Inktober #17: Ornament
This ficlet is based on "April's Dream House", an idea of mine that was originally envisioned as a foul-mouthed adult animated comedy that is kind of like a cross between Robot Chicken, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Tuca and Bertie. The premise is that a bunch of little girls’ toys are living together in a name-changed-for-copyright-reasons Barbie Dream Mansion because the Barbie character can’t pay her mortgage anymore, due to being such a mega-bitch that she’s been fired from over 100 different jobs in wildly disparate professions like medicine, rocket science, and cake decorating. So she is renting out rooms to other toys. Behind the scenes there may be some little girls who are much more profane and aware of sex as a concept than we are comfortable imagining our little girls to be (although those of us who were little girls, or have raised them, or both, may know otherwise), playing out these stories (which is why you can have stuff like Doktor Zapp having lost his previous laboratory to a giant dog.) The detailed character bible is at https://alarawriting.tumblr.com/post/174289659708/aprils-dream-house.
Franchises parodied include Bratz, Monster High, Hello Kitty, My Little Pony, Playmobil, and how weird it is to have your plushies and baby dolls interact with fashion dolls when the scales don’t match, so you get a baby doll the size of the fashion doll. (I think I got that idea from Toy Story 3, which idiotically claimed that Big Baby was male despite the fact that baby dolls are almost always marketed as female and that the child who’d owned Big Baby was a girl and girls generally cast their gender-neutral toys as female.)
“Where is my fucking box of Christmas ornaments?”
April was busily tossing everything Catrina owned down the stairs from the attic garret where she lived. “April! What the fuck! That’s my stuff!” Catrina yelled.
“Yeah, your stuff that you couldn’t bother to keep neatly like I told you to, and this is seriously a health code hazard,” April said. “But more importantly, you’re living in the room I put my Christmas ornaments in, last January, and I need to find them.”
“You keep tossing my stuff around like that and I’ll kill you, mraow!”
“It’s my house, bitch, and you don’t pay anywhere near a fair rate for the rent.” April moved on to the back of the attic, where no one lived. “Ugh, this place is a nightmare.”
Catrina came up into the attic. “Well, whose fault is that, meow? All that’s your mess.”
Behind her, Kelly stuck her oversized head up. “I think Marie Kondo needs to come to this house,” she said. “April-san, I can’t imagine that any of that stuff back there sparks joy.”
“Hey! What are you doing in my room? Sssss!” Catrina postured at Kerry Kitty with her claws out. “No other cats allowed, this is my territory!”
“Oh, then you don’t want me to bring up the things April dropped,” Kelly said. “Okay.” Her large paws opened and dropped the pile of clothing she’d been carrying.
“Wait, no!”
“Oh, so you do want me to help you bring up the clothes,” Kerry said. “Please make up your mind.”
“AHA!” April brandished the box of ornaments. “Found you, you little motherfuckers!”
“April-san, your language. Emily might hear you!”
“Emily is probably eating the Christmas tree,” April shot back. “Make way, coming through, lady with large box here!”
Kelly jumped off the attic stairs with as much grace as a 5-foot tall bipedal cat with a giant head could achieve. Catrina dodged and rolled onto her own bed, or what was left of it after April had dragged it around looking for the ornament box. April, six foot two and model-slim with a frankly impossible body, toted the large box over to the attic stairs, balancing it on her shoulders, and then tossed it down, following that with a graceful jump to the floor herself. “Everybody gather round!” she shouted in her most saccharine voice. “It’s time for Christmas decorating!”
“Doctor Zapp isn’t here,” Lovey said in her sad, slow voice. “Don’t you think we should ask him to come upstairs?”
“Pfft, no. That nerd never wants to come upstairs. Besides, what do you care? He’s scared of dogs.”
“I’m not a big dog,” Lovey said, despite the fact that she was easily twice the size of anyone else in the house. “Anyway, he’s only scared of bad dogs. I’m a good dog.”
“Goo dug,” Emily Egg agreed, thick baby fingers twined in the puppy’s fur. “Wuvvy goo dug.”
“Yes, I’m sure you said something, but no one cares what,” April said. “Sheonte! Cherry! We’re doing Christmas decorations!”
“We don’t celebrate Christmas in Ponyland, and I really don’t appreciate you trying to push your human customs on me,” Cherry yelled back.
“Fuck, no, you’re a children’s cartoon. What do they do for your holiday specials? I know you’ve got something that looks just like Christmas. Get your horse’s ass out here so I don’t need to keep yelling.”
Sullenly Cherry Blossom plodded out of her room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“On Best Pony Friends. You’ve got to have some kind of Christmas-like holiday for the holiday specials.”
“We have the Festival of Friendship… I guess it’s kind of like Christmas. We give our friends gifts, and hang up ornaments, and make snowponies, and sing carols-”
“So what you’re saying is, it’s exactly like Christmas.”
“Minus the overcommercialization and people trampling each other to get the last copy of a cheap mass-manufactured toy, yeah, I guess.”
Kerry volunteered, “I used to be on the air right before Best Pony Friends. Their Christmas is very nice-looking.”
