The Goose
by Kaitlin Lavinder
I walked along the water during the rain storm and watched the elms’ branches shake violently. Two pairs of geese fought each other for territory with tongues out and feathers puffed, wings flapping vigorously. I imagined I was a goose. With a long neck, craning, towering over the rest of my body, working hard to hold my small though heavy head. My rotund body – so plump and so fragile, thick and light, a weight tethering me to the ground and the hollow shell carrying me to the sky, soar, soar, soaring away from the humans and their plight. Oh! And my skinny legs and wide feet. If only to relinquish my human body.
Human beings scare me.
Back to the start.
I fled my small apartment so I could move my legs. They were cramped after a long, sedentary day. I had been working on a short story – not my forte, for details bore me, and in short stories each word must sink. I like writing novels, because in novels, the words can float, and readers forgive you at the end, as long as a cloud rises. So, fed up with the process, questioning who I was, and suddenly seized by a surge of rage, I fled. I ran out into the rain.
When I returned, I was a medium-sized goose. My two cats were very afraid. They sniffed me cautiously. They backed away. They convened amongst themselves in the bedroom. As day turned to night and their food bowls turned dry, they decided, with a wink of the eye, to eat me.
“No, no!” I honked. “It’s me, your mommy!”
That halted them briefly, for my pink tongue was elongated and pointing toward them like a dagger. Hiss, hiss, hissing. I must learn to control these new organs.
I flicked my tongue up and down in my mouth. I felt its roughness, its sharpness on the inside of my beak. I opened my beak. The muscles that move such a hard, slender thing were not at all like my old human jaws, which were square and laborious to operate.
One of my cats – the tan tabby – twisted her head around the doorway, behind which her and her sister had been hiding. She stared at me with glowing green eyes. I waddled toward her. She treaded back. I stepped forward again. She attacked.
She lunged and dug her sharpest dewclaw into my belly while her sister, the black street cat I rescued when I was in Detroit visiting my brother, leapt through the doorway, circled me, and bit my ass. I fell to the ground and wailed. My sweet girls didn’t flinch. They ripped me to shreds. They lopped off my head. They ate every part of me, chewing ferociously. When they finished, a heap of feathers and bones and blood soaked the middle of my living room, ruining the rug my brother gave me, just before he left. My daughters sat satisfied, with protruding bellies, licking each paw meticulously. The tan tabby began grooming the black street cat, and the black cat groomed her back. They licked each other’s heads – lovingly, violently.
What will happen tomorrow night, I wondered from inside their stomachs, when I am no longer here, when the hunger, the starvation, the rage appears? If only my brother…
Alas, he, like me, is no longer here, nor there.
My brother walked into Lake Erie the night before I left. He grew gills and stopped breathing air. The black cat always reminded me of him – beautiful and savage and capable of anything. The tan tabby was more like me – calm and content, domesticated, I guess. What a surprise that she led the attack…
Though if I were a cat, or a human, I think I’d have done the same.
Humans eat geese every day.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a fiction writer based in Chicago. She writes literary fiction and magical realism. She was previously a foreign affairs journalist based in Washington, DC. She has an MA in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a BA in Journalism from Temple University. When she’s not writing, she’s running, hiking, or learning about different plant and animal species.