The Therapy Pony

Inspired by true events...
















Content Warning:
Disturbing Scenes, Language, Assault

Transcript

             The Therapy Pony

                                                                                                     I

           Bryan the Therapy Pony was brought onto the campus in May. As is quite customary for the time of year, the weather was perpetually lovely: day after day of blue sky, cloudless or only a little clouded. What few clouds there were were invariably bold, gold-tinged, milk-white- and their shadows showed on the grass. In the same way, caused by the hot, ubiquitous sun in the heavens, small, stout, summery shadows lay everywhere on the lit ground, attached- as if at the ankles- to everything that moved.

            As agreed, in middle May, Gus brought Bryan the Therapy Pony to the main green on campus. Gus parked his little van, and the equine carrier attached behind, in the carpark. He unbolted the door of the carrying vehicle, and slid it to the left. Out stepped Bryan the Therapy Pony into the sun, in four efficient steps, each one sounded out by the dense, dry knock of a hoof. Bryan cocked his head and looked about suspiciously. Gus firmly, expertly patted a patch on Bryan’s rump. Bryan nickered softly. Gus knew which regions of Bryan’s brown body might be rubbed in pacification. The bond between Gus and Bryan was a strong one, they seemed to share some opinion of the world: perhaps it was contempt, perhaps it wasn't. Gus wasn’t a man of land, agriculture, equestrian sports, nor was he a part of the therapeutic profession, in fact he regarded the word “Wellness” with considerable disdain….he took great pride in the fact that he had never, according to his lights, even once been “well” in his entire life. Anyway, not for him but for the younger, more hopeful others, Wellness was the aspiration, the project for which Bryan the Therapy Pony had been summoned, commandeered. That being said, it was money that brought Gus to the campus grounds with his pony, it had surprised Gus from the outset, just quite how much money various wellness committees, various bodies of pastoral care, were quite content to part with just for access to a therapy pony’s company.

            Bryan was an old, unmarried man. He was in his early seventies: he was in fairly good shape, his physical demeanour and alacrity deducted a few years from his outward appearance, though his disposition was formed of a certain cantankerousness which undoubtedly put him in the province of the old, even the elderly. He had almost been married but the opportunity had passed him by. He was a retired crash investigator, public transport disasters, planes, helicopters, trains, buses. He had chosen his career over marriage. When he retired from his profession, whose traumatic and painstaking investigations he had never consciously loved and yet had repeatedly thrown himself into with a furious fervency, love was no longer there to be explored. It had been thirty years since Charlotte had walked out the door, and he’d never looked back to the day of that departure, the pain of which, at the time, he’d been too absorbed in an investigation to register. Upon retiring, he suffered the pangs, and the guilt, and the dread as his aloneness suffused his life, drew in closer, tighter- around him, wove his future. He would die alone, and it was a terrible prospect. So, he’d purchased a pony for company. When Bryan would finally pass away, Gus was resolved that he too would expire. It would be the perfect moment to make use of something or other among the number of lethal things, keepsakes, trinkets, that he kept in his cupboards and drawers. Need had led Gus to Bryan and brought the pony into the old man’s life, but there was love there, respect, affection, gentleness: though, in more ways than one, that love’s expression was growing more and more seldom.  

            Bryan was a handsome Shetland Pony: his withers stood almost exactly a metre above the ground, his coat lay heavy on flesh that was not fat, and the bulky engine of the stomach with its handsome under-curve sat, a little sagging, but taut and supported, on his sturdy, little legs. He was almost exactly the colour of chocolate, sunlight brought out the apricot in him, in unluminous weathers he was a shade that approximated the dark of onion marmalade. Gus had also described him variously as leaf-tawny, and tree-bark brown. His silken mane was not of a fairer shade- as many Shetland Pony manes are- but precisely the same as the rest of his body: it was quite thick, even luxuriant, but well kempt and combed.

            Gus had visited the campus a number of times before as part of wellness programmes, with Bryan, the Therapy Pony of some repute. Without Bryan, Gus was nothing. Participants from the student body (and on occasion the staff body) seemed to love Bryan, had found him well-suited to animal therapy. It was usually during the summer exam period that they dropped Bryan’s custodian an email of invitation and this year had been no different. They liked Bryan, Gus not so much. But they were quite willing to deal with him to secure the privilege of Bryan’s company. Gus was apparently polite but contemptuous beneath his courtesy, and this unpleasantness sometimes came out in his attitude, a certain truculence, or shortness. Bryan was not an especially warm pony, Gus knew (even if the others didn’t) that his deep, dark eyes betrayed a certain loathing, or at least a certain indifference, towards the hordes of the presumably unwell, afflicted, distressed who sought to be well again by pawing and fondling a pony for therapeutic purposes.

