Here's something.

Through the past two weeks, which have been so up and down and insane that I have no idea what to think or feel or do, I have at least come to realize that the one thing I can always depend upon is a deadline. And I've met my latest one. New column is up today:

Porn Has No Soul.

Monster Side

She patted the back of my hand,
urgency in her eyes and demeanor-
She often taps her fingers on tabletops when anxious-
and when I turned to her she said:
"Your monster side is showing."

We were at brunch.
I looked down at my hand under hers,
there on the white table cloth.
She quickly removed her skin from mine and,
yes, I could see it there,
the black, wiry hair poking out from the cuff of my sleeve.
I moved it under the table, smiled sheepishly.
I'd almost forgotten about those claws.

"When you laugh," she whispered,
"you scare the people at the next table.
I can see them cringing."
I pushed my lips down over the fangs.
"And," her eyes were cast down to avoid my yellow ones,
"when you talk, you gesture so much, and
your claws are so dirty. I don't think
we should do this any more."

I stared down at my palms, smooth and almost-human.
She quietly got her things, threw her hair
over her shoulder like she does,
and left.

I guess I should have known better
than to think my happiness could mask those nails,
or that smiling might diminish my teeth.

And anyway, what choice do monsters have in life
aside from becoming writers?
And who can write when they're happy?

Third Column is UP!

Check me out, I'm such a writer! My third column is up on McSweeney's! This one is a lot more of a story than my usual rambling, and I happen to think it's pretty funny. Let me know if you agree!

Another Story and Another Column: or, shameless self-promotion

In case ANYONE reading this hasn't gotten an e-mail, tweet, FB post, or MySpace bulletin yet... I have two publications to show for one week, NOT on Whack! Magazine! Check it!

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer: Column Two: Desensitization

And:

The Whiskey Dregs: Short Stories: The Old Goat Man

Now that that's over with, I've been considering the merit or not of the upcoming Where the Wild Things Are Movie. I don't know how to feel about it. On the one hand, it looks like a great film so far, and I have the utmost respect for Spike Jonze, as a director, as well as for the fact that Maurice Sendak's wishes are being realized by him directing this movie. He apparently once said that the only way he'd agree to his baby being turned into a movie would be if it were to be directed by Jonze.

So that's all well and good.

But still. It irks me on a number of levels. I'm always hesitant to see a book turned into a movie, particularly if it's one I grew up with. But this one bothers me more than others. For one thing, the book is so beloved by so many, not for the merits of its movie-length plot, but for its sparseness. It's a book with so little background and so little development of the plot that one must bring one's own imagination and experience to it in order to make the story whole. And one's own story must be a good one to match the incredible possibilities and the astounding artwork. And that brings the best of the imagination of everyone who reads it.

Of course I appreciate Spike Jonze's vision, and I think his version of the story will probably be one that will be eminently artistic and enjoyable. But. It's still HIS. From the time this movie comes out, every kid who's seen the movie (there will be MANY) will bring with him Spike Jonze's idea of the story, the characters, the background, the sounds, the sights we don't get to see in the pages. And that bothers me with this particular book because it has always been the opposite of a fleshed-out, pre-imagined story. And now it will be just like Harry Potter or Twilight or The Lord of the Rings. Well, ok, not JUST like them, but one person's vision of it will come to dominate the entire story, book, movie, idea. And I don't like that.

Furthermore, I feel like this movie was cooked up by some producers who looked at my very specific part of my very specific generation. They looked at the books we love, the music we love, the directors we love, and the type of movies we love, and then they said, "You know what would be perfect? Turning 'Where the Wild Things Are' into a live-action style movie and getting Spike Jonze to direct, the singer from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to come up with the soundtrack, and the Arcade Fire to let us use their anthem about growing up in the trailer. The twenty-somethings will line up around the block to see it, and they'll bring their kids! We can't lose! It's a money-making machine!"

I might be totally wrong about that. It's just as likely (and I've obviously done no research about it) that someone really really loved the book and really really loved Spike Jonze and The Arcade Fire and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and thought that together they would make a beautiful piece of art. And you know, they probably will. But I get this feeling that I'm being led by the nose because being who I am, at this point in my life, at this moment in time (post-college fugue, frustrated creative visions, yearning for childhood feelings, wanting to be swept away to a better world without a recession or even money), I HAVE to love it. I don't like being led by the nose, even if the people at the other end of the leash are creative geniuses.

