"Stop!" she cried as I tossed the pills in my mouth with a swallow of water. I spit them out. "What? Are they the wrong pills?" I checked the bottle. "Or are they expired?" I looked closer. "Okay, I don't get it. What's wrong?"

"That's the thing," she said, "they're the right pills. My research has discovered that even minor emotions and sensations create intangible thinking creatures, spirits of a sort."

"Spirits?" I said. "That's--"

"Crazy, I know," she said. "There's really no better term for them, but they're real, provably real. And your taking painkillers would've, well, killed dozens or hundreds of pain spirits. It would've been mass murder."

"Well," I said, "accepting your hypothesis for now, I'm taking the pills as an antiinflammatory, not for any pain. Is that okay?"

She visibly relaxed. "Oh, yeah, that's fine."

I took some new pills and cleaned up the mess the old ones had become. "Hey, what about the pain I don't feel now but won't feel in the future because I've taken these?"

"Oh, that's not murder. That's like, I dunno, contraception," she said. "It's fine."

I felt the blood drain from my face. "What's wrong?" she said.

"I'm Catholic."