It's a magical world, ol' buddy

hey put him in therapy again and told him to stop imagining tigers. They didn’t seem to care that the idea to throw a brick at Susie’s husband hadn’t come from him. It wasn’t his fault the guy didn’t know how to duck.  
    The doctor smiled and nodded a lot, but she kept insisting that his best friend, on the couch beside him, was only a stuffed animal. He was almost thirty. Didn’t he think he was too old for stuffed animals.  He got a peppermint when he left. 
    His mother and the doctor talked in hushed voices while he waited in the room with the old magazines. But tigers have keen hearing. They were going to lobotomize him and put his best friend in the zoo. His mother cried in the car on the ride home. After the last time his parents yelled at each other, his dad had gone on a business trip. That was six weeks ago and he still hadn’t come back. She had taken to drinking alone at the kitchen table. Sometimes he found her asleep there in the morning. He knew it was all because of him.
    When he got home, he went into the basement and closed the door. His mother knocked at it for a while before finally giving up. He could hear the bottle sliding out of the cupboard.
    He got to work on the cardboard box. First the scissors and then he pulled out the felt marker. He wasn’t sure what he would call it yet. Or what it could do to make things better.  He just knew he was tired of being an adult. Their problems seemed so petty. 
    His best friend watched him with dead eyes. They had nothing more to say to each other. The marker was drying out. He was just so tired.

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