           Without ropes, Gus accompanied Bryan across the campus, never leading him, keeping Bryan's pace calm not with reins but with the simple adjacent weight of a comforting authority, occasionally stroking the downward length of the mane or caressing the nasal slope of his muzzle. Bryan trotted at a level pace across the carpark towards the main green, which was an area for recline and relaxation, encroached upon by various student union buildings. It was a beautiful patch: trees, benches, a lake. The distant cacophony of waterfowl pricked Bryan’s ears, a honking of geese, the chattering of mallards. Gus also carried a bag of foodstuffs for feeding, and a saddle and set of stirrups too. They weren’t really necessary, but Gus wasn’t willing to risk financial sanction, damages, a suit. He had once forgotten to properly saddle Bryan: something had caused him to bolt, the child seated upon him at the time was almost very seriously injured. Gus had learned his lesson.  

            Pablo, who ran the university wellness clinic, was already on the lawn. He saw the man and the pony he had been expecting, coming across the green, turning heads and arousing comment, and he waved at them both, cheerfully. Gus noticed Pablo and reluctantly waved in reply. They all converged, Pablo, Gus, Bryan.

            “Hello lovely Bryan,” Pablo cried out, reaching out for the crown of the pony’s hairy head and caressing it with flat palms.

            Bryan quietly whinnied, acknowledging the avid advances of an unusual hand. He had encountered Pablo a number of times, but it takes time to know a pony, any equine animal, and Bryan still regarded Pablo as a stranger. Pablo’s shirt was covered in thermometers, a strange, busy design. The shirtsleeves billowed lazily in the breeze, and the undone top two or three buttons down the middle revealed copious chest hair, in which three or four medallions lay coiled.

            “How long do you want Bryan for?” Gus asked.

            “Oh, about three hours, I’d say…” Pablo answered.

            Bryan depressed his head and joylessly enjoyed the grass. Whether he was hungry or not, in the mood for it or not, grass always seemed to exert a pull to which he could not help but succumb. He tore off dispassionate mouthfuls, and horizontally, circularly masticated them to mush in his heavy, square jaws, sniffling contentedly. A thick, humid, grassy stink rose from his mouth.

            “Same drill as usual then?” Gus asked.

            “Yeah,” Pablo assured. “People know he’s here, he’s always popular. They’ll come…”

            “…and I just supervise while they…touch him, pass the time with him, get to know him…”

            “Yes, exactly.”

            Gus wondered what it would be like to be handled and touched and prodded and stroked and fondled just for people’s relaxation. He pitied Bryan’s plight, even in the same moment as he quite willingly subjected him to it for his own financial gain. Bryan continued to chew the grass.

            “Can I ask about payment…?” Gus enquired.

            “The guild can do direct bank transfer within the week…is that satisfactory?”

            Gus preferred cheque or cash on the day of services performed. “Quite satisfactory. Thank you,” Gus answered.

            People became gradually aware of Bryan’s presence. They hurried over to him and were vocally moved by his beauty. Faces, mostly of young women, congregated in dizzying array and oohed and aahed over the flashing silk of his mane, and the black depth of those two slow-blinking, glossy eyes.

            Gus was amazed at how many people turned up and amassed for this particular visit of a therapy pony. On no other occasion, upon the grounds of this or any institution, had such a crowd lined up. Invariably it was women who joined the queue, but not exclusively. It almost made him laugh, how devoted their homage to that perfect little animal, how strong their faith in the remedial and redemptive possibilities of close contact with him, of close congress with the warm, firm flower of that brown, equine flesh. Women came up, bent down, sank to their knees, pressed their cheeks, noses, ears, wet eyes onto the curved, plump, lovely tummy or into the softly shining mane, in intimate worship. They caressed his flanks, and his rump, at whose centre swung the tail back and forth in slight pendular motion, and they tickled his ears too. Bryan just went on munching the grass, his countenance dead-pan and unparticipatory, ever oblivious to his adorers’ assaults. Only one girl seemed intent upon receiving eye-contact from him. She parked her face right against his, and tried to force his head up and his eyes straight ahead. Bryan resisted, preferring the company of the grass; he stuck out his tongue and gave her a big, wet lick. She stumbled back, reeling, laughing.

