Your writing style is so clear and easy to follow. Not a very epic tale but one that does hit home with how we work ourselves to death in trying to find the work and life quality balance. It was a nice efficient read that didn't attempt to use up the extra space for unnecessary language. 5 stars for flow and clarity.

More representation for female beards! I love it.

Personally, I interpreted "a rock and a hard place" figuratively, being stuck in a difficult situation, between two impossible choices. You could think of it as her being a dwarf (rock, and the character's struggle with her identity) in a "hard place" living and working among humans, and feeling out of place away from her community - a common experience in our own world, for people who decide to leave their culture and families behind in order to provide for them. And the prejudice they face, on top of their feelings of isolation, is a concept certainly worth exploring. I suppose you could emphasize that struggle more, if you wanted, but I think you did an excellent job.

And as others have said, the twist at the end was excellent, and you did a great job with foreshadowing, talking about the "human writing," even though the reader wouldn't realize it till the end.

A great read!

As some have said, it's a bit light on the Rock and Hard Place theming, but I utterly loved this! Taking the medical horror of "the reveal" and spinning it in the protagonist's eyes to become an issue of cultural identity was a great way to double down on the tragedy. It was a great choice to have the first signs of things being wrong being so similar to the effects alcohol withdrawal in human alcoholics, it got me pulled into the same assumption as the protagonist, which is an impressive thing to pull off in such a short work!