“It’s the Festival of Friendship! Not Christmas!”
“You just keep telling yourself that,” April said. “SHE-ON-TE! We are all waiting on you!”
“A Diva is never rushed,” Sheonte yelled from her bedroom. “Beauty and style like this takes effort.”
“Come on, bitch, they threw you out of the Divazz because you tried to kill Vivi and your ex.”
“They were fucking! In my bedroom! You’d have tried to kill them too.”
“I don’t think the language in this house is a very good example for Emily,” Lovey complained.
“I wouldn’t have tried to kill them too because that would never happen to me because Chad is a real gentleman who would never cheat on me,” April said.
“Yeah, too bad you such a ho you gotta cheat on him.” Sheonte finally made her appearance, strutting into the room like she owned it. Her Afro was lightly sprinkled with pale glitter on the edges to create an effect much like she’d just been walking in light snow, and she was dressed stylishly with 14-inch stiletto heels, a green velvet miniskirt, a white blouse that did not cover her multiply-pierced belly button, and a shimmering silver jacket. And many belts around her body that didn’t seem to actually do anything. And by “stylishly”, April meant “like a cheap whore.”
“Look, it’s not my fault that Chad is such a gentleman that he’s waiting until we get married. Saving yourself for marriage is a beautiful thing in a man, and I really appreciate his sacrifice! But I gotta get my pussy pounded by someone, and Mr. Vibrator can’t always do the job, you know?”
Lovey was covering Emily’s ears with her paws. “April! You can’t say things like that in front of Emily!”
“Oh, like she understands.” April walked up to Emily, smiling. The baby, who would be the same height as April if she could actually stand up, beamed up at her from her position on the floor. “Who’s such a stupid baby?” April said in the same cheerful tone that one would say “Who’s such a good dog?” to one’s good dog. “Yes, you are! You are a stupid little baby!” Emily laughed and clapped.
“Can we get this over with?” Catrina asked. “April fucked up my entire room and I’m gonna have to spend the rest of the day fixing it, mraow.”
“Yes, we can get it going now, since I’m here,” Sheonte said. “April, where are the ornaments?”
“Right here,” April said, and opened the box with a flourish…
…to an assortment of brightly colored bits of shattered glass.
“Oh, shit,” April said.
“I think maybe you should not have thrown them down the stairs,” Kelly said.
“Bitch, you tear my room apart for this?” Catrina snarled. “These weren’t shit to begin with, meow, and then you went and shattered them to pieces on top of that?”
“Yeah, these ornaments were shit before you broke them,” Sheonte said. “What’d you do, get a truckload of shiny glass balls at Target?”
Emily began to cry. “Owwmens!” she wailed, which probably meant “ornaments” but sounded entirely too much like “omens”.
“We knew how to do a Christmas with the Weargirls,” Catrina said. “We used to go over Batrice’s mansion and decorate with lights and a ton of different ornaments, meow. Gorgeous stuff.”
“Yeah, well, feel free to go live with Batrice. Door’s that way,” April said.
Catrina made a face. “They’re vampires. They don’t have any windows, sss.”
“This is very sad,” Lovey said, her permanent sad-hound-dog face emphasizing the sadness. “I’m very sad.”
“Owwmens!”
“AwOOOO!”
“Oh, for the love of Christ shut it, both of you. I know what to do.” April closed the box of ornaments. “To the Glitter Van! We’re gonna go to the Christmas store and buy ornaments!”
“Kissma tor?” Emily asked, cheering up right away.
“Oh! I love Christmas store! Let me get Christmas kimono on before we go!” Kerry said, and ran off before April could stop her.
“I’m not dressed for going out,” Catrina complained. “I need to try to find something I can wear, meow, since you trashed my room!”
“Yeah, this is not a Christmas store look,” Sheonte said. “I’m gonna change into something better for going out.”
“This is California, it’s not like it’s cold,” April said.
“I didn’t say better clothes for cold weather, I said better clothes for going out. This shit’s okay for just hanging with you bitches, but if I’m gonna get Seen, I need to look my best.” She strutted back to her room.
“I don’t wear clothes,” Cherry Blossom said.
“Yeah, good for you.”
“But your mane looks like a stinking pile of dog doo. You need to go get brushed and get dressed yourself before you go out looking like that.”
“I didn’t ask your opinion, you nag.”
“That is a misogynist and ageist slur among my people and I’m going to post about your insensitivity on social media if you don’t apologize right now.”
“Apologize to this,” April said, giving Cherry the middle finger.
She sat down on her couch, defeated, as Cherry trotted away. “This is totally fucked up.”
“Don’t worry,” Lovey said, snuggling against April, trying to cheer her up by being a dog. “I’m sure you’ll be able to fix everything as soon as everyone gets ready and we can go to the ornament store.”
Lovey had been in this house long enough to know that “everyone gets ready” could take upward of 3 hours, and besides, April didn’t like dogs. She pushed Lovey away. “Easy for you to say.”
The door to the basement opened, and Doctor Zapp, dressed in his characteristic lab coat, goggles, and green shirt that he apparently never took off, stuck his tiny head out. “What’d I miss?”