The forest across the field behind Luna is a black band of noise. The tree frogs are cackling, getting louder as the ringing in your ears dies down. Luna clears her throat. At times like this, you know it’s best to shut up and let her talk.

“Pardon me. Perhaps I should have restrained myself. I had forgotten how frail you creatures are.”

Looking up at her would be another wrong move. Instead, you reach to the pile of napkins you’d dropped and claw a wad of them against your face. Blood and cantaloupe seeds come away in strings of red goo.

“Are you much injured?”

“No,” you cough. You’ll only make her feel worse if you tell her the truth. Plus, she’ll think you’re a wuss. You quietly spit shards of broken teeth into the napkins.

“Pity. Mayhap you would finally learn your lesson if you were. I am very disappointed in you, although I must say it is no surprise to me that your spine has proven once again to be made of jelly. I have not suffered such humiliation in years! And yet again your resilience to even the gentlest of corrections is shown to be nonexistent. By the stars, you would shatter like glass were I to give you a true dressing-down.”

You nod and say nothing. Best to stick to the routine.

Her gaze is heavy on you. You can feel it even without looking, and her anger is still churning in your chest. The tree frogs chant their tireless song. They’re watching too, lined up on the branches off in the distant woods, mocking you.

At last Luna’s rage begins to subside. “Get up, coward,” she sighs. You rise, fighting through the jabs of pain from your bruised ribs and bleeding forearms. The mayflies spinning around the orange light bolted to the wall above you are blurry, and your vision keeps shifting to the right so your brain can’t keep up with what you’re seeing. Chances are her first shot had given you a concussion. You venture your first glance in her direction.

“Would you like to redeem yourself?” she asks. Her words are pointed, but no longer full of acid.

“Yes,” you manage to sputter through your broken front teeth. This is always the worst part. Knowing that you’d failed her. Feeling how let down she felt, straight from the source. Wanting nothing more than to throw back a bottle of Drano and chase it with a lit M-80.

“Excellent,” she replies. “But first, you’re a mess.”

She conjures a towel you recognize from your bathroom hamper, and throws it to you. As you finish wiping yourself down, your Malibu Beach print hoodie slaps against your face. She must have zapped that one out of the dryer. Guessing she wants you to put it on, you toss the towel onto the grass and struggle into it.

“Pull the cowl over your head, unless you wish all and sundry to see the brand of my hoofprints on your face.”

You must be bruised to shit. Your shirt is marked up with mud horseshoes too. You zip up and pull the hood on, tightening the drawstring as far as it would go. Except for your nose and eyes, maybe, nobody was going to be able to see the evidence of the beat down she’d given you.

“There now,” she says while you test how far you could move your arms. “Here is my request. As we were passing by the pavilions of the gameskeepers and food vendors, I spied one tent that awarded foals’ toys to any who could burst ten balloons with as many darts. Win for me the one with the likeness of a bear. A teddy, as I believe it is called.”

All she needs is a teddy bear and you’re back in business. Game on.

“I shall return with it to Canterlot and display it to the Royal Court, so that my sister and all the nobles may see and understand that humans have some faculty for compassion, and that they care for their young.”

“One teddy bear. You got it,” you reply. The storm is clearing, the birds are singing, and there might even be some sunlight peeking out from behind the clouds in the dreamland of her feelings. That’s another thing that always made you feel like the luckiest guy on earth. No matter how bad of an ass-kicking she gave you, she’d calm down in a minute or two and everything would be fine. That’s a full-grown, mature waifu for you if there ever was one.

“Good. I shall wait here for your return. This is a simple task, easy even for you. I expect it will not take long.”

“No worries, sweetie,” you chime with your broken smile. “I’m a pro at darts. I’ll be back in five minutes tops.”

You see her nod as you shove your hands in your pockets and head back around the restroom building onto the main road. People had thinned out. Most of the families with younger kids were gone, though some of the scruffier-looking ones were still putzing around. Good. Less competition for the game tents. You hurry back the way you’d come.

It’s getting colder. You’re walking fast, scanning the backs of the tents for any signs of stuffed animals or rows of balloons. What would suck is if the dart tent had closed up for the night. What would you tell Luna then? Sorry honey, I was a day late and a dollar short like the rest of my goddam life and didn’t get you the teddy bear that would make all of humanity look like winners? Yeah, that would end well. There’s always the goldfish people for a plan B. If they hadn’t closed up too.

A guy at the cotton candy cart across from the beer tent points at you and starts wheeling his fidgeting tyke your way.

Wonderful. If only Luna had gotten your Foakleys out of the pickup. The hoodie isn’t doing much to hide your face; just the gashes and the knots. Anybody would recognize you.

The guys parks his stroller a few feet away, in the middle of the road. “That was great back there, man. My boy Tyler was laughing his ass off.”

“Was he?” you mutter.

“Hell yeah! I almost shit my pants when the tears started coming out. That’s some Charlie Chaplin old-time shit, man. Classic.”

Tyler reaches up and tugs on his father’s shorts. “Where baby brontosaurus go?”

You chuckle and wrinkle your eyebrows at the kid. “Baby brontosaurus?”

Dad laughs. “I couldn’t figure out what the fuck that was when I first saw it. I told him it was a baby dinosaur. There’s some blue dinosaurs, right?”

“I guess,” you say. You keep your mouth closed as you smile. Scaring the kid with the bloody nubs that used to be your teeth would only bring questions. And you have a question for them.

“You happen to see a dart tent anywhere around here? You know, where you pop balloons and win a stuffed animal? I wanted to get one for my wai … for my brother. We’re gonna make it part of the routine. Whoever can knock it off his head gets to keep it.”

Dad nods, waving his hand toward an intersection a ways down from the beer tent. “Yeah, we saw it. Just keep going. It’ll be on the right coming from this direction. Hey, do you two do birthday parties? Tyler’s got one in a few weeks. Him and his pre-school pals would like nothing more than to light that bronto-butt up, right Tyler?”

Tyler starts mashing a soggy graham cracker he’d been holding. “Where brontosaurus go?”

You think hard. Say yes, and you risk this guy seeing you at the mall someday and chewing you out for not following through. Say no, and he’ll try to talk you into it, wasting time you don’t have. Have one bad morning sometime in the future, versus miss out on the teddy, betray Luna, become a traitor to the entire human race, and probably cause a pony invasion where everyone you know is slaughtered or sent to the moon or whatever it is they do.

“Yeah, we can stop by,” you say, trying to make it sound like you give a shit.

“Awesome! Here, let me give you my phone number.”

He digs into a bag hanging from the back of the stroller and pulls out a notepad shaped like a baby bottle. After scribbling for a few seconds, he tears the top sheet off and hands it to you:

Paul LeCompte
604-887-6793 (cell)
May 20
Birthday

“Thanks a lot man,” he says, opening up a container of sanitary wipes. “Good luck with the darts. See you in a few weeks!”

You fold up the note and put it into your hoodie pocket. “No problem, Mr. LeCompte. See you on the 20th.” Before he can go any further and ask for something retarded like taking your picture with his kid, you jog to where he’d pointed.

It doesn’t take long to find the dart tent. It’s still open, and there’s nobody but a geeky-looking numbnuts and what vaguely resembled a girl failing miserably to hit a single balloon with their darts. You step up into line behind them.

There, sitting on the top of the prize shelf, is the teddy bear that would get you out of Luna’s doghouse.