This is the fleshed-out version of "Horsefeathers", a bare-bones story I posted sometime last year. You don't need to read the original first. Well, enjoy!
Grace flicked the switch, but was distressed at its brokenness. Nothing was working tonight. Even words in her psychology textbook swirled like cake batter before her eyes. Resolving to take a long, hot, herbal bath as soon as possible, she turned to the boy lounging on her couch. She couldn’t remember when he arrived, but he had been here a long time.
"Wanna see something cool?" Roscoe asked.
"Define 'cool'," Grace said, her right eyebrow snapping up like a knife blade.
She regretted asking.
In a daze, she watched Roscoe’s skin turn charcoal gray, then deepest jet. It bristled into a rippling coat and flowed into a brushy tail. Muscles expanded; ligaments braided together; rivers of veins popped. Grace noted with considerable alarm that his hands were now crunchy black rocks, flocked with feathery fur.
The horse stepped off the screaming couch. Twin wings unfolded from its flanks, rankling the crystal chandelier and fluttering Grace’s math homework.
"Holy cow!" Grace shrieked, jumping back.
"Holy horse, actually," Roscoe said, disturbingly human again.
He shrugged and gave a characteristic flip of his bangs, which tonight were dyed deep blue.
Grace remembered to breathe before she went into cardiac arrest and racked up a juicy medical bill. Surely she was hallucinating. And yet…nothing had ever been as real as that night-black, winged pony in her living room.
She found it hard to close her mouth. "H-how did you do that?"
"I can do half-and-half too," Roscoe said.
Grace's blue eyes grew huge as her boyfriend's wings shot like weeds from his shoulder blades. The feathers were sloppy and bent, growing all over the place, but glossier than glass.
Roscoe flipped his bangs. "Intimidating, aren't I?"
"Happy Halloween?" Grace asked weakly.
He shook his head. "I'm the real deal, baby."
The blood rushed out of Grace’s face, leaving her pale as a photographic negative. First she was freezing; then her blood flowed like molten ruby. No, no, no! She frantically touched her head as if searching for a malignant brain tumor. What else could explain this?
Then again, Roscoe had never been normal. No musicians were ever normal. In the past, Grace had sat outside the bathroom door for forty-five minutes, waiting for Roscoe to finish writing a song. “All epiphanies take place in the shower,” was his stubborn philosophy.
What about this? Perhaps there was something weird in the shower water—a chemical, a bacterium—that transformed innocent boys into monstrous horses. Grace moaned.
Roscoe—human except for the wings—moved towards her. Like always, he was so gentle, so concerned about her slightest discomfort. But he wasn’t Roscoe anymore. Grace opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. She looked around for something to give him a concussion with, but the nearest thing was an embroidered pillow.
Annoyance surfaced like an old boot bobbing to the water’s surface. They had been together for less than a year, and Grace was already bored out of her skull. They had met on the subway; she liked him because he had a guitar, and he liked her because—heck, she didn’t know. Because she was compliant and smelled like strawberries?
Grace recalled the long hours of nothing they had spent together. Tossing gooey tennis balls for Roscoe’s dachshund, watching American Idol, drinking lemon lime soda. Mostly they just sat. There was nothing to say.
“I don’t need to talk,” Roscoe had said. “My guitar talks for me.”
But Grace was tempted to murder his guitar. He loved it more than her—of that she was convinced. The way he stroked the fret board and fondled the tuners…it drove her mad. Once he went so far as to kiss the strings.
Another obsession was his bangs. Every month he stewed his forelock a different color of the chemical rainbow—hot pink, electric lime, royal purple. Some day Grace would hack his precious bangs off while he slept.
“Gracie, it’s okay,” he said now. “It’s just a horse. You like horses, right?”
Sure she did, but that was beside the point. The point was that she had a brain tumor that was probably sprouting hairs and teeth and growing all over her poor cerebellum. She needed to be hospitalized before it went too far, before she had to spend the rest of her life as responsive as a stick of celery.
She was relieved when the world started to fade—finally this weirdness could end. Before she blacked out, she saw Roscoe’s indigo bangs shining faintly.
When she came to, she was lying face-up in the pasture, so still that a small green lizard had settled between her breasts.
She leaped to her feet and was rewarded with a major head rush.
"Ugh," she moaned.
A soft whicker reached her ears.
She turned to see Roscoe, her black pony, trot towards her. Sunlight baked the grass and bees hummed like golden musical notes through the air. "Hey, boy," she said. "I just had the weirdest dream."
She fell into his stony chest, twining her fingers in his mane. He smelled so warm and sweet—alfalfa and molasses. His hurricane breath tousled her hair.
“I like you better as a horse,” Grace murmured.
None of it had been real. She was Grace the horse girl, Grace who could spend her life in the saddle. Grace who was so shy she couldn’t look in the mirror; who was afraid of wolves and sock monkeys; who liked her S’mores with pink marshmallows. She was just herself—just Grace—and she had never had a boyfriend.
Her heart thumped painfully against her ribs. Dumb dreams…was there no escape? It just didn’t make sense; her waking life was a dull monotony of mucking stalls and plowing through homework, so why was her dreaming life a nova burst of REM? She dreaded sleep more than anything. When her itching eyes couldn’t stay open for another minute, she was finally forced to fall into that secret world. Burning towers, glowering clocks, cackling rabbits, endless oceans. Severe landscapes, dangerous strangers, darkness, pain, and music.
Only Roscoe kept her going.
Roscoe, Roscoe, Roscoe. He was the joy of her life! While grooming his coat into liquid ebony, Grace put on rock c.d.s. Not because she liked them, but because he did. The stocky pony went into head-banging, hoof-tapping mode at the first scorching notes of a guitar. “He was Jerry Garcia in a past life,” Grace’s dad always said.
“I think I need therapy,” Grace said to Roscoe. “Only psychopaths have such demented dreams. Why can’t I dream about good things? Like sheep?”
Grace pulled away to look in Roscoe’s eyes. That was the great thing about him; you could stare at him and he wouldn’t skitter away. A chill danced down Grace’s spine as she gazed into his serene face. Roscoe's eyes twinkled.
Then, he flipped his bangs.
) is that the beginning went a little too fast for me. I couldn't really get what was going on in the first paragraph. Other than that, it was awesome!