Runtyshy: Part 2

Runtyshy: Part 2


	“Well, hot damn. Looks like you’re gonna like these gifts a lot more now that you can see them.”

	You approach the cage, swing the door open, and sit cross-legged on the floor, gently placing the two Stuffy ponies into the cage, along with the yellow ball. Runtyshy’s eyes widen a bit at the sight, clearly liking what she sees, but her eyes meet yours and she slinks back a bit.

	“Oh, come on. I’m not the best looking guy in the world, but I can’t be that bad.”

	Grabbing the plush blue bow and twirling it around in your fingers, you flash it to Runtyshy, holding it out for her to see. Her pupils shrink at the sight of it, and she lets her mouth hang slightly agape. However, she soon catches another glimpse at you, and turns away.

	“Okay, seriously. What?”

	“Hee…neeee…”

	“…I don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to mean. Here, let me just put the bow on you-“

	As soon as you get within a few inches of her with the hairbow in your hand, she skulks back, closes her eyes, and begins another one of her silent crying sessions.

	“Hey, hey, calm down. I didn’t mean to scare you with my oh-so-terrible face.”

	You lean a bit further into the cage, lightly petting her mane. She perks up a bit at your touch, and, as you continue, she eventually gets to her feet and moves her shaking head in your direction. When she finally opens her eyes to look at you, a surprised expression flashes across her face, and she gives a joyous chirp, stumbling her way out of the pen and towards your legs.

	“Nee!” She exclaims, snuggling up against your ankles, not unlike a lonely housecat.

	“There’s no way I didn’t talk to you enough for you to not recognize me until I gave you a pat on the head. I refuse to believe that.”

	She stares at you, her expression now blank.

	“Yeah, it’s ‘Nee’.”

	Runtyshy beams, a massive smile spreading across her face, and you carefully lift her into your lap, readying the bow.

	“This won’t hurt a bit, trust me.”

	Getting the hair bow in is going to be easy as pie. You watched a show one particularly boring Saturday night about some dysfunctional family with sixteen kids, and the mother taught one of the several little girls to put one of these in. If an eight-year old can do it, you certainly can.

	Or so you thought.

	After about fifty minutes of struggling with the knots, hair getting caught outside of parts of it, and Runtyshy getting bored as all get out and falling asleep as soon as you almost got it just perfectly, you manage to tie the small bow into her stringy mane. You gently shake her to show her what you’ve done, and she stirs peacefully.

	“Hey, check this out.”

	You grab a credit-card sized mirror from inside your wallet (it was an impulse buy, but you admittedly don’t regret having it that much), and hold the mirror in front of her, so she can admire your handiwork.

	As soon as she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she gently holds her hoof to the glass, captivated by the fact that this mysterious new object seems to have created a clone of her with the exact same mindset and movements as her.

	You see her eyes trail upwards on the mirror, before finally landing on the reflected image of the bow in her mane. She smiles, points at it, and swings her head to look at you, happily chirping. You can’t help but laugh a bit, and you give her a scratch behind her ear.

	“Alright, well, now that we’ve got that settled, we need to get down to business.”

	The phrasing and tone of your voice seems to worry her, and her happy expression changes to one of either neutrality or anxiety, you can’t really tell from this angle. As you stand up, Runtyshy tucked away in your arm, she shivers a bit.

	“On a brighter note, though, since your eyes are opened, I don’t need to squeeze you.”

	A soft chirp comes from the ball of fluff you’re cradling.

	“Nope, I get the amazingly great privilege of teaching you how to how to use a litter box.”

	Another quiet chirp.

	You stroke her fluff as you carry her down into the basement, where your laundry room is. After all, that is where you left the old cat’s litter box. The stairs are cold, since they’re, well, made of cement. You considered putting some carpet down not too long ago, but the idea soon passed when you realize you only go down there about once a week, either to get something from the freezer or to wash your clothes and towels. Either way, you’re probably going to move the litter box upstairs regardless, so that Runtyshy doesn’t trip down the stairs and break something, provided she would even try to go down the things.

	The laundry room smells faintly of your favorite detergent, Tidal Breeze. Runtyshy shuffles about in your arms, and you look down to see her sniffing at the air. She seems to get her fill of the oceanic-scented air, and settles back down with a deep sigh.

