In the summer of 2004, my house was the scene of a vicious murder.
Background: Two years after my family and I moved into our new house, we were attacked by a fleet of Canadian Geese on a regular basis. Our house was located directly next to a fenced in pond of what looked to be filled will chemical waste. If I were living in a more dangerous area, this pond definitely would have been filled with dead bodies. Instead, it was filled with geese. I would have preferred the bodies. Every day after school I would come home to a lawn completely covered in a thin layer of goose shit. My dad would hand my brother and I each a cardboard box and we would walk around picking up the runny feces with a gloved hand. Looking back, I have to wonder why my father had an endless supply of small cardboard boxes.
Wearing goggles in the pool was now a must. What used to be a device for allowing people to see clearly underwater, was now a tool to keep fecal bacteria out of children’s eyes. Things were getting out of hand, but surely no one expected it would end it murder.
A little after midnight in the summer of 2004, I was having a sleepover with two friends. We did 12-year-old girl stuff like gossip, try on each others clothes and call ourselves fat. (These same activities actually apply to all women ages 12-102). Contrary to popular belief, pillow fights almost never happen at sleepovers.
Probably in the middle of me saying something like “she’s such a slut for shaving her legs,” or “I can’t wait until I get boobs,” I heard a blood-curdling scream. It was coming from my front yard. I stepped outside and saw my mother clutching the sides of her silk nightgown yelling at my father, “BART GET THE DOG. GET THE FUCKING DOG BEFORE THE GOOSE KILLS HIM.” And sure enough, there was my white Bichon Frise engaged in mortal combat with one very angry mother goose. It wasn’t dog fighting. And it wasn’t cockfighting. It was something in-between. The goose was winning. In 3 hard stabbing motions, the goose almost pecked my dog into defeat. My mother was in hysterics and begging me to save the dog; a pretty huge request for a 12-year-old girl with a crippling bird phobia. So, with the reluctance of a gay man forcing himself to have sex with a woman, I inched towards the goose. As I bent down to whisk my dog away to safety, the goose, angrier than ever, clamped her beak down on some of my hair. I slipped into some sort of fear induced black out. When I came to, I was free, running full speed in the opposite direction of the winged beast.
The goose stood proudly in the center of the driveway, swinging its head around as if to ask,“Who’s next?” To the Goose’s ultimate dismay, what was next was my father and a pitchfork. My father appeared our of the darkness like a spartan warrior, silhouetted by only the moonlight. Though, unlike a spartan worrier, he was wearing yellow short shorts, a crop top that read “STRONG MAN” and his infamous snake skin boots, (all things he has also worn to get the mail, pick me up from school and discuss weather with the neighbors). But let’s not be bothered by specifics. Charging onward with his pitchfork raised, he stopped dead in front of the goose, and in one swift stabbing motion, skewered a mother of 17.
My father wrapped the goose in a black garbage bag, threw him in his car and set off to a secluded road nearby. Only a mile into the drive, the goose revived itself. It used its beak to tear through the bag and started thrashing about that car. My father, never one to be defeated by members of the avian species, Stopped the car to engage in further combat. He laid the goose in front of his car and ran over it, backed over it and ran over it again before throwing it into the swamp.
The mother goose is survived by her 17 children, who have since relocated to the very swamp where their mother died…peacefully.
RIP.
