The Gosling

a short story

I want to thank Nuno Pinto and Pablo Báez for being my beta readers.

The Gosling

They came like your naked grandmother, bald and four-footed, hunched upon stilt-like legs. That’s what the newsies heard. It’s what they repeated. It’s what Daryl believed. No one ever said anything different.

With the calcium ammonium nitrate in the coffee grinder, Daryl pulled a fifty-pound bag of icing sugar from the pantry. Beth and the girls watched from beyond the bakery’s shattered glass. Behind them, dawn broke over red-brick buildings, and the little strip they called downtown changed, becoming what it was when Daryl was a boy, probably what it was when the first stores opened in ‘46. For a few, sun-glorious seconds, he saw the memory of a world, young and healthy.

He looked to the boy with the backpack and the mouth full of news.

“As a child, I’d ride my bike through downtown on the way to school,” he said. “I’d leave too early and arrive too early so that when I passed by, that fresh-baked aroma was still strong and clung to me like hope. No better smell on that pre-forsaken earth.”

“They’ve passed as far south as Grover, but that was three days ago,” said the boy. “They eat what they take, so that’ll slow them down some, but a town the size of Grover won’t last no three days.”

Death worked like a hive, snagging its victims and keeping them in a communal feeding area where hundreds of naked grandmothers ate and shat until the food ran out and the shit ran high. Then death moved on.

Daryl dragged another bag of icing sugar from the pantry and then a third. He looked to the boy with some faint notion of finding help, but the boy had come with news and nothing more. Daryl went back to the pallet. The bags wouldn’t be going far. He could handle it on his own. There’d be plenty of rest when he was done.

Beth called out to him from the sidewalk, saying she was strong enough to help.

They’d talked about this. For at least a month, they’d discussed how today should go, and together, they’d decided that he’d do the work. The girls wouldn’t be alone.

“There may be a doll left in the store,” Daryl said.

Beth stood her ground, and the girls didn’t even glance in the direction of possible toys. Such promises had lost their meaning.

“Okay then,” he said.

“You wait here,” Beth said to the girls, and she stepped through the glass.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“We haven’t had a newsie pass through in weeks,” Beth said. Then she took hold of a bag by its corners and dragged it out through the opening and into the road, and when she was done, she sat on the bag and made a whooping sound full of dignity and the pride of effort.

Daryl looked up at the sound and smiled.

“We used to think they wanted their meat fresh,” the boy said.

Beth pushed herself up from the road, ruffled the hair of her youngest, passed through the glass, and took hold of another bag.

“Ma’am,” said the boy.

“What do we think now?” she asked.

“Ma’am?”

“What do we think now that we didn’t think before?”

“They’ve been seen eating carcasses off the road, roadkill, bloated, and reeking of rot,” said the boy.

“Roadkill,” she said.

“People. Those killed in the riots.”

“They eat carrion. That sounds adaptable to me. That sound adaptable to you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They were never said to adapt.”

“We didn’t think them capable, no.”

“But now we know better.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She dragged away another bag.

Daryl returned to the grinder, covered his mouth, and worked by hand what was intended to run by motor, cranking a handle he doubted had ever been connected before today. It moved easier this time, the grains being finer now and putting up less resistance.

“I’ve reports of how they digest their food,” said the boy.

Daryl glanced at the girls. Four, six, and eight. His first memories were of being four, most of his first memories, anyway. The world was full of discovery then, and every new thought felt profound.

It was strange how, on that journey from gosling to gander, the ignorant wisdom of new eyes became the foolish knowledge of youth.

Beth returned for more sugar. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Eye witnesses out of Boston and Tullahoma,” said the boy.

“It’s the eye-witness part I don’t understand.”

“Boston was still heavily populated. A few made it out. At Tullahoma, the witnesses were hunters, camouflaged, with scopes at a distance.”

Daryl wanted to say they’d hit plenty of populated areas and plenty heavy with hunters, instead he asked the boy what any of that had to do with how the creatures’ digestion worked.

“They don’t digest their food internally,” said the boy. “They vomit fluids while the catch is still living.”

Daryl grabbed a bag of sugar, pulled it to his shoulder, and walked out, passing Beth along the way. Her voice drifted back to him.

“They do the same with a carcass?” she asked.

Down the fall of the road and up the rise, thin crowds gathered, moving Daryl’s way. He couldn’t hear the boy’s answer.

He raised a hand in greeting. A dozen hands raised in return. The world went quiet. He could almost hear his own wind chimes play their strange song from the wraparound porch of their two-story, clapboard house, white as bone among well-tended flowerbeds, spotless and pure but for the occasional flurries of ash.

He pondered that ash and remembered its taste. Other towns. Other families anointing their homes one last time, transforming themselves into the soil which had supported their generations.

Bits of ash had lodged themselves in his daughters’ lungs, flavored their breath, and punished them with coughing fits. One more click of the clock. Time was running out. Death would come by fire or cloaked in baggy flesh and perched on lanky limbs. It’s what the stories said, each echoing the same inescapable horror.

