Hello, faithful reader! A fair warning about this piece: it contains a terrible pun, which my husband states has taken years off his life. I am so, so, sorry.
“I have to do physical what?”
“Therapy. Physical therapy. It’s a human concept.” Doctor Moore scribbled on his yellow pad and tore off the page. “The details.”
Grey took it with an expression that suggested he didn’t understand his own behavior. His long ears quirked back like a puzzled cat’s. “Physical therapy? Can you do that? Therapy is mental, isn’t it?”
Moore smiled. “I think you’ll find this sufficiently stimulating in all areas of life.”
“I’ll kill him!” Grey wrenched the spear back and forth to no effect; it stayed lodged in the cow-sized spider, making squelching sounds. “Kill him with his own pencil!”
Robin landed beside him on fours, awash with gore and happiness. “A little drastic, don’t you think?” And he laughed like a fool and sprang away to continue the stabbing.
Grey snarled, his long ears angled back and down like a furious horse’s. Robin’s spear didn’t stick. That was because Robin belonged in this savage place, stabbing things and facing fears-turned-goofy-flesh. Clearing out nightmare-weed from the Field of Dreams tended to be as self-revelatory as it was gory.
Physical therapy, indeed. The doctor was a dead Fey and just didn’t know it yet. “Dead shrink walking,” Grey muttered, shimmying the shaft.
“Did somebody call for a clooooown?” boomed some unseen monstrosity behind him.
Grey’s response surpassed the scope of written language.
“So, how did it go?” said Doctor Moore.
“I’m never doing it again,” said Grey, studying the nails on his left hand; the bruising was almost gone.
“And?”
Grey sighed. “You were right. The nightmares stopped. But next time you decide to test borrowed theories, you can play ‘guinea-pig’ with somebody else. Humans are out of their gobby minds.”
Moore nodded and made a check-mark on his notepad. “There is a reason they don’t live long.”
Grey took his spear with him and stormed out, grudgingly prepared to admit the Yelp reviews were right: one did not simply walk into Moore’s door and come out unchanged.