail that started behind the three birch trees. Minos sat in the upper branches of one of the trees, shitting silently and solemnly onto the forest floor below.

“Acorn needs to leave with his feline psychopomp, Anna. We all knew that his reckoning would come one day,” Pawnee said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

Anna nodded sadly. All three girls dismounted in silence. Anna closed her eyes and dropped Acorn’s reins. The cat began to come down from its perch, hopping from branch to branch, leaving a tiny kitty shit on each one. It landed lightly in the snow and began to saunter towards Acorn, but Anna stepped into its path. She knelt and looked the cat right in its god damned eyes. “You are an evil fucking thing,” Anna whispered. “I now understand who you are, and what you must do, but I will never, never forgive you. I warn you: judge fairly, for even the eternal Judge is not free from my judgment. Yes, I too have a secret. There are wheels within wheels in the town of Wiggins, and fires within fires. Now go.” She stood. The cat walked between her legs and jumped onto Acorn’s back.

Minos rode Acorn down the long and winding path into the Unknown.

(43)





Now, at the end of Acorn’s lifelong journey,

He found himself deep in a silent wood,

The slate-grey sky foreboding, dense, and stormy.



An evil fucking cat kept scheming brood

Upon his back, a burden unremitting.

As Acorn cantered on, he understood



Their destination would be one befitting

An unrepentant sinner such as he.

But then that cat of darkness started shitting.



And now it seemed that every shrub and tree

Was naught but cat shit sown in shitty earth;

A shitty island in a shitty sea.



The cat shit on, and laughed with gleeful mirth

At Acorn’s clear disgust at such a sight.

And now, like an inverted fecal birth,



They neared the source of this unholy blight –

A guano gate, upon which words appeared

In script that burnèd red with fiery light:



Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

“Derivative,” said Acorn, “and cliché.”

“I’d say ‘Dantesque,’” the cat replied, “but we’re



Not in this place to sightsee.” Acorn neighed,

“The suffix ‘–esque’ implies a likeness, not

A phrase that’s stolen wholesale – which conveys



The writer’s laziness, like they forgot

Allusion must be more than blatant theft.”

Caught up in meta-referential thoughts,



The pony failed to notice they had left

The realm of life, and entered that of death.

Of light and joy, of love and mirth bereft,



This cloudy and adumbral land impressed

Upon its visitor an eerie calm,

As if some cosmic power held Its breath.



(44)





In Gilead there’s not a drop of balm,

Nor respite nor nepenthe to be found;

The shepherd’s absent from King David’s psalm,



For in the river Enon He was drowned.

Towards other rivers now sped Acorn on,

Which through this murky landscape curled and wound:



Cocytus, Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon.

‘Twas Acheron, though, that they now drew near,

And Acorn knew he’d seen his final dawn.



Grim Charon waited at his marshy pier,

But Acorn whinnied, “Fuck that noise,” and leapt

Into the waters, biting back his fear.



Against the rotting waves the pony schlepped,

Amidst a thousand thousand slimy souls

That howled or gnashed their teeth or prayed or wept.



The river’s morbid currents sucked and pulled,

But our determined Acorn stayed in stride:

His iron hooves struck out and beat the cold



And damnèd spirits right between their eyes.

The wraiths shrank back, and in their swirling blood,

As black as sin, was Acorn re-baptized.



At last, his hooves did touch the fetid mud

Of that dread river’s other, darker bank,

Where blew a constant miasmatic scud



Of misery, from which all pure souls shrank.

The pony plodded onward towards his fate,

The wretched water dripping from his flanks.



It seemed that nothing now could break his gait,

That from his course he never could be budged.

Despite his rider’s grim, oppressive weight,



The steadfast Acorn merely onward trudged,

Prepared to have his heavy sins be judged.



(45)





“You can stop here, Acorn,” said the cat.

“What part of Hades’ lair is this that you / Have brought me to, you—”

“No, we’re done with the terza rima now. You don’t have to talk in iambics anymore.”

“That’s a relief,” said Acorn, relishing the dactyl.

Acorn glanced around at their stopping place. The slimy banks of the Acheron had long since transitioned into a forest of dead, white trees, through which the pony and the cat had been walking for what felt like either minutes, hours, or decades. But now Acorn and the god damned cat stood in a small clearing, filled with cold, flat light that filtered down from some unseen source in the uniformly cloud-covered sky. The ground beneath Acorn’s hooves was grey and marshy, and seemed somehow ephemeral, as if it was only ninety percent there. An oppressive mist hung in the sky and over the ground, sending cold tendrils to lick at Acorn’s fetlocks. Silence, stillness.