	You place Runtyshy onto your dryer, which is currently on and, well, drying a load of t-shirts. She slowly gets to her hooves, and she begins to rumble in rhythm with the dryer before ultimately deciding to curl up into a ball and falling asleep on the warm lid.

	Second verse, same as the first: Hnnnng.

	Of course, you put her up on the dryer so you could free up your hands and fill up the litter box. Luckily for you, there’s still a bag of kitty litter tucked away behind your water heater. It seems fine; it is pretty much glorified sand and rocks, after all. You just hope that Runtyshy doesn’t accidentally breathe some in, since that wouldn’t exactly do wonders to her already weak lungs.

	“Alrighty, come on, Fluffyshy. We have to train you for this.”

	Upon being woken up and plopped into this comparatively colder and less comfortable box makes her give a groggy chirp, but she soon wakes up fully after her eyes lock onto yours, and she smiles up at you.

“Nee!”

	You pat her on the head, and choose your next few words relatively carefully.

	“I need to show you how to make poopies in the box.”

	Oh God, that sounded a lot less retarded in your mind than it did when you actually said it. In any case, her ears perk up at the word ‘poopies’, as if it’s something she already understands. She lets out a quiet chirp, and turns away. You place a finger under her chin, and tilt her head up towards you, and your eyes lock on hers.

	“Come on, don’t give me that. Buck up! …Hey, that wasn’t bad. Pony. Buck. I should write that down somewhere.”

	Runtyshy stares at you in silence for a few seconds, cocks her head to the side, and gives you the most confused chirp you’ve heard from her yet.

	“Fine, forget it. I didn’t expect you to get the joke anyways. You could’ve at least smiled.”

	She sits down, her eyes still meeting yours.

	“Okay, so, getting down to business: poopies. Do you know what poopies are?”

	She looks away a second time and chirps, sadly.

	“I take it that’s a bit of a sensitive subject, then. Well, just so we have the same definition in mind, whenever you feel this-“

	You reach towards her and gently squeeze her mid-section, to which she reacts by letting loose a long string of panicked chirps. Pulling back quickly, you can almost swear she glares at you.

	“That’s poopies. Poopies go in the litter box, right here.” You bury your finger in the clean litter, pull it out, and repeat the motion a few times to make a point.

	“Boo…?”

	“That’s close enough to ‘poopies’ that I won’t correct you on it.”

	Runtyshy reaches for her stomach with her front hooves, and falls flat on her chest, rolling over on to her side with a tiny “oof”. She presses her hooves to her gut, softly, and looks at you.

	“Boo?”

	“It’s not just the squeeze. No, poopies…come on their own. One minute you don’t have to make them, and the next you do. When you feel this, in your tummy-“

You give her another light squish.

	“That’s when you have to make poopies.”

	Yo’re wishing there were more fluffy-friendly words for shit, but that seems a slight bit useless at this point. Runtyshy sits there for a good minute, concentrating on something. Lost in a world of infinite thought, where any one fluffy pony can-

	Wait, she’s just staring at the dryer.

	As soon as you go to take her out of the box for her lack of doing anything, she gives a familiar grunt, and you decide to take out the now-finished laundry from the dryer while you wait for her to finish up.

	“Nuhhhh….”

	You wish you’d brought some headphones or earmuffs or something, since haphazardly tossing a pile of clothes into a basket isn’t nearly as relaxing as it could be when a fluffy pony is audibly shitting only a few feet away. As soon as you toss the final shirt into the laundry basket, Runtyshy calls you over with a couple of chirps.

	“Nee!”

	Runtyshy points her snout to the middle of the box, and swings her head up to look at you. Lying in the center is a decently bloody turd-

	Hold on, blood?

	Sure enough, Runtyshy has left a small trail of blood leading from the shit to her, but she doesn’t seem to notice the actual blood itself, only the dull pain in her backside. She grimaces for a brief second, and gives you a depressed chirp.

