OOM: These paper wings will carry me
It's mid-morning in Milliways, and Kate is sitting on a post out back on an eastern stretch of fence line, eating a peach. A few of the horses roam the paddocks, nibbling at tufts of grass, flicking their tails at flies gathering around their quarters; some start after each other, and run. Beaut's grazing a few feet to her right, occasionally grunting about this and that. Or maybe she's just checking to make sure Kate's still there.
The month of July came and went and Kate weathered it, like a dingy that floats on through a storm. Pieces of the hull have gone missing. The paint is chipped and peeling. The proud block letters that spell her name are now ever so obscured, faded, and worn. Somehow, and seemingly despite her best efforts, she didn't capsize; and now she's just drifting, hoping to run aground on some solid shore.
She bites into the peach, allowing the juices to run down her chin and into her collar. Rivulets of sticky, golden sap find dried riverbeds of sweat and dirt, cutting out fords on her skin as they all run together toward the basin below her throat.
Beaut's ears twitch. She nickers softly, taking a half-step closer, hooves pawing at the ground. Kate watches her for a time, cataloging the patterns in her coat left by sweat marks and dried mud. Her back twitches and she shakes her mane out over her withers, flicks her tail against her shiny, brass croup. Kate digs meat away from the peach pit and holds it out for the horse, who immediately stretches her neck to lip it up.
"Restless?"
She strokes her muzzle with her thumb, and turns her attention out to the sprawling grass fields. It's humid and clear today, and there's not a single thing left to be done that she hasn't done twice already.
"Me, too."
Beaut holds her head up and stares at her with bottomless brown eyes, as if Kate owes her something. It's been weeks since the last time she took her out for a proper run, and in these conditions the mare has grown bored. Her great sides heave with a sigh impressive enough to move Kate's hair.
Her lips twitch.
"C'mon, then."
She hates the sound of hardwood under hoof; it makes such an almighty racket when she sets off at a gallop. But she's a good horse, and she doesn't rear or buck even once, all the way from table to terra. Not even when a waitrat, bedraggled with spilled beer and water, raises a high-pitched fuss at their exit.
Beaut's hooves hit cracked earth, a plume of dust and soil swelling up around her hocks, and the door winks shut behind them.
Kate laughs, as she always does, Beaut's mane tickling her chin and a wide, wide open expanse of sky, bluer than blue, draped overhead. It's immediately a few dozen degrees warmer than it was back in the bar, despite being roughly the same time of day, and the heat hits her in the face in great, salty gusts of fresh air.
And just like that, she's free.
.