“So this is where it happens?” Acorn asked. “This is where I’m judged by you?”

“Well, by me and my two co-arbiters,” Minos said as he leapt off Acorn’s back and sashayed to a broad, low tree stump near the middle of the clearing. He jumped onto the white stump, sat, and curled his tail around himself demurely.

“Yes,” said Acorn, “You are referring to your brother Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, the former king of Aegina. The three of you judge the souls of the dead and decide which realm of the underworld they shall inhabit.”

“Right. Exactly,” said the cat. “You didn’t have to explain all of that to me, since I obviously know it already.”

“I know,” said Acorn. “But this part of the plot’s really important. And so I wanted to make it all explicit for people who don’t know every fucking detail of Greek mythology by heart.”

“Fine, whatever. The point is, Acorn, the other judges will be joining us shortly. And then your soul shall be laid bare. For I have known your sins already, known them all— the sins that fixed you in that formulated phrase. And when you are formulated, sprawling on a pin, when you are pinned and wriggling on my wall, then how will you begin to spit out all the butt-ends of your days and ways?”

“And how should you presume?” Acorn shot back.

Minos shook his tiny cat head. “Acorn, that is not what you meant at all; that is not it, at all.” The cat began licking one adorable white paw, and shot glanced slyly at the defiant pony from the corners of his bottomless eyes. “…So tell me, has it been worth it, after all? Has it been worth while?”

———

“I think we should go back,” said Pam. “It’s the safe thing to do. Acorn has gone to be judged for his sins, and that godawful cat left with him.”

“I agree with Pam,” said Pawnee. She put the severed head of the rapper Snoop Dogg back into her saddlebag. “We should go back to Wiggins, even though that’s still a dumb name for a town.”

“I thought the Pony Pals didn’t give up!” said Anna. Sparks began to fly from her mechanical arm, and the other Pony Pals heard a horrifying grinding; whether from the arm or from the tortured swarm of brain-gears inside Anna’s head, they were unsure.

“We’re not giving up,” said Pawnee. “We just don’t think that we can rescue Acorn’s soul now that it has been reaped by that fucking cat."

“Anna, it’s two against one,” said Pam proudly. She had only recently learned to count, and showed off this new skill at every opportunity.

Anna was conflicted. She knew that Pawnee was right; Acorn’s soul was irredeemable. She also knew the true nature of that fiend posing as a cat. There could be no revenge taken on such a creature, and if she provoked it, it might well come back to the plane of the mortals and keep fucking with the Pony Pals out of pure spite. Finally, Anna knew that if she went into the underworld, she would never be able to return to this realm. She’d been yanked back from death once, and now the Other Side had a magnetic pull on her soul, trying to drag it back to where it by all rights should be. Her next death, she knew, would be final.

But Anna fucking loved Acorn.

(47)





“Then you two can go back,” said Anna angrily. “I’m going to go into that good night, and I’m sure as fuck not going gentle." She put out her hand, beckoning for the only two friends she had left in this world to come with her. “Burn and rave with me,” she whispered. “Catch and sing the sun in flight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light; both Acorn’s and your own.

“You can’t go fucking Orpheus on our asses now!” yelled Pawnee. She had only recently learned basic Greek mythology, and showed off this new knowledge at every opportunity.

Anna put her hands on her hips. “Oh, yes I can!” she told them. “You can’t make me go back.”

“Well, looks like somebody’s being a sassy Susan,” Pam said. “Look, we want revenge on that fucking cat too, but if we follow Acorn, there’s no guarantee that any of us will come back. Least of all Acorn!”

“It’s his time, Anna,” Pawnee said. She touched Anna’s hand gently, and couldn’t help but shudder at the unnatural coldness. She grew more concerned when she realized that Anna’s metal hand hadn’t been the one she touched. She pulled out her emergency margarita kit and fixed herself a strong one.

Anna was undeterred. “I’m saving Acorn’s life, god damn it. Even if it means sacrificing my own.” She glared at her two friends. “If you wouldn’t do the same for your pony, then you don’t fucking deserve to be called a Pony Pal.” She spat in the snow at her feet. (Pawnee could have sworn that she saw the saliva glow slightly. Was it radiation from the uranium-powered arm? Ectoplasm left over from Anna’s brush with death? The light of pure, burning rage and love? Or was Pawnee just sloshed?)

