I smile as I catch the coin out of the air. The familiar uneven weight on my hoof, the metallic smell that lingers in the air, the sheen of the metal. I have the best job in the world.

“Heads! Ooh, how unfortunate. You know what that means, mares and gentlecolts!” I turn to my assistant, who is tied with hemp rope to an old oak plank taller than he is long. A tattered off-white blindfold covers his eyes, and he holds a bright red apple in his teeth. I throw my coin into the air again, though not to flip it this time. Instead, while it’s in the air, I sweep up the extremely heavy-looking axe on the floor of the stage—it actually weighs only a bit more than the coin does, though with that coin I’m not sure in the moment if that’s because the coin is heavy or the axe light—and brandish it above myself for all to see.

“Off with his head!” I cry, doing my best to add a warble to my voice. As my mouth forms the word “head,” my teeth close around my coin, fallen back to earth. As a result, the word “head” comes out more than a little garbled, but I think my audience gets the picture. I grin around the coin and swing the axe at my assistant’s neck, putting as much of my weight into the blow as I possibly can without overbalancing and throwing myself off the stage.

That’s happened a couple times.

The crowd, as all of this has been going on, has been collectively leaning in to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised to see ponies falling forward out of their seats. I’ve also had that happen a couple times. One time a pony lost her balance and fell so hard that she sprained her jaw. The forms from that show were terrible. Her lawyers tried to corner me, claiming that if my show was less suspenseful their client wouldn’t have had cause to injure herself. What a load of poppycock that was.

As annoying as lawyers can be, though, mine has certainly gotten me out of more than a few messy situations. There’s the stupid stuff, like that pony I just told you about, but my shows can be pretty dangerous, and sometimes ponies do get more seriously hurt. Not that it’s ever my fault per se; ponies just seem to have a lot of accidents when they’re in my audience. I do wonder sometimes, though.

There’s been many a time that, after I’ve hung up my special direct-to-emergency-line telephone, I’ve sat on the floor of my trailer and gone back to a story my sister told me once. Now, you have to understand, my sister is far, far older than I am. My parents had her before they were married, and they had me just a couple years before they died. Sometimes I ask how my mother could’ve possibly given birth to me when she was eighty-three, but sister somehow always changes the topic.

The story, though, goes like this: once, a pony had a mug half-full of ale. Wait, what’s ale, I asked my sister the first time she told me this story. She said it was an adult thing and I’d find out when I was older. I did. The pony was at the bar with a friend (what’s a bar, I had asked my sister. She just looked at me until I lost the staring contest, and then kept telling the story), and the friend also had a mug half-full of ale. So, the pony took the friend’s mug half-full of ale and poured it all into their own mug, then put their friend’s mug back. So the pony had a mug all the way full of ale, and the friend had nothing.

It was never a very interesting story, and I was always asking for better ones, but my sister really liked telling that story for some reason. I heard it every night when she put me to bed, every morning when I woke up, and sometimes in between in the middle of the night my sister would sneak into my room and whisper it into my ear, which I know because I woke up once or twice while she was doing it.

The funniest thing about the situation, though, was that the day I got my Cutie Mark was the last day I heard my sister tell that story. Or, well, not tell it so much as hand it to me on a metal plaque with the words engraved on it. But she never so much as mentioned ale or bars to me again after that day.

I had been out playing with my imaginary friends—we lived half a day’s trot from the nearest village, so I didn’t have any actual friends—when I put my hoof into a snake hole in the ground I hadn’t seen. I had been running pretty fast during our game of tag, so I twisted my shoulder—my front left shoulder, I recall—really good. As it happened, I couldn’t really walk. And, given that my friends were all imaginary, they weren’t of any help to me. To make matters worse, I startled the snakes living in the snake hole with my inexcusable intrusion into their home. A snake poked its head out of the hole, scanning the surrounding area—bog, bog, bog, and more bog, except for the cute delicious pony that couldn’t run because of a twisted shoulder. At least, I assume that’s what it was thinking, because it slithered over to me and started trying to fit my entire bottom right leg into its mouth at once. Given that the snake was shorter than my tail and thinner than a rib-bone, it didn’t have much success. Nonetheless, I was terrified. In my precious youthful ignorance, I assumed that no matter the size of the snake in question, a snake with the necessary gumption could devour any creature or piece of a creature it wanted to.