I dunno. I guess it just seems contrived to me, and too much awesome in one place.

I'll probably end up seeing it and loving it, but hating myself for it the whole time. Grumble.

What do you guys think? Support it? Love it? Hate it? Meh?

In other news: my coworker Maribeth saw John Turturro on the street today. I am way jealous. This lady has never even SEEN The Big Lebowski! Not fair.

But I DID see this after leaving work: a mid-twenties white guy sitting in traffic in a very nice Chrysler convertible, with the top down in 50 degree weather, smoking a cigar, and listening to "With Or Without You" at full volume. Way to go, guy, for blasting the music you REALLY love.

Big Friggin Announcement

Hello, loyal fans. Many of you think of me as a close friend, a confidant, perhaps a sex object. And those of you who don't know me personally certainly think of me as a bringer of news, a blogger, a paranoid whack job. Well, here's a new title for you to put by my name in your brain books' margins:

Writer.

Real, serious, honest-to-god-is-getting-somewhere Writer. I don't know if you all know this, but there's no time like the present to come out with it: I've been writing about sex and pornography for several publications and for my own book project for almost two years now, and it gets weird. Being a practical, if not radical, feminist, an intelligent, career-minded woman, and a porn writer all at once can be surreal and sometimes even difficult. But, as a writer, the money is what matters. And so is the chance to turn my experiences into a column or a book, that would maybe someday turn me into a capital-W Writer.

That day has come.

I have just landed, in no uncertain terms, a column at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. They announced it. McSweeney's is a great website, but also a prominent publisher of books by notable authors, including (I can't help it, I've gotta name drop here) Dave Eggers. And they LIKE ME! Gah!

I'll be publishing, starting sometime between now and mid-October, two columns a month for them on the subject of being a sex writer and a woman, and the issues/weirdness/hilarity that goes along with it.

I waited a few days to post this announcement because, honestly, when I got the initial e-mail I was at first too excited to type anything. I literally slammed my hands on my desk, got up and jumped up and down for a good minute, then danced around and tried to get my heart rate down to a safe level. For the next two days I convinced myself that I'd dreamed it and that it was, in fact, too good to be true.

But now it's online. And as we all know, once it's online, it's forever.

As for how this development will affect my blogging on this here site, I can't say just yet. This fall is going to be a big lurch forward for me as far as the amount of material I have to produce each month, and along with my many other projects, my blogging could be taken back a notch. We'll have to see what happens. In the meantime, I'm gonna just bask in my Writerliness. Is that a word? Hah! Who cares? I'm a Writer! I just MADE it one!

(PS - Also just got word that an anthology featuring a story of mine, which was supposed to be released in April originally, is finally finished. A buy online link with more info should be available soon. I'll post it when it is. GOD, I'm on FIYAH!)

Sorry to those of you not at Literary Death Match on Thursday...

For those of you who weren't there, just check this out:
Bobby McFerrin Plays the Audience



And for those of you who were at Lit. Death Match, or who care to read some rambling pseudo-poetry-cum-argument, here you go:



On the abstract use of language in poetry:
or, why Abraham Smith deserved to win Literary Death Match #16.


To use words aesthetically, he says,
is unacceptable.
The universally recognized meaning therein predisposes
the free flow of sound to strike the listener
or reader
as confusing. As nonsense.
To use words as nothing more than aural blocks in a polyphonic structure,
to deny their universal subjectivity,
is to set oneself up for failure.
The audience will be baffled, annoyed.
Words have meaning, he said.
One cannot use them so.

Banana.
Delivery truck.
Deer, swallow, rotator cuff.

Doesn’t work, he says.
Should be illegal.

But I must then ponder the meaning of poetry as Art
in its most specific Platonic form.
Poetry as a vehicle,
--a delivery truck--
with which to bring up, display, impart
an idea.
Simple enough.
But how to transmit this idea
from the ether to the eye?
Therein lies the dilemma, the argument, the very breast meat.
The Art.