	The hell? This didn’t happen before, when she shat on your counter. You rack your brain for details, trying to remember what she’s been doing, what she’s done, what she ate-

	What she ate. The first time, on your counter, she’d only had milk, oatmeal, and whatever the shelter fed her before you got her. Today, around lunch, you gave her some kibble. It was kibble, wasn’t it? Maybe it was a fluffy treat, or a candy of some sort. You don’t remember. Either way, you figure out that it must have something to do with her dietary habits, since she’s obviously not used to solids. Hell, she probably can’t even really digest them properly because of the whole runt thing. You make a mental note of the fact, and lift Runtyshy into your cupped hands.

	“Tonight’s spaghetti night, Fluffyshy. Mashed spaghetti, that is, so you don’t choke or shit noodles.”

	She gives an almost pained chirp, but follows it with a happier one and a smile.

	“I’d say ‘that’s the spirit’, but I have no clue what the spirit is right now.”

	Runtyshy lets out another happy chirp, before settling down in your hands, shifting uncomfortably.

	Odd.

	----------------------------------------------------------------------


	“Alrighty, here comes a-one hot bowl of a-spaghetti!”

	Again, you feel beyond stupid hamming it up like this for Runtyshy’s sake, but she’s enjoying it all the same, smiling, giggling, and squeaking for “Nee”.

	“Here a-you go, Fluffyshy! Eat it-a carefully! It’s-a one spicy meat-a-ball!”

	Damn, it’s like Super Mario and Buddy Valastro had some horrible love child through the darkest of the dark arts, and you’re the racist little caricature that spawned from that festering pit of hell. Runtyshy at least seems to appreciate the little show you put on, despite the fact that it was stupid as all get out, and gives a wide grin. You set the bowl right next to where she’s sitting, on the counter.

	“Nee boo duh.”

	“Did you just call me stupid or something?”

	Runtyshy giggles again before burying her head in the bowl of spaghetti, taking tiny, deliberate bites. You didn’t even have to warn her to take it slow –well, you did, in the accent, but she didn’t actually absorb the information, did she?

	Progress, to say the least.

	You grab yourself a bowl of spaghetti, and lean up against the fridge. Kinda bland, really. If you had a couple of herbs, maybe some parmesan cheese, it would be a lot better, but for now it’s just plain tomato sauce and whole wheat noodl-

	“Boo! Boo!”

	Your thoughts are interrupted by Runtyshy’s cries, and you look over to see her trotting around quickly in a circle, shouting “boo” over and over again. Flashing back to earlier, you’re reminded that she referred to shit, or ‘poopies’, as you put it, as ‘boo’. Fuck, you knew you forgot something, and that something was bringing the litter box upstairs. Thinking fast, you make the stupid decision of bringing the box to her, instead of vice versa.

	You rush up the basement stairs, box in hand, and spill a bit of the litter on the stairs. Doesn’t matter, you’ll sweep it up later. All that matters now is getting the box to her before she shits on the counter again.

	“Nuhhh…”

	Goddamn it.

	You make it back into the kitchen just a few seconds too late, and see Runtyshy shit a Type 7 on the Bristol chart all over the counter. Honestly, you’re more upset with yourself for being a moron than you are with her for shitting on the place she eats off of.  You should’ve brought her down to the box. You should’ve brought the box up earlier. She even warned you.

	You’re still a bit upset.

	“Fuck. Fucking shit, just fucking…now I have to fucking clean up the fucking shit on the fucking counter ‘cause I’m too fucking goddamned stupid to…”

	This continues on for a short while as you head to the closet to grab a roll of paper towels to wipe up the mess.

	“Fuck. Just fuck.”

	When you return to the kitchen, Runtyshy is curled up into a ball on the counter, shivering. She probably heard your little outburst. Maybe she just feels bad about going outside the litter box. It doesn’t matter now. You’ve just got to clean up the bloody puddle of feces now on your-

	Bloody.

	Christ Almighty, is there a lot of blood. To avoid going into the rather disgusting details of the shit itself, it’s at least taking up fifty percent of the puddle, and is quickly dripping off of the kitchen island and onto the floor.

	“Holy shit.”

	Runtyshy coughs, and your attention snaps from the bloody puddle to her. She’s hacking, loudly, almost uncharacteristically. She gives a final, weak sputter, and a couple flecks of blood leave her mouth and land next to her head. She collapses, and coughs again, closing her eyes.

	“Holy fucking shit.”