Angel Bunny Superstar (Ed)

Angel Bunny Superstar

    “Come back!” Fluttershy called after Angel Bunny.
    Angel spun around in place.  “Come back?  Come back?!  Are you kidding me?  I’m through with you, baby.  I’m through with the hutch.  I’m through with this podunk shitberg,” he shouted back at Fluttershy.  He didn’t actually say it.  Bunnies can’t talk, dumbass.  But he communicated his thoughts in a series of nose wiggles and waving his forelegs dramatically.  He pounded his chest, “I’m outta here, Toots.  I’m going to the big city.  My name’s going to be a superstar.  I’m going to be a dancer!”  He spun around again in his adorable little leotard and sauntered off towards the big city, with an occasional display of “jazz paws.”  Now Fluttershy, being the Queen of Trolls, was perfectly fluent in sign language, but she hadn’t let on in all these years, and she wasn’t about to now.
    So off down the road Angel went, off to New York City.  If he could make it there, he’d make it anywhere.  Sure, Canterlot was the capital of Equestria, but New York is the largest city.  It's where all the action was.  It is the home of Broadway.  It's the city that never sleeps.  It’s the city that’s so big it doesn’t even need its own working pun.  A half mile down the lane, Angel was beginning to worry that he had bitten off more than he could chew.  New York was still another two thousand miles away.  That was when he began to smell burnt toast.  Then small colorful sparks started dancing in front of his eyes.  The tips of his paws began to shiver.  Oh no, he had just enough time to think to himself, not again.
    Angel came to on cold slimy concrete in some back alley.  It was a familiar experience.  Angel, you see, was a very sick bunny.  He had always had an unfortunate combination of epilepsy, narcolepsy, and congenital simultaneous amnesia.  He’d black out and then come to days later, with no idea what had happened in the intervening days.  It was the reason he had hooked up with that dizzy broad back in Ponyville.  She always took good care of him. Angel looked around.  It was a big city, lots of skyscrapers, hundreds of strange animals from a hundred different countries packing the sidewalk.  New York, he had made it.  Angel looked down and was surprised to find that he had lost his leotard.  He was even more surprised to find his penis covered in dry saliva and chewing tobacco, and his ass felt like it had been worked over by a red hot crowbar.
    “Pull yourself together, Bunny,” he signed to himself.  “You’ve been in worse situations before.  At least you’ve still got the hundred dollars in cash you’ve got hidden up your…”  His whiskers twitched three times to signify the ellipses.  He was pretty sure that wasn’t there anymore either. “Oh double bing bang hell,” he signed.
    There was a Broadway addition in two weeks.  Two weeks, Angel could make that.  Even if he had to squat in some crack house or even sleep on the street, he would be there.  Twelve years of tap, three years of modern, a semester of folk dances, and eight years of ballet.  Angel had prepared for it, and his time had finally come.  It wasn’t easy, lasting those two weeks.  He found himself beating up hobo ponies to steal their empty bottles and return them for the recycling money just to get spare change.  He ended up ripping the iron horseshoe off one of them and forcing it into his mouth.  Angel wasn’t proud.  Another time he blew a teenager in a movie theatre for the promise of twenty bucks.  The bastard only had $3.50 on him total.  Yet, in the end, Angel had enough to buy a new leotard from a flea market, and he still had enough left over for one wash cycle at the Laundromat.
    Today was the big day.  Audition day!  Angel showed up at the theatre bright and early, but there were already hundreds of hopefuls in line, stretching and exercising.  After several hours, Angel was getting close enough to the stage that he could see the other hopefuls auditioning.  Amateurs, he thought.  Wannabes.  Oafs.  They didn’t have even a fraction of the natural talent or training that he had.  This would be a shoe-in.  Soon he was the next in line.
    “Next,” the director called out, “we now have… Anhell Boonay.”
    Angel stepped out onto the stage.  He didn’t even notice the massacre of his name.  He had made it.  Here he was, on a stage, in a theater, in front of an audience.   Sure, there wasn’t an audience yet, but he was in the spotlight.  His selection of music started.  Angel opened with a perfect plié, slid into an arabesque penché, and with the grace of the princess herself leapt into an extraordinary grand jeté, only to follow that up with an even more amazing…
    “Next!” the director called out.
    What?
    “Next!  I said next!  C’mon, somebody get that raccoon off the stage!”
    Angel got off the stage.  The director said to get off the stage so that’s exactly what Angel did.  It wasn’t until he was back behind the curtain that Angel realized what just happened.  His eyes began to well up.  His hands began to shake.  All that work.  And now he could smell burning toast.
    Angel came to on a soiled mattress in what looked like some seedy motel.  His head throbbed.  There was a furiously barking dog, sounded like a Rottweiler, barricaded in the bathroom.  One of his ears was missing.  There was a dead unicorn curled up in one corner of the room, its horn was missing.  There was something horribly wrong with his left foot, he wouldn’t be dancing again.  Get out, he signed to himself, get out now.
    Angel got out.  What to do now?  Fluttershy would never take him back, now that he was such a failure.  He spent the next six months living off the street.  Angel got tuberculosis, the resistant kind that couldn’t be treated with medicine.  It got deep in his lungs.  At night he coughed himself to sleep.  He coughed so hard his ribs broke.  He tried to make ends meet by passing himself off to an increasingly worse series of pimps. There was only so much clientele for a one eared limping male bunny with a contagious disease.  He attracted the worst sort of stallion johns.  Angel never even found out he was BIV positive.  Being homeless, the doctors didn’t have any way of contacting him.  Even when he got full blown AIDS, and his fur began to fall out, and Karponi’s Sarcomas appeared on his flesh, Angel didn’t understand.
    After long months, Angel finally scraped together fifty dollars.  It was enough for a carriage ticket back home to Ponyville, and Angel was taking it.  Angel never lived to see Fluttershy again.  Half way back to Ponyville, he smelled toast for one last time.  He would have had an epileptic seizure, but he was too weak.  Angel’s body gave up, and he died.  A half an hour later the only other passenger in the carriage, an aristocratic otter with a monocle, noticed his travelling companion’s condition.  He went out up to the driver’s seat and spoke with the ponies driving the carriage.  They thought about it for a moment, and told the otter there was nothing they could do for him.  They would simply have to continue on to Ponyville and dispose of the carcass there.  The otter retired himself back to the interior of the carriage.  There the otter searched Angel’s corpse for spare change and, finding none, molested the body before returning back to the crossword puzzle he had been working on earlier.