It must be said that language,
the most baldly literal medium for such a transmission
from ether to other,
surely muddles abstraction.
How can one submit as mixed media
a collection of letters, which, to every eye and ear,
unfailingly signifies a concept—perhaps not identical but nevertheless uniform?
Deer is not a series of sounds,
he would argue,
but as literal a form as the human figure in oils,
brought about by phonics and working as its own agent in
a pre-existing paradigm separate from its aesthetic parts,
and, therefore, unacceptable as abstract form or media.

But I say (for the sake of argument only,
for I do not enjoy an more than he does the experience
of being shouted at by some wheezing Alabaman poet
jerking and twitching on stage to the sound of his own
fiddle-like voice, deeply involved in the tones and arcs of his musicality,
“Tick, bladder, bucket, kitten-sack!”)
But nonetheless...

…nonetheless, (for this idea is itself such a one as must be transmitted)
I must argue
that the finest and tightest-held hope
of artists, the dearest ideal of Art,
is that of the ineffable spirit who can wield the idea, the concept, the Point of It All,
so powerfully, flawlessly,
using whatsoever he will to transmute his idea from the ether to the observer,
and still, against all odds, be understood.
He makes Art.

To transcend the paradigms inherent in the medium one has chosen,
to showcase, whether it be via such an easily and perhaps even cop-out-edly accessible
form as the human figure or, in this case,
the vagaries of the English language and its tonality, consonant-laden ends and nonsense grammatical structures,
the idea, pure and shining and pinhead-small
against the black velvet backdrop of the void,
and to force into the materials at hand the meaning therein…
That, right there, is Art.

Surely we must—those of us with the desire to create, at least, who
fling ourselves into that dark shadow of predefined mindsets,
screaming desperately at nothing—
concede that words can be whatever we ask of them
if we have but the power or the genius or the tenacity or the obliviousness
to try and fail and try again to make them something other than their signifieds.
And surely those who can do so, or who dare even make the attempt,
are such folks as we can only respect and vaguely wonder at,
minds, like jaws,
agape.

I must then write it, though it pains my practicality:

Deer. Deer. Swallow.

OH. MY. GOD. And how the media is trying to send us all into a panicked frenzy.

Ok, so when I first read this: Ant Mega-Colony Takes Over World ... I kinda freaked out a little. I mean. C'mon. Takes Over World?? That's a little terrifying no matter who's doing it, but ANTS? I got these pictures of huge 1950's B-movie Ant Monsters the size of 3 story buildings running around in traffic, wiggling their 20-foot antennae and clicking their human-sized mandibles together and doing any number of the horrible scary things that ants do (ever read up on bullet ants? blind ants? fire ants? nasty little buggers, I'm telling you!) on a ginormous scale. I almost peed myself.

Needless to say, this was not exactly the scenario that Matt Walker from the BBC's Earth News was trying to describe. The story itself isn't all that fantastic: basically there's this highly invasive species of Argentine ant that has been spread all over the world by human activity, and that has now established 'super colonies' in Europe, the US, two in Japan, and of course in South America. The ants are currently on every continent except for Antarctica. This is bad, because according to Suite101.com, these ants are among the world's worst invaders of new territory, causing serious damage to ecosystems when they land in new places and start up their monstrous colonies. And while that's kind of so-so on the unpleasant scale (at least for us; I'm sure there's some species of native ant out there lignering on the brink of starvation in little ant refugee camps, huddled around campfires and singing their native ant-farm songs in the night), things got a little creepy when researchers from Japan started putting the ants from super-colonies thousands of miles apart together to see how they'd react - and they got along. Ants are pretty aggressive critters, and as a consequence, when presented from an ant not of their own colony they usually get into fights. But these Argentine invaders (those from the bigges of the super-colonies) had no beef with each other. They basically just bought each other beers and started telling crazy stories about their mutual extended relatives antics at the last Argentine invaders' company holiday party. The researchers, surprised and unnerved, apparently let it slip that ants usually only act this chummy around others from their own specific colony, and that "the enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society."

Well, yeah. Ok. But then the BBC turned these observations into statements like these:
-"billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony."
-"The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination."
-"further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition."

Dude. Come on.

Unless you have evidence that someone has actually found a giant underground series of tunnels leading from Japan and the US and Europe to an Argentinian home base with a giant ant-head that glows transmitting doom thoughts to billions of other ants around the world, don't give me shit like this. I'm way disappointed.

