In the Blood - Special Hugs and Wall Sockets

FractalFluff, January 11, 2014; 06:40 / FB 16413
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Special Hugs and Wall Sockets

"How time tiww speshuw fwend, daddeh?"

Oh, dear. Same thing every day, at least once a day. I wasn't sure if he honestly forgot or if he was just hoping that one day, the answer will be different. Just like every other time, I reached down to pet the corpulent unicorn's mane and then gave him a hug.

"I'm sorry, Uni," I told the fluffy, "but Unice isn't coming back. She got very bad owwies from that meanie mare, and she took the longest sleepies before Daddy could save her."

Yet again, I watched Uni's face fall. Actually, it didn't so much fall as deflate, his wide blunt countenance with its with its permanently puffed cheeks and stubborn frown suddenly seeming to lose all of its structure. His mouth turned down, his jaw hung open, the firm V of his frown inverted to become a sad and bewildered /\ of distress. Then the tears would start. And all I could do was wrap my arms around his silly great barrel-body and hug it out with the poor guy while he sobbed.

It's weird, because I never even liked Uni much. Not at first. If anything, he made me think of some stereotypical British Colonel, all bluster and bumptiousness wrapped around a complete inability to grasp new ideas without the aid of a lump-hammer (with reddish-pink fluff standing in for the obligatory choleric complexion). All we had in common as nominally sentient creatures was our mutual love for Unice. And later, our grief.

My first fluffy was everything Uni wasn't. They were like night and day: physically, Unice had a graceful, slender body-type and fine features, making her look more like a miniature Falabella horse than the stocky sheep-pig-ox-lump that was Uni. She was soft-spoken and shy, with the sweetest demeanour you'd ever seen in a fluffy. You'd have thought that Uni would ride roughshod all over her; but when he was with Unice, the Colonel Blimpishness just melted away. He was completely devoted to her.

Uni was never even meant to be a fixture in our home: I wanted to breed from Unice and hired him for a weekend as a potential sperm donor. By breakfast time on Sunday they were completely inseparable, playing together, hugging every other minute... And Unice was prattling cheerfully about much more fun the Pawk would be now that her "speshaw fwend" would be with her (Park happened on Tuesdays and Thursdays), how happy she was to have another fluffy to play with while Daddy was at work, how Uni would be the bestest daddy for her babies — although not as good as _her_ daddy, who'd found her such a lovely special friend! (Cue pancreas-melting hugs.)

That was when I realised that I'd never actually explained to Unice the temporary nature of the arrangement. Even though I'd playfully introduced the stump-legged hunk of mulishness with a breezy "ready to meet your new special friend, honey?" I'd just assumed she'd want to get shot of the loudmouthed lummox as soon as sufficient huggies had been completed. The idea that she would take my offhand comment literally... well, it just never entered my head.

Watching them play together, I realised something else: just because Unice never whined about being left on her own all day, never played up or tried to seek attention, it didn't mean she was OK. She was so tractable and so sunny in her disposition, it had never occurred to me that she might be unhappy. I'd been leaving a loving, social creature to rattle around an empty house for half the day, with only the TV for company, every working day for several months; and I'd never once come back to a chewed pot-plant or a damp spot on the rug.

And now I was going to yank away not just the society of a peer, the promise of company and affection when I couldn't be with her, but her actual boyfriend?

Yeah, no.

Uni's owner left my house that night empty-carriered but fat-walleted. It cost a hundred dollars to keep the happy couple from finding out they were meant to be a one-night stand. Best money I ever spent.

And then I had to go and ruin it all by bringing home that... thing.

I'll never forget the night you came home with a prospective buyer for Una's three foals to find that only Uni and she were still alive. I still can't quite forgive myself for my assumption that he'd killed the foals and Unice, and gored Una almost to death, out of some testosterone-fuelled territorial instinct. That was the first time I saw the deflating-face effect: when I shook him and screamed: "UNI! WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO, YOU LITTLE MONSTER?"

Fortunately, Una herself disabused you of your assumption. "Mistah... gif huggies... Yoonah haf owwies... huuhuuhuu... dem bad fwuffies twy take way Yoonah's babbeh..."

"Tried to take your babies? But Unice had her own baby... where is it?"

A howl from Uni.

"Twy take wed'n'wite babbeh... *gak* Yoonah babbeh... *bloik* Yoonah gif dewe uwgy babbehs foweveh sweepies..." she waved a hoof towards the sad little heaps of blood and fluff that were all that was left of her own babies. "Yoonah... *gulk* Yoonah gif meanie dummie mawe wowstist owwies... *huuk* pu' gud babbeh in bewweh... fow be saf..."

Oh God. OhGodOhGodOhGod. She couldn't mean...

*HUUUURRRK*

I recognised the object in the mare's vomit just in time to cover Uni's eyes and lug him out of the room. I took my sweet time reassuring him before I called the vet to see what could be done for Una.

What could be done was a needleful of forever-sleepies.

I tried to reassure Uni, but the damage was done. Already blaming himself (he'd been unable to intervene while Una was killing everything else in the room because he'd got his horn stuck in a power outlet again), my response cemented in Uni's mind the idea that he was a horrible fluffy for letting Una hurt his mate and child. It didn't matter how many times I told him he was a good fluffy and a great special friend: MONSTER was in there like curry in a white t-shirt.