Caught in the throes of this sudden terror, I reacted with the one thing that was beaten into my brain above all else: ale. Well, not the ale, but rather the taking from another for yourself. What I mean is that I accidentally tore the snake in half. Being covered in blood and snake pieces really didn’t help me at all, seeing as I more or less went from being in very little danger while suffering from a substantial degree of terror to being in no danger at all while suffering from near-complete terror.

I fled towards home. Through some good luck, I avoided stumbling into another hole, or indeed any obstacles at all, and I chose the correct direction to sprint blindly in. And it wasn’t until I reached the front doorstep that I remembered I had hurt my shoulder—which did still hurt a really incredible amount, compounded by the distance I had just run. I pounded on the door with my good hoof, crying for my sister to come out and help me. What larger problem exactly I wanted help with I wasn’t sure, I just wanted to stop being covered in blood.

In any case, my sister calmed me down and cleaned me up, and when she drew her washcloth across my flank, what else did she find but a mug (some might say a tankard) of ale, half full. She walked out of the house then, with me still half-covered in crusting snake blood, and came back close to midnight with the metal plaque with her story engraved on it. I had gotten ready for bed by then, and I was just waiting for sister to tuck me in and say my goodnight story. Instead, she just dropped the plaque on my chest and walked out of my room. I never learned how she got to town and back so fast.

I left our little house in the bog a few months later. One day it occurred to me that despite having a mug of ale on my flank, I had never tasted nor even seen the beverage. This realization was the first of several that led me on that fateful day to packing a rucksack and throwing it over my shoulder, giving my sister a goodbye hug, and walking out the door to greener pastures. I walked for quite a while—I was still small, and apparently the half-day’s trot measurement only applies to fully grown ponies. But eventually I came upon the village nearest to our little cottage, only to discover that the local bar served wine, vodka, whiskey, rum, and absolutely no ale. I stayed at the inn—the innkeeper was a very kind mare who was happy to let a little pony like me have free room and board for just a single night—and in the morning began the next step of the journey that I was by this point entirely convinced was my true calling in life: finding a drink of ale.

Unfortunately, beer isn’t very popular in Equestria. It took me five years of searching, so many lucky moments I can’t even count them using the hairs on my head as extra hooves, and only slightly fewer broken bones. Most of those were other ponies’ bones, though. Not that I broke them, there were just a lot of accidents around me. There always have been.

I did finally find my drink of ale, though, in a small bar just a few miles from the western beaches on the southern sea. Close enough you could taste the salt on the air. It was a lovely place, that bar—and the whole town—but it wasn’t for me. Because the second the contents of that glass of ale touched my tongue, I spat it out with a fury. The only thing worse I’d ever tasted was the bit of snake blood I got in my mouth on the day I got my Cutie Mark. It was a demoralizing outcome to be sure, but I got up the next day and decided that just because I didn’t know my purpose in life didn’t mean I couldn’t have an exciting time finding that purpose, and carried on exploring the country as I had for the five years before I tasted ale. I picked up a couple friends along the way, ponies who didn’t know what they were meant for, like me, and we eventually settled down just south of the great city of Fillydelphia. Close enough for comfort, far enough away to avoid the bustle of city life. We built several splendid log cabins in the woods there, though unfortunately they all burned to the ground when I was out foraging for berries. It took longer than I had expected because I couldn’t remember if a certain berry I had found was poisonous or not, and I hadn’t wanted to bring them back to camp lest some unsuspecting soul die the victim of my own lack of training in herbology. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth the risk—a lucky choice to be sure. I looked it up later, and the things I read in that book nopony should have to go through.

After our settlement and a good portion of the forest had been burned away, we decided as a group that it would be best to go back to our nomadic lifestyle. So we did, traveling by day and pitching tents by night. We actually ran into a mare on the road one day that impressed us so much with her stage show that we decided we should try taking up an act as a family. And since that day we’ve performed in every town we’ve stopped in, and ponies have always loved us. Such a curious twist of fate that ponies seemingly without a destiny should find their way by rebelling against what others might think is natural, by leaving their homes and finding a new family on the road.

What got me onto this tangent again? I feel like I was doing something important.