Their meager farms failed. The food stores wouldn’t last. Months ago, they’d worked in teams to search root cellars and inventory what provisions remained, but—

—A tiny hand grabbed his trouser leg and tugged.

Even before he turned, before he understood the trouble, his hand whipped to the pistol tucked in his waistband. Before he could pull it free, he saw Beth holding hers and pointing it in the boy’s drained-white face. Her own flushed red.

Beth’s words broke clean and clear in all that silence. “You’re no witness.”

Daryl motioned for the girls to stay behind and then stepped through the glass. “If he’d seen, he wouldn’t have survived to spread the news.”

Her voice became something feral. “Not even those piles of manure left behind? Shouldn’t somebody somewhere have seen something?”

“Apparently, they have,” Daryl said.

“Boston and Tullahoma. Where the hell is Tullahoma?”

The boy said nothing.

Daryl answered for him. “Tennessee, I believe.”

“Well, it ain’t here,” Beth said. “Neither are they.”

“You rather we leave?”

“I don’t rather nothing.” Her grip on the pistol loosened.

Daryl walked past her and checked the grinder. The fertilizer looked like sand. He funneled the powder into a paper sleeve.

Beth’s voice settled. “I’d like to have heard something, anything, from someone who’s seen.”

Daryl dropped the last chunks of the ammonium nitrate through the grinder’s top. “I can’t fathom what difference that would make.”

“It’d make a difference.”

He pulled on the handle, and for a long second it barely budged. “How so?”

“It’d make a difference to me.”

The handle turned, and the room filled with the noise of gears turning and teeth gnashing.

“We chose to keep living our lives in this place and with these people,” he said. “I can’t imagine having done it any other way. Does that change now?”

“Did you hear what they do with the rotted ones?”

Daryl stopped grinding. Beth looked away from the boy. Looked right into him. Daryl saw a familiar emotion in those eyes, strength buckling beneath an inescapable weight. He pulled his own pistol and aimed it at the boy. As if released, Beth came to him. He took her in his arms, and she tensed against his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt, clinging to him like a climber clings to the mountain.

“It never mattered before,” he whispered. “It doesn’t change anything now.”

But it did matter. Whether it changed anything or not, every detail mattered.

“I don’t regret a single day,” she said.

“Until now.”

“Not even now,” she said.

Now had come the time of second guesses, as clear as any mark on the clock. Click. The news. Click. The doubt. Click. Peace with that which could not be appeased.

Click. The news. Always the same and always believed. Click. And now? If they proved it all lies, the clock still clicked. If they proved it all dreams, the ash still fell. If it be nothing but ghost stories, even stories had an end.

“They don’t vomit on the dead and bloated,” Daryl said. “They suck up the rot.”

“You were listening.”

“That’s just what it has to be.”

She drew her mouth close to his ear. “When they come, they’ll suck us up, too, whatever’s left. We were meant to be escaping that.”

Outside, the first of the others gathered behind the girls, each couple carrying their own heavy load.

“From some things, there is no escape,” Daryl said.

She took one long breath, pulled herself out of his embrace, and with a touch of her fingers, lowered his pistol arm.

“I still wish you’d seen them with your own eyes,” she said to the boy. “It’s the one thing today needed.”

Daryl walked the boy out through the glass and the gathering crowd. He pointed to the valley, to the white farmhouse where sunlight reflected off wind chimes. “Some provisions. Even now. You’re welcome to what you can carry.”

The boy shook his hand.

“Where you off to?” Daryl asked.

“Heading south until I run out of road.”

“Just as likely to meet them there.”

“I know.”

Daryl put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “If it weren’t for men like you, we’d have no notion of what’s going on in the world. I don’t have much news to offer in return, but you can say that Gosser’s Gap was a place where generations were born and raised. A good many of us decided a change in the world needn’t mean a change in us.”

Beth stood with the girls. The youngest buried her face into the back of Beth’s thigh.

The boy walked on.

The crowd grew thicker and, one-by-one, set their explosives in the street. Children glanced at one another without smiling. Adults spoke of the quality of the sky and the lingering scent of rain.

Daryl held Beth’s hand, and the girls pressed in close. They’d gathered in these same streets for the town’s bicentennial, the same couples, the same friends, but there’d been babies that day. No babies now. His four-year-old and those few her age were the last to experience the depth of first-discovered thoughts. He wondered what she’d tell him if he asked her about today, but he knew he’d never ask, not even if seconds stretched into eternity.

Down the road, the boy stopped and watched. Perhaps he felt it necessary, and Daryl supposed they’d goaded him into bearing witness. The boy. The gosling. The fool. Mouth full of news. Mouth full of lies. No idea which was which. No notion whether he spread life or death and not enough sense to ask.

Daryl had been such a boy on mornings when the air carried bread like ash and the chatter of fools carried no more consequence than the passing of time.

-end-

Thaddeus Thomas