That was him all over, you know? He wasn't disobedient, exactly; it was just that if he didn't see the sense in an instruction it would go in one ear and out the other. He was housebroken in under 24 hours, never begged for treats, and would steadfastly remain at his post in the saferoom as long as you told him to, even if you left the door wide open, because those rules could be explained in a way that made sense.

Bad poopies smell nasty and could make people in the house sick; too many treats rot your teeth and stop fluffies from running and having fun; and sometimes there were things outside the saferoom that could hurt fluffies (like freshly-painted walls, hot saucepans on the stove, or power tools), so you should wait until Daddy said it was okay to come out.

On the other hand, "the fluffies on the TV will never hear you, no matter how loud you shout," "the microwave is not a portal to the pasta dimension, nor can fluffies operate it with hooves, no matter how convenient it might be to have infinite spaghetti when Daddy is at work," and "you can't make your horn's 'magic' more powerful by plugging yourself into the wall socket," on the other hand — well, those just went in one ear and out the other. Does not compute. After Unice's death, I actually came to appreciate it, in a way; that stolidity. I would come home from work to be greeted by a high-pitched yet somehow stentorian voice, lecturing TV fluffies on staying away from water and not touching hot things; daft, yes, self-important, certainly, but also kind and invested in the wellbeing of others.

Following the loss of Unice, he got really serious about the horn thing. Like his guilt complex, that was partly my fault; I queued up a bunch of old Pixar and Disney stuff for him to watch while I was out at work, and didn't consider the impact some of the scenes might have on a creature with his literal turn of mind. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, in particular, hit him very hard. I found him with his hooves up on the screen, watching Beauty awakened with a kiss, with that deflated face on. His fluff was soaking wet with tears.

While I hugged him, he rattled off questions. What if special friend was only asleep? What if the bad mare had used horn magic to make her go to sleep? What if special friend was waiting for huggies, like Snow White, or kissies, like Beauty? He'd given her both, of course, but what if he just hadn't given her enough huggies for her owwies, or the right kissies? What if we could find her boxie and make her be awake again? If his horn was better, could he wake Unice up? Daddy said his horn was the bestest — was Daddy sure about that? Couldn't it be better? Couldn't there be some magic, special magic, just for unicorns, that he could try? Would other pointy-friends know? Did Daddy know any other pointy-friends — nice ones — who might tell him?

By the end of it I was crying too.

And he was still stuck on wall sockets.

I went around the house covering every damn socket with those baby-proof things. He learned to pry them out or just plain smash them. I removed all the floor-level wall points and had new ones wired in halfway up the wall. He would stolidly try and try and climb furniture to get to them. In the end I basically set up a decoy socket in his safe-room, one that wasn't wired into anything and that wouldn't get stuck on his horn. He would plug himself in several times a day, then sit there with a constipated expression and try to make new kinds of magic. And I would hug the big lunk, and try to distract him with toys and games. And it would sort of work... for a while.

I guess I was wrong in thinking that I didn't share anything similar to Uni's one-track mind. I was so obsessed with wall sockets that I simply failed to consider the possibility that he might recognize anything else as a power outlet. It was a stupid mistake, but one that I think many people might have made. One day, the LED bulb in my desk lamp gave up its 25-year-old ghost, and I went out to buy another. To make sure that got the right fitting, I took the old one with me, leaving an empty light fitting.

While I was out, Uni put two and two together. It must have been an even more tempting target than the wall sockets: a round hole, just the right size for his horn. It would still have been okay, if I'd only remembered to flick the switch off. But I didn't and, well, here we are.

The first thing that I noticed was the smell. Like I say, Uni was a very conscientious litter-box user; once trained, he'd never had an accident in all the time I owned him. But the house reeked of fluffy poop. I walked into the living-room, and there he was.

The desk lamp was on its side, on the floor, next to the fluffy. He was sitting up on his butt, in that very un-horse-like gate-ornament posture fluffies can adopt, his face looked as calm and serene as an icon of the Virgin Mary, and he was at the centre of a lake of piss and crap about two feet across.

"Uni?" I said. "Uni, buddy, what happened?"

He turned that serene smile on me. "Hewwo, nice mistah," he said, brightly. "Whewe fwuffy? Yu be nyu daddeh?"

My blood turned to ice.

See, fluffies have this facility where an electric shock can effectively wipe their brains. So do humans — ECT is hell on the memory, and the more juice you get the more gets wiped. But fluffies seem to have a kind of biological onboard ROM; they don't get wiped entirely, just kicked back to factory settings. The built-in stuff — find out where you are, greet humans affectionately, ascertain whether they are your new owner — that stays intact. But litterbox training and other learned skills? Gone. Personality? Gone. Sense of identity, beyond fwuffy-am-fwuffy? Gone. All the games you like to play with Daddy? Gone. Memories of your special friend and baby?

Gone.
Gone.
Gone.

All I can hope for is that some of his memories may creep back over time, as his brain heals from the shock. I'm also hoping that some of his personality was hardwired, too; at least part of who he was must have been down to the expression of his unique genetic makeup, like the smarty-trait he carried. Maybe that will reassert itself over time.

Physically, he's fine; never better. Doesn't cry at fairy-tales, doesn't try to turbo-charge his horn, doesn't bury his face in Unice's old blankey, doesn't attempt outwit the microwave, doesn't tell off the TV fluffies anymore. Fitter, happier, more productive.

I give him lots of hugs. Maybe one day, I'll find the right one.

I miss you, buddy.

Please come back.