Die, Brony, Die

by Paul Neuhaus

  “I guess so. I don’t think I’m too crazy about the me-for-breakfast part.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s a way around that. You’ve done a bang-up job keeping them fenced in—which means they hate you something terrible. We can use that.”

  “Okay... I trust you.”

  I looked up the face of the Rocks. They were steep and jagged, and I was in lousy shape. I regretted it immediately, but I asked Hope for a favor. “Say... Do you think you could scootch over so you’re above me? Where I’m currently standing? At the bottom of the rocks?”

  There was a long pause. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Hope said. “I’ve been keeping these sons of bitches here for days and you wanna get out of a little climbing? Fuck you.”

  That was only the second or third time Hope had sworn in the last millennia. Still, she wasn’t wrong. I was being lazy. “Alright, alright. Gimme a minute.” I took a deep breath and began trudging up the side of the Rocks. For the umpteenth time in a short period, I cursed myself for going to seed. I had a little roll around the middle and I was paying the price for my years of sloth. I stopped about halfway up, put my hands on my knees and sucked air. “Gimme. Just. A. Minute.”

  “Oh, fer crissakes.”

  “I know,” I replied. “After this, Jenny Craig’s my new BFF.” Finally, I reached the top and stood under the maelstrom. I spread my feet apart, dropped the gladius on the dusty ground, and wrapped my right arm around the pithos. I held my left hand over the stopper. I leaned in and said, “Are you ready, Orpheus? You’re gonna get some company.” Orpheus was the new jug’s only inmate—and I was looking forward to expanding his circle of friends. I looked up and said, “Okay. On three. Are you ready?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Hope said. “Do you mean go right at three or right after three?”

  “Are you asking me that because you wanna know, or because you’ve seen this exact conversation in a million movies and you’re confusing reality with a pop culture simulation?”

  Hope sighed. “I don’t wanna discuss psychology right now. Let’s go at three.”

  “Deal. One... Two...” (At two I pulled the top off the jug and felt the reassuring vacuum cycle up.) “Three!”

  What happened next was, I assume, like standing under a manure silo right as it opens. A plummeting mountain of metaphorical shit crushed me to the ground.

  Hope shaped herself into an upside-down bowl and the Evils didn’t so much flow out as plop down like one of Godzilla’s turds. Even though they were incorporeal, they had enough collective weight to slam me to the ground and keep me there in a sweaty, breathless heap. I wanted to scream. I wanted to say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything with that dank mass pressing down on me.

  Hope did something smart right then. She dropped down on top of us, creating a cell with herself as the walls and ceiling and the Rocks as the floor. I didn’t see her do it, but I felt the change in air pressure and saw the quality of the light alter.

  On the one hand, we were in a good place. Without much effort, I had access to the Evils, and the Evils were still contained. On the other, I was suffocating. I was suffocating, I could hear the air escaping my lungs, and there was a horrible din all around me. The Evils began to murmur to one another. They knew something had changed but they were disoriented. Their confusion didn’t last long. They realized the shape of their cell had changed and there was someone in there with them.

  Someone they recognized.

  As much as the Evils hated Hope, they hated me more. Sure, I was the one that’d liberated them in the first place, but I was also the one that’d gone around and systematically re-imprisoned them. When they were all shoved into the pithos by Zeus, I’m sure he told them, “Look, everybody crowd into this tiny little space, but don’t worry: I found a stupid girl and she’s gonna let you out again. Once that happens, you can run roughshod over humanity causing whatever pain and misery you like.” I can easily imagine the Evils replying (with a single, enthusiastic voice), “Fucking-A! Sign us up!” But Zeus hadn’t told them the second part. He hadn’t told them he’d given me an out. Well, he’d given me an out if you wanna call a full-blown curse an out. The allfather told me I had to find the escaped Evils and put them back in the jug. Until I caught ‘em all, I was doomed to, as Samuel Jackson once said, walk the Earth like Caine in Kung Fu. The baddies weren’t aware of that clause in the contract and none of them liked it when I stuffed them back into the crock.