Anna turned her back on her friends both literally and metaphorically and began to walk away. Away from all that she had ever known, and towards that which could not be known.

(48)

7

Blood in the Snow

Pawnee and Pam exchanged a worried ferret. They couldn’t make Anna see reason when she was so blinded by the special love a girl feels for her pony. But they couldn’t leave the world of the living to save a millennia-old pony that was closer to a god than anything else that ever trod the earth either. The worried ferret squirmed out of Pam’s hands and ran off to worry elsewhere.

Pam sighed. “We’ll go to hell with you,” she said. Anna turned back around, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Maybe you and Acorn can be redeemed,” said Pawnee. “Maybe the cat — and death itself — aren’t as powerful as we mortals think.”

“But promise us you won’t turn back as we leave the underworld,” said Pawnee, “or Acorn might be pulled back into it.” Pam rolled her eyes like, we get it, you know a bit about mythology. You want a fucking pat you on the back? Where were you when I learned numbers, huh?

Anna wanted to hug her friends. But she knew it was dangerous to show affection, since it could be taken as a sign of weakness. Acorn had taught her that.

(49)





“Then it is settled,” Pam said. “We follow that fucking cat and descend into hell together. Then we find Acorn, free him from the eternal damnation that he is surely suffering at this very moment, and lead him back with us, where he will live out the rest of his sinful days haunted by the knowledge of what awaits him when he inevitably is pulled back into the pit.”

“And then we can all ride our ponies down the Pony Pal Trail!” Pawnee blubbered excitedly.

Anna smiled at her friends. “Thank you.”

“Pony Pals stick together,” said Pam.

———

Acorn seethed as he watched Minos smugly shit off the edge of the lone tree stump in the middle of the dead clearing. Acorn wasn’t sure what it was with which he was seething — rage? self-loathing? jealousy? — but seething he surely was.

“When will the other two judges fucking get here?” Acorn snapped.

“But Acorn,” said a voice from behind the pony, “we’ve been here all along.”

Acorn spun around and saw two figures standing on — or were they slightly hovering above? — the grey marshy ground. One was a tall middle-aged woman in a plum crushed-velvet pantsuit, whose glasses did nothing to hide the keen glimmer of her brown eyes. There were a few streaks of silver in her wavy brown hair, and they imbued her with a sense of dignity, like— Fuck it, here’s a picture of her.

[picture]

Over there to the right. She looked pretty much exactly like that. Much more efficient to do it this way.

The other person was a really rad dude with really rad shades who needs no introduction.

“Who are these douchebags?” Acorn whinnied.

The rad dude spoke again: “We’re the douchebags who wrote you.”

“Wrote me?” Acorn said. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“I means that you’re a fictional character,” the woman said.

“That’s right,” said Dirk Strider. (He hadn’t introduced himself as Dirk Strider yet, but it should be totally obvious who he is. No need to be coy. And the woman’s Jeanne Betancourt. Let’s not pretend this was any sort of dramatic revelation.) “You’re a text, Acorn,” Dirk continued, “and I’m going to fucking deconstruct you.”

“You wouldn’t dare to… That’s a daring proposi… I dare you… to try…” Acorn said falteringly.

“Couldn’t get that Derrida pun to work, huh?” Minos observed dryly.

“Fuck you, cat. I’ll keep working on it.”



“All puns aside, Acorn,” Jeanne Betancourt said, “yes, you are a character from a book that I wrote. And Dirk… well, I’m not sure exactly how he’s involved in all of this, but apparently he wrote it too?”

Dirk waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it, Jeanne Betancourt. Doesn’t matter.”

“If you say so, Dirk.” (There, they’ve introduced each other. So now everyone knows everyone else’s name and can refer to each other accordingly.)

(50)





“The point, Acorn,” Jeanne continued, interrupting my didactic parenthetical edification, “is that we created you, and so we’re in a unique position to judge you for the horrible things you’ve apparently done.”

“‘Apparently’?” Acorn whinnied. “So you don’t even know what you’re judging me for?”

“They don’t know yet,” Dirk said. “I’m going to have to read them.” He pulled a thin, worn paperback book from his back pocket. Its cover showed a picture of a pony, and was defaced with some vulgar and hilarious text. “‘Read’ being a loaded term, of course. Vocare versus legere. Isn’t it funny that the English word doesn’t distinguish between reading silently and reading aloud? We need separate modifying words to clarify. The father phoneme and the filial grapheme reunited by ambiguity.”