            “Who wants to feed him a pear chunk?” Gus said.

            A host of hands went up. Gus put a pear chunk into each successive palm and they all went up and offered their morsel to the weighty, mandible orifice. Bryan never rejected food: he grabbed hold of each chunk with his big baggy lips, sucking and slurping chunk after chunk from the hand that offered it right into the churning cauldron of his jaws and down, once made liquid, down his gullet and into his belly. Pablo surveyed each encounter, his smile beatific, rictus. The crowds that had turned up to avail themselves of Bryan’s primal, tactile, animal therapies, did not seem to Gus, in their individual component, especially stressed, anxious, depressed, or traumatised, but three hundred pounds was not to be sniffed at, even for performing such odd, nauseating services as these.

            Bryan was eventually worn out by all the fuss and attention. All afternoon, people had come and gone, and then new people had come, and then gone, one or two people had come back, and so on and so forth. At a point about two and a half hours into his ordeal of compulsory affection, quite without warning, he sagged wearily, and he got down onto the grassy ground, rolled onto his side, and slept. Gus took out a small switch from his bag, very effective in whipping Bryan awake should he succumb to slumber but Pablo wrang his hands and urged Gus to leave the pony be- though Gus explained that research showed that whipping was shown to be good for equines, and that it had been scientifically proven that they felt whipping not as pain but as encouragement. Pablo would have none of it. In odd solidarity, he got down onto the grass and lay next to Bryan. He curled up and spooned, almost conjugally, with the beautiful creature. Following Pablo’s example, all those in attendance quite suddenly, in a unified gesture, fell to the floor, and lay in a pile, in the sleepy sunlight of an afternoon in May. Gus stared down bemusedly upon the spread of young people, all lying prone, at the level of his boots. They were all knit into one somnolent enchantment by Bryan the Therapy Pony, the warm, bellied source of the magic. His stomach rose and fell, rose and fell, in slow, big breaths.

Gus felt quite uncharmed by the sight, he felt as he might have felt staring down at a helicopter crash on a scree, a ruin of machinery and metal and corpses and dissembled parts both human and mechanical upon a hill. A futile and imbecilic waste. Through the frown of his unhappy, folded eyes, he reckoned the whole affair to be quite contemptible. He was contemptible for inflicting this touchy feely torture upon his beloved Bryan, he was contemptible for so happily accepting remuneration for such an infliction, he was contemptible in the first place for sharing Bryan at all, for sharing the beauty he cherished so personally in that bushy, Northerly species of pony. The three hours was mercifully close to expiry.

            “Right…wakey time…everybody up…pony therapy time’s over…get back to your…whatever it is you do all day…come on…up, up!”

            Gus woke everyone up, including Bryan, who took a few careful rump-slaps to be reanimated and to rise onto his feet. His legs wobbled, he let out a capacious yawn. Then he cocked his head alertly and refocused. Bryan and Gus walked back the way they had come, back to the carrying vehicle in the carpark. They drove home.

                                                                                                    II        

            The evening sprawled beautifully. The hurried setting habits of the reluctant winter sun were months behind them. Against the curtain of heaven, the celestial bodies performed a different dance, the dance was now different to that one of months before. The Maytime evenings, lit by a sun slanting so mortally, so melancholically from the west, lasted for such a long time before it was finally night. The world was perfectly warm, only a little warm, almost breezeless but not quite. The distant hills slumbered peacefully, and the fuzzy cornfields and rapefields, dotted with the bold paper skirts of poppy flowers, lay patient and solar, shadowed with evening clouds. Having returned Bryan to his pen, Gus reclined easefully in the garden hammock. He didn’t notice it at first, but he gradually registered a change in Bryan’s demeanour. Those who know an animal well can efficiently recognise any change. With a competence almost unconscious- at least initially- Gus clocked that something was not right with Bryan. He was such a proud creature, had such an imperious nobility about him, a bigness of being, a figurative stature so much larger than his literal one- a spiritual stature so much greater than his bodily one: now he seemed lost, low-status, as the daylight disappeared and the night began to turn starry, it troubled Gus, the way Bryan stood…awake, bleak, aloof, catatonic, under the stars. Gus yawned. He was tired. He shrugged, it was the shrug with which one assures oneself that tomorrow is indeed a new day. As a matter of fact, the following day promised more of the same as the day just ending: a secondary-school fete wished to avail themselves of Bryan and Gus’s services. Gus resolved that he would soon give up pony therapy, he would pack it in, like an unhealthy habit. But it just paid so damn well, and was such easy work.