  Now, for all intents and purposes, I was inside the crock with them and they’d begun to suss out it was me.

  Even with all that going on, I heard a sucking sound over the murmurings of my fellow inmates. The sucking sound made by the pithos. Despite the oxygen shortage, I tried to home in on the noise. Because of the wriggling mass on top of me, I couldn’t figure out the exact orientation of the jug. As best I could, I ran my right hand up the contours of the container. Finally, I felt the neck followed by the lip around the opening.

  The opening had slammed into the ampleness of my right titty and fastened itself there, forming a seal.

  Because of course it had.

  I pulled my right hand back down, so I gripped the fat end of the pithos. I did the best I could but, because of the weight on top of me, I couldn’t turn the jug—and my left arm was pinned underneath me, so it wasn’t much help.

  As I laid there, wondering how I was going to get the pithos away from me (and where I was going to get my next hit of oxygen), a voice broke through the din. It was the voice of a leader, urging the others to silence and attention. “Wait! Wait! Quiet! Do you smell that?” it said. I recognized the voice. It was Pestilence. He always did have a surprising gift for organization.

  “What’re you doing?” Hope said to me. “Do something.”

  “I’m... trying. I can’t move my arm and the pithos is suckered to my boob.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I know, right?”

  Meanwhile, the natives were growing more restless. “It’s Pandora. I’d know that rutty whore anywhere!” It was Famine. He always did have a gift for character assassination.

  I felt a rustling in the pile. Someone near the top was working his way to the bottom. “I’ve got dibs,” it said. It was the minotaur. Believe it or not, I didn’t get him into the pithos until 1978. He was a relatively new inmate to be so gung-ho. His passage from on high caused a lot of grumbling and groaning. It also caused a split down the middle in the pile. As the minotaur burrowed, other Evils fell inward on top of him. That didn’t stop his progress. It also didn’t help me get closer to pulling the jug off my jug.

  “Can you roll over one hundred and eighty degrees and then seal yourself on top again?” I said to Hope. My voice was faint. I really was close to passing out.

  “And not spill out most of the Evils in the process? I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, sure, but I’ll be dead soon which doesn’t do either of us any good.”

  Hope seemed to be thinking for a moment. “Alright. Hold on. Let me see if I can...” Then she rocked from side to side with her bottom still stuck to the top of Vasquez Rocks. The motion threw the Evils off-balance and led to a lot of surprised exclamations. Finally, the personification of hope did the one-eighty roll I asked for.

  Here’s what she got right: She managed to completely upend everything inside of her and seal herself at her top (which used to be her bottom). She did this—seemingly—without losing anything inside of her. Here’s the part that wasn’t an unqualified success: She lost her balance and rolled off the peak of the stone formation. One thing I should point out: The inside of the “Hope Ball” was not rigid. Rather than being like the interior of a hollow metal sphere, it was more like the inside of a hollow latex sphere. She stayed a ball all the way down, but those of us on the inside felt every outcropping and protrusion on the way down. You’ve never encountered a more unhappy group of Evils in your life.

  W
hich is saying something since they weren’t exactly glass-is-half-full people to begin with.

  I alternated being on top and being on the bottom as we rolled. I had neither the presence of mind nor the proper orientation to pull the pithos off of me or take a deep breath. It was like the most unpleasant theme park ride of all time. I would say, “Well, fortunately it was over quick”, but I can’t say that. While it was happening, it felt like a fucking eternity. And it wasn’t like we reached the bottom and stopped. Our momentum carried us about halfway across the scrubby terrain between the Rocks and the ranger’s station—and we only stopped because we ran into something. I think it was a little hill. It probably wasn’t a tour group since the site was empty. Anyway, we had that going for us.