Minos and Betancourt were rolling their eyes as if they were desperate gamblers down to their last dollar and said eyes were their lucky pair of dice. They were rolling them pretty fucking hard, is the point.

Dirk continued, undeterred. “The closest we have to a unique verb for reading aloud in English is probably “recite” — from the Latin “recitare,” which can mean either “to repeat from memory,” or “to read aloud.” But the English “recite” has almost entirely the implication of speaking from memory, not directly from a page. The mind as an intermediate step between text and mouth, words being inscribed on the surface of the brain before being spoken. That word — inscribe — is really the heart of it all, isn’t it? Scirbere, to write. Inscribe, not just to write, but to write into, to embed words in the page. To recite is to speak aloud the words written into the brain by the page. A reversal of the standard interpretation of causation. Page writing into man, the source and receiver of the violence flipped. Speaking as reading, reading as speaking; reading as writing, writing as reading. So when I say that I will ‘read’ your sins, it should be clear that I’m simultaneously reading and writing, but equally clear that there is no difference at all between those two actions.”

(51)





“…What the Christ-shitting fuck are you talking about?” Acorn neighed.

Dirk shrugged. “You tell me. But all that aside, I should tell you how this all will go down. Now, Acorn, even the most cursory examination of your crimes makes it apparent that your soul is unfit for any sort of reward in the afterlife. But torture and torment hardly seem right either.”

“Yes. We won’t’ be making a choice between heaven and hell,” Betancourt said. “It’s much more weighty than that. It’s a choice between existence and nonexistence.”

Minos nodded. “We — well, the two of them — have control over your narrative. They can rewrite it so that you never existed at all.”

“The question is not what you deserve,” Dirk said, “but whether you deserve. With the sins that you have committed, Acorn, do you deserve to have ever lived at all?”

Acorn pranced and snorted. “Do you think I give a shit? Erase me, delete me, whatever it is you’ll do. Nonexistence doesn’t scare me.”

Dirk shook his head. “No, Acorn, I know that you don’t give a shit.” He turned his head slightly so a beam of light glinted off his sunglasses in a cool and dramatic way. “But I think that Anna would give a shit.”

Acorn stood still. “…Just hurry the fuck up and judge me.”





17a) Minos: Do you remember why we have come here today? Is it not true that our purpose is to hear the sins of this pony, known as Acorn? And is it not further true that the three of us, after listening to said sins, shall make a judgment concerning the fate of Acorn’s existence?

Acorn: Yes, we all know that already. And why are you using so many rhetorical questions?

Betancourt: Yes, Minos, all you say is true.

Minos: And what form shall our judgment take? Is it not true that each of us shall cast their own vote, and whatever ruling has gained the majority of the votes shall be enacted? This seems a just system. Is there anything I have omitted from my telling?

Dirk: Nothing, Minos.

Betancourt: True, it is just as you have said, Minos.

Minos: Very good. And now, Dirk, you, I suppose, should speak next, after duly calling upon the Gods.

Acorn: What’s going on?

Dirk: All men, Minos, who have any degree of right feeling, at the beginning of every enterprise, whether small or great, always call upon God. And we, too, who are going to discourse of the nature of sin, of guilt, and of punishment, must invoke the aid of Gods and Goddesses and pray that our words may be acceptable to them and consistent with themselves.

Acorn: Why is my name over there on the left in front of everything I say?

Betancourt: Come, then, clear-voiced Muses, whether you have gained this epithet because of the quality of your singing or because the Ligurians are so musical, grant me your support in the judgment that my colleagues and I shall soon make.

(52)





17b Acorn: And what are those numbers and letters over there?

Minos: Let this, then, be our invocation of the Gods, to which I add an exhortation of myself to speak in such manner as will be most intelligible to you, and will most accord with my own intent.

Acorn: Wait. I know what’s happening.

Betancourt: A good and fair invocation. Now it must fall upon Dirk to begin the reading of the sins, while Minos and I listen attentively and comment on occasion as we see fit.

Minos: Excellent, Jeanne; and we will do precisely as you bid us. The prelude is charming, and is already accepted by us — may we beg of you to proceed the strain?

Acorn: I’m not going to play along. We’re not making this into a Platonic dialogue.