Off Gus went to bed. Remembered soft twenty-year-old faces crept upon him from the darkness. He couldn’t help remembering their soft faces, all intent, and receptive, and touched, at pony therapy. He attempted to masturbate before he slept, but found the event of climax impossibly remote, and so he abandoned his member. Sleep stole over him soon enough, and the soft faces withdrew.

            The following morning, a little earlier than he intended to rise, Gus was woken by a strange bellowing. He grimaced with both vexation and curiosity. With a little difficulty, and a creaking of joints, he rose and left his bed. He ventured outside, stood at the front threshold of the house, looking out over the garden, the distance, Bryan’s pen. The morning was crisp, and bright. Then came the shock, the terrible inverted silhouette. Bryan! He was on his back, in his pen, and his legs writhing. He looked so helpless, like a baby. In his anguish, all his robust, self-preserving wildness seemed irretrievably erased, and replaced with a pitiful and dependant domesticity. It was indescribable, and it was soul-desiccating, the constant, plaintive wail that he emitted like the agony of a whistling kettle, from thick-lipped jaws open in pathos, and the ham-like tongue operatically waggling between. Gus hurried over to Bryan, scaled the fence, and was horrified by what he saw upon advancing and getting the upended form of his beloved Shetland Pony into the light:

            Bryan’s eyelids were puffy and crusted, his eyes were folded away, like a rabbit with a faceful of myxomatosis. His belly, the under-curve that had been so smooth and level only yesterday, was carbuncled in sores and pustules. Gus peered inside the jaws, trying to glimpse the uvular or oesophageal source of that terrible moaning note. He was mystified and appalled to find the gums and the tip of the tongue splashed in a painful looking white and yellowish thrush. Then, an enormous belch rumbled low in Bryan’s belly, shot up his throat, and erupted pungently from his mouth. The stink that hit Gus right on the nose was unbelievable, a smell of sickness, vomitus, blockage, rancidity.

            “No no no! Bryan!” Gus cried aloud. The morning seemed oblivious. A magpie rattled somewhere, a cock coughed. “You can’t do pony therapy in this condition, Bryan. Look at you! You’re repulsive, nobody’s going to feel relaxed while you look like this…nobody would dare go near you…”

            Gus resigned himself to the reality that he would simply not be able to make the couple of hundred pounds he had been due to make at that secondary school fete. He attempted to reconcile himself to such a loss, and pity his poor animal, so mysteriously struck by such an unpleasant condition. But the more Gus stared at his Shetland Pony, made so unbeautiful and pathetic by his ailment, the more Gus saw a cash-source, a resource, a piece of meat, a piece of whinnying, trotting, visually pleasing meat- for caressing not slaughter-, but meat all the same. But it didn’t matter all that much, the way he thought of his animal. Whether he loved or required him, whether he wished to care for him or simply preserve and prolong him, whether his concern was emotional or pragmatic, he’d to call the veterinarian forthwith.

            The vet was summoned and made his examinations. He investigated the afflicted equine body, listened to its heartbeat through his stethoscope, felt the body in his hands in the places where particular pathologies might tell.

            “Nothing wrong with him,” the vet concluded, zipping up his medical bag.

            “Nothing wrong with him? But for Christ’s sake, look at him!”

            “Stress,” I would say. “Psychosomatic symptoms of stress. That’s all it is.”

            The irony was not lost on Gus, but he was too incensed to be amused, or even amazed by it.

            “Couple of days of rest, plenty of fluids. He’ll be right as rain in a jiffy.”

                                                                                                 III

            The vet’s prognosis was exactly right. As hastily as they had appeared, the unpleasant and putrid symptoms disappeared. It was a banal recovery from a flying visit of nameless, arbitrary ailment. Gus apologised to the organisers of the secondary school fete for he and Bryan’s absence; Bryan’s frightful sickness was a good excuse as excuses went. Bryan spent most of the week flat, at rest upon the cheek of the grass, motionless, as the sun crossed the sky and his shadow wheeled, as Gus brought him fruit-mash and warm water. Gus was quite certain that it was Bryan’s subjection to pony therapy that had caused his sickness, a sickness that- though very temporary- was quite horrifying. The robbing of agency from him, the figurative tethering to a single spot, the invasion of his space by human faces and human hands. It was as though in every place he had been touched, fingered, caressed, wounds had flowered.