  When the ride was over, I found myself plastered to one of the walls, a press of smoky bodies against me. That couldn’t last since we were on the inside of a sphere. As I started to slide back down again, I took a big drag of sweet, sweet air and I yanked the pithos away from my titty.

  What followed was a very gratifying riot.

  It turns out, the pithos could suck in more than one Evil at a time—or at least this one could. Maybe Zeus had worked in some upgrades to model two-point-oh. As I descended, screaming, angry spirits flew toward the mouth of my jug. I recognized some of them as they got sucked in. Fear, Covetousness, Sloth, Envy, Pedophilia, Schadenfreude, Murder, Gaslighting, False Witness, the minotaur, Scylla and Charybdis, Self-Pity, Lechery, Necrophilia, Wantonness, Usury, Mormonism, Gluttony, Pride, and Making Money Off the Mentally Ill all shot in a steady stream back where they belonged. It was like a reverse firehose. After a moment, I gave in to the sheer awesomeness of it. As I moved the pithos around to suck up every unwilling Evil, I laughed like a madwoman, drunk on my own power. Grabbing all nine thousand-plus of the mean little buggers took less than a minute. After they were in, I put the stopper back on and it made the most satisfying pop I’d ever heard.

  Then I collapsed.

  Hope stopped being a sphere. She became a little point of light floating a foot or so above my eyes. “Dora! Dora! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so. My lungs hurt. And my titty. Plus, I feel like a thousand fat guys took a nap on me. Other than that...”

  “Do you need a minute?”

  “Yeah. Just a minute. Lemme just... Lemme just catch my breath. And rub my boob.”

  “You want me to rub your boob?”

  “No. That’d be weird,” I replied.

  “Oh, I know. I was confused. Say, Dora?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for coming after me.”

  I nodded to her. “It was never even a question,” I said.

  When I was able to stand, Hope and I went back to the Firebird. I'd parked it in front of the deserted ranger station. I put the pithos in the backseat and sat down in the front. For a while, I rested my head against the steering wheel.

  “Are you okay?” Hope said from the passenger side.

  “It’s been a rough week,” I conceded. “Pan fucked off, I made a new friend, my new friend became queen of the Underworld, I had to talk to Medusa, Medea poisoned me, I had a gas bomb planted in my body, I got shot in the shoulder, my trailer burned down (but then it didn’t), I died (but then I didn’t), I watched Medea get straight-up murdered by her own kids, then I came here and almost got suffocated inside a giant hamster ball.”

  “You need a vacation.”

  I looked up and expected to see a point of light floating over the passenger seat. What I saw instead floored me. It was a little girl wearing a toga, a garland of flowers in her hair. It was the most beautiful little girl I’d ever seen. She smiled. I started to speak but stopped. I started again but couldn’t find the words.

  “Relax,” the little girl said. “It’s me.”

  “Is this... what you look like when you’re not stuck in a jug?”

  Hope shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it is.”

  “Huh,” I said, still trying to take her in. She had a faint luminousness, little blonde curls, and enormous blue eyes. “If there was a picture of you outside of every K-mart portrait studio in America, they would never stop selling out of the deluxe package.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she replied.

  “It means you’re every ad man’s dream. You could sell Barbies. You could sell Campbell’s Soup. You could sell ice to Eskimos.”

  “You’re babbling.”

  “Maybe. What I’m trying to say is you’re the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen.” Seeing her (as opposed to just hearing her, as I’d done for thousands of years) washed away a lot of the hostility I’d felt toward her. I’d always thought of her as a pest, but it was hard to hold onto that after seeing her in her native form.

  “I appreciate the compliment,” she said. “But I need you to do me a favor...”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to put me back in the pithos.”

  “What? Why? Why would you wanna go back to that dusty old place?”

  “I’m scared. And I’m uncomfortable,” Hope said. “The pithos is my home. It’s what I’m used to.”

