This is a story about the sometimes hidden truth inside idioms.  Those innocuous phrases we find ourselves uttering every day as a way to handwave details through metaphors and simile.  This is story about a girl learning the truth embedded in one saying she’s heard hundreds of time before in a past life.

This is a story about Sunset Shimmer, set in...the Twilight Zone.

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Sunset dropped her backpack into the empty rear-most seat on the school bus and took her spot next to it.  In front of her, the next three rows were filled with her friends and their own packs.  Sunset pushed her bag against the bus wall, under the window, and leaned on it to get comfortable.  Puddles splashed up onto the curb as the bus gained speed and merged with the city’s evening traffic.

Sunset found her eyes drifting up toward the sky and the grey clouds that still hung wet and heavy overhead.  Memories of pegasus weather ponies pushing and sculpting storm clouds in Equestria filled her mind as her math homework took a backseat in her brain.  The moisture in the air was a visible haze, and when the bus turned, the sunlight caught there and split into its component colors.

She blinked sleepily at the rainbow, her thoughts turning to Princess Celestia, the motherly titan of ponydom.  Long before their falling out, Sunset would hang on her every utterance.  Partly out of respect, but partly to tease out every meaning.  To find the hidden hints that would guide her to power and ever greater skill.

Not every phrase held meaning beyond the obvious.  One in particular had always struck her as peculiar though.

“My little pony.”

Sunset yawned, turning the phrase over behind her lowering eyelids.  It was a simple phrase that spoke of both Celestia’s large physical stature and her position as a mother figure to all Equestria.  Still Sunset felt there was some greater truth she’d never been able to tease out of it.  Something primal.

The bus hit a pothole, sending Sunset off the end of her seat.  She blinked rapidly to clear her vision, catching the last flash of colorful hair as her friends got off the bus.

“Must have fallen asleep for a bit.”  Sunset pulled herself up groggily, wobbling down the aisle after the girls.  The bus was quiet now, the students gone, seats passing by at eye level before reaching the cliff-like steps.  The white lined edge loomed a mile-wide, the floor dropping out of Sunset’s sight.  

She craned her neck out over the edge.  “Why are these steps so high?”

“That’s for you to find out.  This is your stop, Miss Shimmer.”

“What?”  Sunset looked back and up into the mists at the bus driver.  Wavy rainbow hair poured from under a slightly off-white cap.  Bus Driver Celestia smiled that soft smile of hers and leaned down from her high seat.  Up close, her face filled Sunset’s view. 

“This is your stop.  Go be with your friends.  You don’t have to hang on to me any longer, my little pony.”

Sunset knit her brows and looked down at herself.  At her tan coat.  At her hooves.  They were barely big enough to keep her from falling into the ruts in the formed rubber floor mats of the bus aisle.

“This is truth, Miss Shimmer.”

“That I’m a pony the size of a house cat?”  Sunset fell back on her dock, and looked back out after her titanic friends as they thundered into the house one after the other.  “Are we really [i]this[/i] small?  I thought...that maybe it was a more one to one scale?”

“You are only as little as you let yourself be.”  Bus Driver Celestia nodded after the other girls.  “You have never been one to let that hold you back.  I like that about you.  So stop holding yourself back and go be with them.”

The bus shook violently, hitting a pothole.  Sunset reached out and grabbed the back of the seat in front of her for purchase.  They came to a stop a moment later and her friends started grabbing their bags.  Sunset blinked a few times, gripped her own backpack and followed the rest of them to the front of the bus.  The stairs were a lot shorter now.

She turned and gave the bus driver a smile and got a tip of the cap and a flash of rainbow colored hair in return.