            About a week later, Gus received an email from Pablo at the university: could Gus bring Bryan onto the campus for more pony therapy, due to popular demand. Could he indeed: Gus figured Yes, he could. Tuesday, 18th? Yes.

            Without reins, Gus walked with a recovered Bryan through the carpark, onto the main green. The proud equine form of the pretty Shetland Pony, maned, head held high, turned heads. They stared after him in something more sinister and condescending than rapture, tranced in the disarming thraldom of the cute and adorable.

            Gus and his pony were once again received by Pablo on the green, on a spot quite close to the majority mallard pond- a moorhen beeped among the quacking number, a swan silently sailed, but these watery others both kept themselves to themselves while the ducks bickeringly attention-sought. It was quieter than last time. The people present were few and sparsely scattered.

            “I’ve actually got to go and run a workshop this afternoon, Gus, so are you alright to take care of proceedings yourself?”

            “Certainly,” Gus replied.

            “People know where you are…I’ll see you later…”

            “Bye,” Gus said. And off Pablo went.

            Gus’ ears pricked at a munching sound. Bryan’s head was already depressed in one of his beautiful stoops and he was picking and chewing and grinding the grass.

            They were alone for a while. They sat, enjoying the peace, the relative quiet. The ducks were occasionally thrown into group paroxysm. A professor emerged, seemingly out of nowhere. Repetitively, aloofly, mechanically, disconsolately- (there were so many words to describe his attitude)- he tore off crustcrumbs and breadcrumbs from a loaf of bread and tossed them into the water. A joyless communion it was, between man and bird, held together by little more than the fluffiness, the flimsiness of bread. Voices continually disturbed the stillness. Strange, dead, reflexive laughter in one place, a distant argument somewhere else. An admission of triviality lay so close to the surface of everything everyone did and said in this place, Gus quite mercilessly thought. Bryan remained intent upon his grass. His eyes were ancient and wise, he blinked in slow, deliberate ritual.

            A customer materialised. She came from the main forum, where the largest lecture theatre and the library were located. With great intention she made for the man and his Shetland Pony, across the wide lawn. As the young woman came close, perversely avid for pony therapy, desiring animal touch with a weird primal thirst that didn’t become her soft beauty, that soft beauty dawned on Gus. He eyed her, her fairness, her milkish paleness…he was an old man, brown with sun and age, creased with work and sadness. He felt forty years younger, as his eyes drank the crimson bliss of her lipstick, a signal, charged with electric volts. He deluded himself that it was for him, that lipstick: of course it wasn’t. If only he were a pony! He could get down on all fours beside her, share the measure of her beating heart, feel his firmness touched by the soft healing voyage of her touch, lick her face, nibble her knees. And she would forgive him all of it, because he was just a pony, not a man! She approached and they small-talked. Then, clasping her cheeks, flushed with passional red, she cried:

“Oh, he’s lovely. I just love Shetland ponies. I love being close to animals. Any animals. I love to be reminded that there’s such a world beyond us, such a…a kind of…a depth deeper than our depths…do you know what I mean?” She was light and gregarious.

            Gus replied only curtly. He gazed at her in great rapture, and he was made perfectly incoherent by her beauty. After a moment he was able to encourage her:

            “Go on…touch him however you like…he’s very well trained. He’s a therapy pony. He’s quite used to being touched.”

            “Oh, wonderful…” she bent down and moved towards him, a little cooly.

            “Go on…snuggle right up to him,” Gus urged.

            “I will…”

            She began to stroke his right flank in feeble, weedy strokes.

            “Don’t be afraid of him. Be quite firm. He responds to firmness.”

            Gus helped her touch the pony, guiding her hold in his hand. Her hand was so soft and small. He leaned in closer, guiding her hand all the while as though the animal she laid her hands upon were an extension of Gus. Bryan softly neighed, as though to give voice to Gus’s pleasure, guiding the girl’s hand. A little closer he moved in. She was beautifully, innocently, unwittingly trapped between two male, animal bodies, the pony before her and the old man behind her. Gus leaned in closer, entrapping her more, and just as the beginnings of her hanging hair touched his nose, so he smelt the naturally emanating perfume, the smell like crushed petals that seemed to find its source at the blonde roots.

