Vinyl Scratch shuffled her hooves, staring at the kitchen floor while Octavia ranted about how nothing had been done all day. Vinyl didn’t see what the problem was. She thought the house looked nice. Maybe not spotless, but it wasn’t dirty.

“You had eight hours, Vinyl, and you had three things to do. I don’t understand how you could have possibly accomplished nothing in the time I was away. What could you possibly have to say for yourself?” Octavia’s gaze locked on Vinyl and the unicorn mare tried not to meet Octavia’s angered stare. She swallowed before beginning.

“Well, you see...”

Vinyl sighed and looked at the list Octavia had taped to the fridge, quickly skimming what her marefriend had planned out for her that day.

Vinyl looked around the kitchen and shook her head. The kitchen was, in her opinion, just fine, and not at all dirty. Sure, the counters were a little sticky, but that was to be expected with all the orange juice Vinyl spilled. And there was a rag on the counter that Vinyl had used to mop up something or other last week. There were a few dishes in the sink, but they weren’t stacked on top of each other, so Vinyl let them be. She did, however, pick up the apple core she’d left on the table and drop it into the garbage bin, smiling at her progress and heading into the bedroom.

The bedroom wasn’t that much worse than the kitchen, and Vinyl rolled her eyes at the ‘disaster’ on her half of the room, kicking some of the smaller things under the bed with the rest of the clutter she’d hidden at Octavia’s request.

“I’d hate to hear what she calls a real disaster,” Vinyl muttered, shoving all her DJ equipment into the corner, out of the way. She stacked her records in an unbalanced tower and tossed her dirty clothes towards the basket on the other side of the room,whooping loudly when the clothes fell into the basket, and swearing when the clothes fell short, landing in a heap beside the basket.. She didn’t bother picking up the headphones, pens, mixed tapes, and papers that littered the floor, because she was planning on working on finishing her new single later that day. She also pulled a few more reference records out of her pile, knocking a few to the floor. She promised herself she’d pick them up later and left the room to do the windows.

The windows only took a few minutes. Vinyl had grabbed the rag from the counter and ran it under the sink for a few seconds to get the rag damp, and ran the rag across the surface of the windows. She hummed happily as she smeared water across the windows, re-wetting the rag every time it felt a little dry in her hoof. All the hoof prints and marks were gone as far as Vinyl could tell, and she smiled at her handy work.

“An hour or so, more like ten minutes or so,” Vinyl scoffed, plopping herself on the couch and flipping through the tv stations, trying to find something worth watching. That’s where she was, watching reruns of some sitcom about a bunch of ponies sitting around a coffee shop all day instead of working, when Octavia got home, looking furious as anything.

“You mean to tell me you cleaned?” Octavia asked, looking around the kitchen. The counters were still sticky, the rag was now sitting atop the oven, and the dishes were still sitting in the sink, their dirty surfaces beginning to smell as they sat. The windows around her were streaked so badly nopony could see through them if they tried. Octavia was almost too scared to go up to their room and see what horrors Vinyl had left. “How could you honestly sit there and tell me this house is clean, Vinyl Scratch? This house is messier than any other house in the entire neighbourhood, and the neighbours have six children with another on the way.”

“Well, you see, the house really isn’t messy.” Vinyl said. “Just cluttered, and kind of sticky,” she wrinkled her nose as she pulled her hoof off the counter, frowning at the hairs that had been pulled out and were now sticking to the sticky orange juice spot. Octavia shook her head and left the room, returning with a box filled with different sized bottles of cleaners.

“Vinyl, you’re going to clean this entire house, top to bottom, with no help. And you’re not going to be done until I say you’re done.” Octavia handed Vinyl a blue bottle and a clean rag. “Starting with the windows, so you get used to using actual cleaner. When you’re finished, I’ll give you everything you need for the kitchen.”

“Aw, come on, Octy. You don’t wanna be like that. You know I tried,”

“No, Vinyl, what you did was...nothing. You did nothing, Vinyl. You got absolutely nothing done today. If anything, you made the house worse that it was when I left. So until you know how to properly maintain a home, you get to clean the entire thing and see how I feel every other weekend when you skip out on your cleaning day.” Octavia crossed past Vinyl into the living room, switching the television back on to the sitcom, where two of the ponies were crouched over on the floor, picking through pieces of some sort of cake. “I’ll check in on your progress...oh, every half hour or so. Have fun, Vinyl. Oh, and good luck.”

Author's Notes:

This sucks. I'm already saying it. It's also being posted two hours late (as of time of submission), because I had homecoming, and I wasn't home all day. However, I'm counting this as October 4th's story, and October 5th's will come later (after I get off work most likely). But I needed a one-shot for today (the 4th), so I tried to pull something together.