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“I still think it’s a poltergeist,” the angry man is saying. “You don’t think it’s a poltergeist?”
You crane your neck low, peering up from under the bench. You don’t know what to make of this town, and you don’t think you like it. There is no canal or picnic blanket in sight. No gardener leaving his radio out sitting there, waiting for you to drop it in the lake. There is a boy, but he doesn’t have a toy airplane you could steal, and you can’t see a phone booth to chase him into anywhere around.
“Listen,” says the tall man. He has long hair; you might be able to pull it, if you could fly. “All we know is — you and Cas activated something when you were, um, sorting the storeroom. I still haven’t found a manual for the map table, but given how it lit up in England and in Lebanon, and given that everyone in town’s talking about weird noises and items going missing, I think you must’ve —”
“Opened up a temporary portal,” finishes the man in the long tan coat. You kind of like him, but you don’t want him anywhere near you. He seems dangerous. He seems like he could talk to geese. “Or rather — created a negative space within the warding around Lebanon, which sucked something in to fill it.”
The angry man scowls. He is wearing too many jackets, even though it’s warm outside. You wonder if someone else tricked him into putting them on. You would like to meet that goose.
Maybe you could trick the angry man into wearing the coat man’s coat, too.
“All right, fine,” says the angry man. He’s starting off down the sidewalk again; the other two men fall in stride. “Say it is a poltergeist. How the hell are we supposed to take care of a ghost whose bones are still in fricking England? ”
The boy lingers for a moment by your bench. He’s looking across the street, at another boy and two girls. They’re laughing beneath the sign for a movie theater. The boy looks wistful.
You shuffle a step out from under your bench. Another step.
You say, “HONK!”
The boy turns. He cocks his head.
“Hello,” he says, and crouches to see you better.
You’ve had enough of this stupid place. Boys are supposed to be afraid of geese. The one from across the street is looking at you now and laughing. You want to go home.
“HONK!” you say, again, and take off in a run in the other direction, to nurse your wounded pride.
---
Things take a turn for the better when you find the post office.
There is a lady who works there. She wears a name tag with little lines on it shaped like this: M-A-R-T-A. She goes to a box and picks up envelopes and packages that also have little lines on them. Then she looks at the little lines and puts the envelopes in different boxes, all in rows on the wall.
Pretty quickly you learn that when her back is turned you can go switch the envelopes into different boxes. Then you can hide again, and she will turn back and exclaim about how she’s getting old and switch the envelopes back into the right boxes again.
This is fun, but it eventually starts to get repetitive. You find another box — a big box, big enough for a goose — and climb inside.
Then you nap for a while. When you wake up, you’re somewhere different. Through a peephole in the corner of your box, you can see arms picking you up. Setting you down again on a counter. Then hands open your box —
“HONK!” you say, and tumble in a flurry of wings to the floor.
The man who opened your box yells and stumbles backward. There are bottles on the wall behind him, and one falls and smashes on the floor. You look around and realize this whole room is full of shelves, and those shelves are full of more bottles — excellent! You take off at a fast waddle down an aisle before the man can recover.
A bell rings at the door. “Jackson,” says a familiar voice, “what the hell’s going on in here?”
You peek out from around the shelf. It’s the angry man again, and the coat man. Maybe if you smash a bottle on the coat man he’ll take off his coat.
“Goddamn demon, ” gasps the man named Jackson. “In my shop —”
You shuffle a little further, peering around the shelves. And then you see it:
Out on a little display table, just out of your reach. A bottle — another bottle — three bottles that all say the same thing on the side: G-R-E-Y G-O-O-S-E.
You can’t read. But you can understand the image above the words. It’s mountains, and above them are geese in flight.
How dare they. How dare they? You’ve always dreamed of being able to fly. Imagine the mischief! The hair-pulling! The places you could poop! It’s not fair.
It’s not fair, and they’re going to pay.
You can’t reach the bottles, but there’s a tablecloth on the little stand, and you can reach the corner of that.
You take it in your beak and tug. Tug again. It goes slowly — their goose bottles are heavy. The angry man and the coat man are still talking to the Jackson man. You tug again —
And the entire table gives way with a mighty crash, bottles shattering everywhere.
The three men make wonderful noises of alarm. You dash away around the shelf, down the next aisle — there’s no one at the counter now. They’re exclaiming over the broken bottles, and the door’s still halfway propped open from when they came in. You glance one more time at them and make a dash —
There. You’re free.
You pause for a moment, looking up and down the street. The tall man is standing a little way down, leaning against a big black car. He’s talking into a phone. “All right, Rowena. Just call if you find something.” He glances up and down the street, then turns slightly away, and adds another thing into the phone that you can’t quite hear. Then he hangs up.
Behind you, the bell on the liquor store door chimes. You quickly duck into a potted plant. The angry man comes out of the store, and looks around; when he sees the tall man, he walks toward him. They meet halfway, and stop, turning to look out over the street together.
There’s another potted plant right next to them — a nice big one. You glance back and forth, thinking about it. There’s no one else in sight.
You crane your neck low. And you sneak — sneak — sneak — dash to cover.
When you peek out, they haven’t noticed you. “Did you get in touch with Ketch?” the tall man’s asking.
“Not yet,” the angry man answers. “I’ll give him a call in a sec. Bit of a situation in the liquor store — Cas is helping Jackson clean up.” His shoulders ruffle and settle again on the name Cas, like a goose on a nest. “How about Rowena?”
“She’s looking,” says the tall man. Something buzzes, and he reaches into his pocket.
You track his movements, curious — pockets are often full of good things. But it’s only his phone.
“Hey,” says the tall man, “looks like Jack’s got something, at the post office — you mind if I —?”
“Here, lemme have the keys,” says the angry man, nodding.