            “What are you doing?” she said, turning her head sharply.

            “What?”

            “What are you…”

            “Nothing, nothing…” Gus protested.

            He quickly and ashamedly yielded, retreated, let her go. But she was rattled and wary.

            “What the fuck were you doing?” she cried, standing up, her hand softly withdrawn from the furry, apricot pelt.

            She continued to protest, and Gus to repudiate. Meanwhile, the silken mane on Bryan's back leapt a little in a wind. Bryan went on serenely chewing the grass. His eyes were not sagacious, they were not deep with ancient knowing: he was quite dumb, innocent of human affairs, the complex rituals of touch and contact, a complexity from which he had been considered so exempt, though he was an expert in being touched. But the pony learnt something that day. Gradually, his jaws slowed. He stopped eating the grass. He began to lift his long head, thoughtfully. They had seen fit to touch him to their hearts content, he thought, in any place they chose, for as long as they chose. His head was fully raised. When Bryan saw the girl’s vulnerability, her wariness, her slow, deliberate retreat, the fright and admonition in her countenance, tensile with so many emotional possibilities, his eyes swirled with new feeling, with a certainty he had never known, he grew hot and his eyes lighted with the quickening of resolve, the flow of action over the stasis of passivity, over the ice of servitude. The therapy pony lunged at the girl, the last figure to have laid upon him that needy, falsely-poeticised, condescending touch. The scream shot from her like a flash of light. It startled the mallards into cacophonous flight, and even the swan got up and loped through the air with broad, effortful, wild wings towards the sun, not glancing back. The girl was knocked supine by his fast, solid approach. And, lit from behind by the skyey lightness of that May afternoon, she was covered in the shadow of the therapy pony, his body elevated diagonally in hind-leg elevation. And the last thing she saw was the descent of that creature’s front legs, having raised himself up in approach like a drawbridge, he let gravity take his hooved front feet to the floor, where he crushed her skull. So hard and new was the shock of force that went through him that he stumbled back from the corpse.

            No-one had seen what happened. Apart from the professor, who had been feeding the ducks. He’d stopped feeding the ducks and had turned away and begun walking home. But he had turned back when he heard the brief scream, and the dreadful thump, and the fleeing clatter of the ducks. Gus didn’t know how to feel, he couldn’t quite believe, nor quite comprehend what had just happened. He didn’t have much time: he had no time! He pulled the body by her legs towards the lake and he pushed it over the bank where it sank quickly down. The waters were dark, swallowing, and obedient. They devoured the body without delay, nor a hint of stubbornness. A pair of froggish eyes opened and watched, white, from the liquid blackness, but they did so without the admonishing grimace of morality; they simply thanked the deliverer for his corpse. At the green land’s level, Gus looked about. He saw the professor looking right at him, with inquisitive calm.

            “Shhh,” Gus said, placing a finger, pointed vertically, on his lips.   

            Brain and bone and blood flecked Bryan’s hooves, and higher, splattered, up the stout columns of his legs, and on his curved underside. Apathetically, Bryan went right back to the grass, lowering his head to eat it.

            Gus was about to slap his companion’s rump and say: Come on, Bri…Home time. But he didn’t. Instead, Gus began to walk away. He walked not so quickly at first, away from Bryan, who didn’t follow. Having braved the first yards, having dared to walk away, it was easier to begin running. He scampered off, leaving his Shetland Pony to his ravenous devices, his lower quarters bloody, but apart from that quite content, on the green university grounds. The ducks re-alighted, quiet once again and in an unspooked state, having shaken the fright out of their wet wings. They settled upon the water and quacked. The shy moorhen peeped out from a patch of bullrush stems: his black face frowned: Yeeeeeeeeeeeap! he cried.

            Bbbbbrrrp, said Bryan, in between mouthfuls. The professor, who a short while ago had been feeding the ducks, watched as the mysterious world returned to normal, as, on the other side of brutality, its eerie animal inhabitants regained their composure and equilibrium. A cloud crossed the sun, and then the sun reappeared, unobscured. The ducks were chattering. The girl’s body was in the water. A man had just abandoned his pony, and the pony was eating the grass of the student green for nutritional purposes. The professor shrugged, turned back the way he had been walking, and returned to his homeward journey. He found that the situation tickled him, and he chuckled for a while.