The Muffin Man

     To say that Derpy was broken would be an understatement. She lay on the ground, heaving sobs wracking her body as she cradled what was left of Dinky. “It’s all my fault!” She lamented. Of course it wasn’t; she’d had no idea that I was bluffing about the bomb and therefore her failure to save her daughter was no fault of hers. But the dotty blond mare wasn’t smart enough to construct such a line of reasoning. She blamed herself.

     “I’m sorry Dinky! I’m sorry! Mommy’s so sorry!” the Pegasus moaned to the mangled corpse. The tighter she hugged her foal’s remains, the more blood poured out. After one particularly tight squeeze one of Dinky’s eyes fell to the floor with a splat, eliciting a fresh wave of sorrow from Derpy. This was getting messy. I leaned down and attempted to grab the carcass from her lest she make more of a mess, but she held fast.

     “NO! NO! Not my Dinky! Don’t take her away Muffin Man please!” I considered beating her but a more interesting idea came to me before I could raise my hand. I rifled through my pack and found them: a whole bag of muffins. I hid them behind my back.

     “Derpy, please give me that body before you make a bigger mess!”

     “NO! She’s not a body don’t call her that! She’s my Dinky! Her name is Dinky!” the blonde mare cried.

     “If you give her to me, you can have this whole bag of muffins!” She looked at the bag, then back to Dinky, then the bag, then back. I could see the raging mental conflict play out across her facial features. Finally she hugged her filly one more time and then held the broken creature out for me to take. She almost wouldn’t let go. I handed her the bag of muffins. Instantly she regretted the trade and fresh tears burst forth while she crammed the muffins in her mouth, as if they might assuage the pain and self-hatred that filled her soul.

     “Wh…what are you going to d-do with Dinky?” She managed to eke out the words. I let my actions speak for themselves, walking over to the lab’s sink. I crammed the tiny body down the industrial strength garbage disposal and turned it on. The rumbling growl of the machine was punctuated by the sounds of snapping bones and tearing skin, a dissonant soundscape that acted like a backing track for Derpy’s howls of anguish.

     My little experiment with Dinky and Derpy had proven correct a postulate of mine: these equines were intelligent creatures capable of human-like thought and emotion. In short, they would make the best test subjects in those truly horrible endeavors for which not even the men upstairs would allow us to use human subjects. Those sorts of tests that governments deny performing…the ones even the soulless men I worked for felt sick about.

     “I wanna go home!” Derpy interrupted my train of thought, “I wanna see Lyra and Bonbon and Rainbow! Please Muffin Man, I don’t like this place!” she begged me. Somehow she still spoke to me as if I were a friend. Had she not just seen me kill her daughter? Her egocentrism was childlike – everything that happened she perceived as a result of her own actions. In her mind, it wasn’t that I had killed Dinky, It was that Derpy had failed to save her. This creature would make a fascinating case study for any psychologist.

     “You’d make a good pet,” I mused out loud. Derpy just stared at me in confusion, her eyes moving in opposite directions. I could use other ponies as test subjects…Derpy I wanted to keep. She was smart enough to follow directions and dumb enough not to question them. There was just one problem. Her wings. I couldn’t have her flying away on me. In fact as these thoughts skittered through my mind she had already begun to fly about the room, looking for a way out. I surreptitiously made my way over to the tool cabinet and grabbed the lopping shears that we used to cut bundles of copper wire and other such things. I hid them behind my back. The lab was already a mess, so I figured I might as well do this now.

     “Derpy, do you want another muffin?”