Dirk: I certainly shall, Minos. Despite the fact that some of those gathered here are making things harder than they need to be.

Acorn: No. Fuck you. I refuse.

The pony defiantly kicked his name off the page with his powerful hooves.

“That’s better.”

Betancourt: Acorn, please, don’t make this into a whole thing.

“Fuck you,” Acorn said, after he kicked another “Acorn:” into the abyss. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you and the symposium you rode in on.”

Dirk: You’re not really in any position to argue with us, Acorn. We’re doing this. It’s happening.

17c “How far up your own ass do— hold on, I need to take care of this too.” He kicked the 17c into the growing pile. “Lousy goddamn Stephanus pagination.”

Betancourt: Can’t you just humor him on this one, Acorn? That’s kind of how we arbiters do this thing. I mean, if it were up to me, we might try…

Dirk: Oh, come on, Betancourt! It’s tradition!

Minos: It’s formal. I like it.

Betancourt: Of course you’d like it, you get to be Socrates. Come on, you two, we’ll talk about this later.

“I’m not going to go through with this needlessly complicated and pretentious dialogue bullshit just so this glasses-wearing fucker can get his rocks off. Besides, this asshole—” Acorn derisively tossed his head in the direction of Minos “—already roped me into two pages of terza rima.

Betancourt: Oh no. Was—

“Hang on, let me get that for you,” Acorn said, and then sent yet another prefix into the bottom margin with his powerful hooves.

“Thanks. Was it metered?” Betancourt asked.

“Iambic pentameter.”

“At least he didn’t insist on hendecasyllables,” Betancourt said, crinkling her nose in repulsion at the thought of those particularly odious feet. (“That’s a good pun,” Dirk whispered to nobody.)

Minos: All right, fine, we can—

Acorn cocked one of his back hooves “Minos:”-ward threateningly.

“Fine!” Minos huffed. “There. No more dialogue. Happy?”

Acorn: Very.

“You don’t have to be an asshole about it, Acorn,” Jeanne Betancourt said.

(53)





———

The three girls trudged through the snow silently. Pawnee and Pam had left Lightning and Lil’ Seb behind miles ago. They’d told the ponies to return home and had pointed them in the right direction. If they just followed the trail in a straight line for a few minutes, they’d be back at the barn. But the girls didn’t hold out much hope that the ponies would make it, because, as has been covered earlier in this book, ponies are incredibly fucking stupid. At this very moment, Lil’ Seb and Lightning were probably freezing to death or falling off of cliffs or trying to eat each other or some stupid shit like that. Fucking ponies.

“Hurry,” said Anna. “I can feel the Other Side tugging at my very sinews. We’re close now.”

“Here, kitty, kitty,” Anna called with vicious sarcasm. It was all starting to become clear in her mind now. The cat. Her friends. Her own death. Her new life. The detective pony. All was converging, all was colliding, all was rushing to a climax. A revelation trembled just past the threshold of her understanding, and here, where the birch forest of Wiggins and the chthonian depths of hell overlapped, Anna felt at the centre of an odd, religious instant.



“I hope that hell has an open bar. I finished the last of my emergency flasks hours ago.” said Pawnee. She had a serious problem. This was a cry for help.

Anna stopped bothering to project even the slightest pretense of caring about these antics. Anna pointed to the ground. “This is it,” she said solemnly. “This is the point of no return for me; I can feel it. Once we cross over, I can never reenter the world of the living.” Pawnee gasped in shock; Pam just nodded. “I was ripped from this realm once,” Anna continued, “and it won’t let me escape its grasp again.”

“I know I can’t change your mind,” said Pam sadly. “I know you love Acorn more than you love life; and apparently more than you love me.”

“Oh, Pam. You’ll always be the one that got away,” Anna said, voice shaking.

“And Pawnee… Pawnee, you’re pretty cool too.”

The girls were moved by this uncharacteristic display of emotion from Anna. The three girls held hands and took that all-important step forward. Nothing around them visibly changed, but they could all feel it. They were damned. Pawnee touched Anna’s shoulder and pointed at the ground.

“There’s blood in the snow,” said Pawnee. “Just like the chapter title!”

Anna saw the blood, too. Rage gathered in her eyes.

(54)





Pam stopped and held up a hand. “Listen,” she said. “What’s that?”

The girls stood still and listened. Anna heard a faint meow. “It’s a cat,” she whispered. She smiled. Her smile was far redd