I studied the pony as I peeled the foil from another chocolate. Her silky mane draped over one eye. Between the chubby cheeks on her oversized head, a slight smile curled like an apology. Or intuition.
After last week’s magic, let’s keep the pony love going with our second My Little Pony Contest winner: “My Little Pony’s Easter Message” by Debbra Palmer.
My Little Pony’s Easter Message
For years on Easter morning our friends who also didn’t have children left an Easter basket at our doorstep without waking us. We always knew it was them, and they knew we knew. But afterward we’d text them. “Can u believe it? Easter bunz has struck again!”
We’d gorge on peanut butter eggs, chocolate bunnies, marshmallow peeps and jellybeans. But our favorite were the toys: Slinkys, troll dolls, Etch-a-Sketch key rings, wax lips and a mini Gumby.
After three years of this we decided to be Easter Bunny too, and snuck a ridiculously over-filled basket onto their porch before sunrise.
“Is this sad?” I asked my husband on the drive home.
“No, I like candy,” he said as the sky broke open in pink clouds.
Returning home, we found a basket at our door. We must have passed our friends on the highway, or maybe they’d taken a different route. It hadn’t occurred to me this would happen. I’d imagined them waking up and finding their basket like we always had. I silently berated myself for not thinking of this simple logistic.
This year, our basket was topped with a retro My Little Pony our friends had defaced in ink with the words “He is Risen!” I recognized the My Little Pony from childhood, though my mother never let us have them. She thought they were like Barbies, sexualized, shapely plastic figures with eye makeup and dyed hair that little girls swooned over. I explained this to my husband.
“She is kind of hot,” he said rubbing the pony’s blue speckled behind. He whispered into her ear. “Hey little filly, you are so fine! How ‘bout a ride, pony? Ooooh, I might be in looooove.”
“Stop it,” I said trading him a mini Krackel for the pony. I showed him how to stroke her purple hair.
“It’s mane, not hair,” said my husband digging for jellybeans. I studied the pony as I peeled the foil from another chocolate. Her silky mane draped over one eye. Between the chubby cheeks on her oversized head, a slight smile curled like an apology. Or intuition.
At this moment, I saw My Little Pony for who she really was—a girl so pretty she broke everyone’s heart. She didn’t know how, or why, it just always happened, and she couldn’t help it, so all she could do was apologize. And when that didn’t work, she tried apologizing in ways that made her hate herself. And when people talked, they always said she deserved it. My Little Pony’s atonement? Denied.
Later that Easter day, our friends called to say the Easter Bunny had come to their house, too. We all pretended to be surprised and inventoried the contents of our baskets like children. But it was the last year the Easter Bunny walked among us, the year we passed each other in the predawn. We made no apologies or revelations. It just seemed best to wait for him to come again.
An Idaho-born Oregonian, Debbra Palmer studied writing at Portland
State University. Her poems have appeared in Calyx Journal, BLOOM,
Pectriloquy (CHEST Journal for the American College of Chest Physicians)
and The Portland Review. She is the writer and director of the feature
documentary Sky Settles Everything profiling an old-time cattle rancher
and his poet cousin, Verlena Orr. Currently, she is exploring the southwest
and working on a collection of poems inspired by the military alphabet.
We are in the process of posting all four My Little Pony Contest winners on this blog. To read another winner’s prize-pony work, see “Friendship is Magic” by Marci Rae Johnson.
Pony Photo: Hina Ichigo