The tall man passes something over that glints of metal, setting them in the angry man’s palm. The angry man pushes them into his pocket — except that they catch, a little, on a loose thread of his jeans.
They’re right in front of your beak. They’re keys. They’re gleaming.
They’re yours.
You snake your neck out. You clamp your beak delicately, so they won’t jingle.
And you retreat into your potted plant, the treasured keys in your beak and the angry man none the wiser.
---
You don’t like Lebanon, Kansas, but it’s starting to grow on you.
The people back home know you, and you know them. Sometimes, that makes life difficult — the burly man at the pub is harder to evade every week — but you’re fond of them. They’re your people. If any other goose came and tried to torment them, you’d show him whose town he’s in.
You’re starting to realize that maybe the tall man and the angry man and the coat man and the boy are Lebanon’s goose, all put together.
It makes sense. You’d need a lot of people to add up to one goose.
But you see the way the townsfolk watch them. Muttering from their windows or staring in envy at their big black car. People don’t have beautiful white feathers like you do; you guess they need other things to make them look pretty. Like cars.
Imagine how pretty you’d be, if you had both.
That’s where the idea comes from. For a while, it’s just there sitting in your brain, turning over on itself. Then you see someone getting into a different car, and you remember: keys aren’t only for being shiny. They also make things go.
You’re hiding by the popcorn machine at the movie theater. You wait until the girl at the counter turns her back before you dash back out into the street.
The keys are buried in the potted plant where you left them. Just down the street, the tall man and the angry man are standing by the black car again, arguing — “I swear to God, Dean, I handed you the keys. If you can’t find them then —”
The angry man makes an angry sigh and runs a hand through his hair. It makes him look more like a goose; you approve. “I can get it open, Jesus, but it’s your fault if I need to hotwire my Baby.”
“Pretty sure it’s yours,” mutters the tall man, and stands back to watch as the angry man slides something down the side of his car window and jimmies the door’s lock.
You have got to learn how to do that.
As he works, you creep forward, fascinated. The keys clink slightly in your beak, but neither of them turns to look.
“There we go,” says the angry man, triumphant. He steps back and pulls the door open, then turns, gesturing triumphantly to the tall man. “See? I didn’t lock them in the car.”
He says those last words in a funny voice and waggles his head like a goose asking another goose to fight. Is he asking you to fight?
It doesn’t matter. You’ve seen your opening.
The door is gaping open, and neither of them can see you. You flatten yourself to the ground, and stick out your neck, and run.
The angry man yells as you flash by his boots. You’re up on the seat inside — your feet slip on the leather, and you beat your wings — and the angry man is reaching after you, tripping, hand slamming down on the lock —
And then he falls, and the door bangs shut behind you, and there are two angry men outside shouting now, but the big black car is finally, gloriously, yours.
---
As it turns out, geese can’t drive.
You could’ve anticipated that, probably. Getting the key into the key place is almost too much of a task. You keep dropping it on the floor as the people outside mutter furiously, working to open the door again. More people have gathered — a crowd. Some of them are laughing at the angry men. You think you were right about them being Lebanon’s goose.
If you can turn the car on, maybe you can drive home to your own village.
But you never get the chance. You get the key into its key slot, finally, but just as you do, the lock clicks again. You flap your wings, but you can’t reach it in time — and then the angry man is lurching inside, grabbing you by the beak, then the wings, then bundling you under his arm like a common duck.
---
Usually when people at home catch you, you know what’s going to happen: they’ll shout and wave things at you and chase you away, and then once you’re out of their shop or their pub or wherever it is they nest, they’ll leave you alone.
The Lebanon goose men do not do that.
They put something over your head so that you think it’s nighttime. And the next thing you know, you’re tied by your feet at the center of a big star shape on the floor.
They’re throwing water at you.
Water! As if you were some unwitting gardener walking by the end of a hose! “HONK!” you protest, flapping your wings at them.
All four of them are standing there watching you: the tall man and the angry man and the coat man and the boy. “I don’t think that’s how demons usually react to holy water,” the boy says.
For a moment, none of them answer. Then the tall man says, “No. No, it’s not.”
They try salt next. Then iron. Then they make a tiny cut on your wing with a silver blade. “HONK!” you tell them. “HONK, HONK, HONK!”
“Sam?” says the coat man. “Dean. I think this may just be — a goose.”
They all stand and look at you for a minute. Then the angry man — he doesn’t look so angry with the coat man standing close by his side — asks, “So what now?”
Everyone frowns at you for a long minute. They don’t say anything.
“It wouldn’t be difficult to just — send it back,” says the coat man, finally.
They all look at each other. They shift their feet. “I mean,” says the tall man, “it’s not like it’s actually a poltergeist. We wouldn’t be —”
“Maybe they like it in England,” says the boy, looking faintly hopeful. He glances between the three men like he thinks they’ll give him a flower.
For another long moment, they’re silent. Then the angry man claps his hands together. “All right. That’s it. Cas —”
The coat man turns abruptly and leads the way out of the room. The other three follow, the angry man first, the tall man and the boy trailing behind.
You’re alone in their room. It’s a strange room. It has lots of shelves full of boxes of papers and books. If only you could get free, you’d find something to do with those.
Then you feel a strange feeling — sort of a cosmic HONK — and you’re nowhere at all.
---
Water is lapping on the banks of the lake. The sun shines down on you. Somewhere distant, the gardener’s radio is playing.
“HONK,” you say, and find yourself among lilypads, surveying familiar scenery: the park bench. The picnic blanket. A basket, an apple, a sandwich.
You waddle free of the lake. The gardener’s working in his carrot patch. There’s the knob to turn on his hose; there are his cabbages to trample through.
A sense of well-being settles under your breastbone. You didn’t need a big black car, anyway.
It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.