  I don’t know why considering my own recent bout of reclusiveness, but that struck me as an unsatisfactory answer. “Hmmm. Maybe you oughta stretch outta your comfort zone.”

  “I like my comfort zone where it is,” the little girl replied. “Besides... What if you decide to go after one of the remaining Evils? How’re you gonna do that with a moppet in tow? It works much better if you’re point and I’m intel.”

  I laughed. “‘Point’? ‘Intel’? You really took a shine to those Bourne movies, didn’t you?”

  Hope threw up her arms and launched into a fangirl rant. “I’m sorry! It’s just so fascinating to me! With the Treadstone, and the Blackbriar, and the ‘Is he Jason Bourne or is he David Webb?’ It’s soooo good!”

  I couldn’t help grinning. But I also reached into the backseat and grabbed the jug. “Here’s my input and you can ignore it or not. It’s your life. I just spent more than ten years in a jug of my own. That stupid trailer. Now that I’m out, I’m exhausted, and I’m scared, but I feel like I made the right decision. So... I’ll ask you again: You’re sure about this?”

  Hope nodded.

  I sat the pithos in my lap and started to pull off the stopper. “You’re sure you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure I’m sure.”

  I put my hand on the lid.

  “Wait!”

  I stopped.

  Hope held out her little fist and we bumped in the air. We smiled at one another.

  Then I pulled off the lid and sucked my friend back into the pithos.

  After she was in, her voice came out again as it always had. “In our better moments,” she said. “I think of us as sisters.”

  I put the car in gear and backed out. “That’s ‘cause we’re sisters,” I replied.

  After I got on the Southbound 405, I turned on the radio and raised the volume. Hope understood that as a signal I had some thinking to do. As I did my best to stay awake, I mulled over the last couple of days. A lot had happened, and I was pretty sure I was a different person than I’d been when I started. When I started, I was a shut-in who didn’t care about much of anything except watching TV, clubbing the clam, and getting blasted. After spending time with Amanda Venables and Constantine Constantinides, and after narrowly averting an invasion of the old gods, I was starting to feel like the old me. The old me from before my decade-long lost weekend at the beach. I hadn’t always been a surly loner, and a little tickle in the back of my brain told me I didn’t have to backslide. I wanted engagement. I wanted interaction. I wanted the satisfaction of jobs well-done.

  Or at least I thought I did. My noggin was so clouded with exhaustion, I wasn’t sure if it was the old me peeking out, or if it was a fever dream fueled by sleep deprivation.

  Only after I enjoyed a mini-coma would I know for sure.

  2
>
  Meet the Wieners

  When we got back to Malibu, I slammed my car door and went around to the passenger side. I undid the seatbelt from around the pithos, picked it up and walked toward our aluminum homestead. “It’s weird,” Hope said from inside the crock. “It’s almost like we never left.”

  “Except that I feel like a piece of ABC gum.”

  “‘ABC’?”

  “‘Already been chewed’. Speaking of... If we had anything to eat in the house, I’d eat it, and then I’d pass out.”

  “What about Uber Eats?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s where you message Uber and tell them what you want, and they bring it to your house.”

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “From TV.”

  I scratched my nose. “Don’t you need a cellphone to make it work?” I didn’t have a cellphone. Couldn’t afford it.

  “Oh, I dunno. Maybe.”

  “Well, I’m not gonna worry about it right now. Maybe if—”

  But then a voice to my right scared the shit out of me. “Are you Pandora? Pandora Weir?”

  I threw back my head and took a deep breath. “Don’t do that to people!” I said. “I almost threw my jug at you.” Then I looked over and saw a teenaged girl. She was especially curvy for a teenaged girl, but I could tell she was no more than fifteen. She had brown hair in a ponytail and she wore a “Grand Funk Railroad” t-shirt (which was weird since I don’t think anyone had worn a “Grand Fuck Railroad” t-shirt in thirty-five years).