.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Sure, he was a freak, but I had dealt with my fair share of those. I'd given birth to one so deformed he'd been killed by his own body, so a horse decorated in candy wasn't going to set off my footing. And he was young, too.
But that wasn't really what I was giving this stranger the benefit of the doubt about. It was that he had called me darling. Perhaps it was my age but I was beginning to feel like wandering might not be best for me, that perhaps I wanted to stay here. But I wasn't going to stay here if I was going to deal with more of the same, going to be called darling. And that left me with two choices:
1. Leave, for surely this land was inhabited with whorish men.
2. Make sure they all knew my name, for once, and could call me by nothing else.
It was a resignation but it was one I would make if it would spare me the obnoxious pain of constant objectification. "It is Ahvelyn," I snarled back with a sharp turn of my head and a clear expression of do not fuck with me, boy.
"Call me by my name," I added harshly, letting my ears snap back against my skull, "or I will call you pussyfoot for the rest of your life. And I will tell everyone I meet that one night I came across a young stallion named pussyfoot, and that he looked absurd and deserved no other name. I will spread that falsehood until across all of this god-warring land you are known as pussyfoot."
My eyes became cold stones and my heart beat with surprising excitement. Perhaps I should stop searching for a role, perhaps I had found one in this herd. I could be the curmudgeon of the Aurora Basin for the rest of my life.
"Do you understand me, pussyfoot?"
Softly, in my cold heart, I smiled.
--
""
Those Days Are Gone
image credits@Johnny