BUT! I am published again! My little Rant Rez from the other day went up today on The Whiskey Dregs. I rule!

This has nothing to do with anything, but...

...I just have to write down my dream from last night before I forget it, because I'm sure this is fodder for an excellent story and I have to keep it. Please, don't be scared off. This is the kind of stuff I have to share with the world.

Last night, I dreamed that I woke up in hell. I had apparently passed away and found myself in a large cafeteria, reminiscent of the one I remember from college. There were rows of hot food buffets and people lined up at them, spooning food onto partitioned trays, just like in high school. It appeared to be mostly cheesy casserole food, as it was all stringy and stretchy. Didn't look bad. People were having pretty typical conversations and were wearing whatever they died in, but everyone was a little sweaty because, obviously, it was quite warm. All the buffet sneeze guards were steamed up from the inside and the outside, and the air just had that stuffy sheen of hot weather to it. Very humid.

I set about determining where I was, and within a few minutes I'd discerned that I was in fact in hell, and also that a lot of my friends were already there. Gretchen, if you're reading this - sorry, but you goin' to the big cafeteria down under. And Amanda Myers and few people I work with, I think. All explaining to me how things worked and how it wasn't really so bad, just endlessly monotonous and the food wasn't very good.

So I sat down with people to my first meal in hell, pretty certain I'd never be leaving, if the legend of Persephone had any bearing. Cause that mac-n-cheese looked delicious and I was gonna eat the crap out of it. Sometime during our meal, in which we discussed how people around me had died (no memory of the details, sorry Gert), the Devil got up and started reading out who was to be on what work detail that week. We apparently worked different jobs in shifts. The Devil was Hitler, except he was bright red and had horns of course, but the face - definitely Mein Fuhrer. He seemed to be in the same mood as everyone else. Doing ok, but just kind of tired and worn out and bored. And sweaty, very sweaty. He kind of gallumphed up onto the stage, read his list of assignments, and then shuffled off.

I got assigned with a group of mostly young attractive women. There were about seven of us, I believe, and we all tromped off to the office we'd been assigned to. When we got there I realized that our job was to assist Mr. Pierre Levai, the former (i.e., now deceased) President of the Marlborough Gallery. It WAS hell! I was on a personal assistantship team for one of the biggest pricks ever known to man (except the leader of the Third Reich, of course). He came storming in, all red faced, and started demanding things of us that we didn't know how to respond to - which is pretty much his modus operandi in life. We were all getting flustered when suddenly Kim Kardashian, who was apparently on my work detail with me, came purring up from her seat and somehow charmed him into calming down. At first I was annoyed, because she was being so blatantly sexual and ridiculously servile to him, but after a few minutes she had talked him down out of a temper tantrum and somehow convinced him to leave the office for a while. Go, Kim! After he left, we talked for a while and I came to the conclusion that Kim Kardashian is actually a pretty cool chick. Go figure.

After work detail was over, we all reassembled in the cafeteria. Kim and I went our separate ways, but we had forged a pretty decent working relationship and I hoped she'd be on my detail the next day. I went to sit down with Gert and Mooie, and suddenly, out of a rift in the space-time continuum, Jon Wagner, Josh Baney and Rich Hess (all high school friends) plopped down near us in hell. We explained where they were, and they explained that they had all been on military duty together in Afghanistan (I think?) and had apparently been killed. We went around the table telling our stories, and it seemed that everyone knew where they were and what they had been up to, but not the moment of death or what it was, specifically, that had done them in.

When it came around to my turn, I suddenly realized that I had no idea how I'd died. No memory of anything at all, not even of the surrounding circumstances. I got very upset, thinking I should definitely have known, and I was informed that I had to go down the hall out of the cafeteria to get my memory restored. There was an office down there, they said, where they'd give me everything I needed.

So off I tromped, down the hall, first door on the left, and entered into... the most delicious looking and smelling pastry shop I'd ever been in. The women behind the counter were all in bonnets and aprons and smiley, although they looked a little bit like pigs. They gave me plates full of pastries, telling me exactly what every one would do for me when I ate it, what kinds of memory would be restored and what to expect to feel. They were very supportive, and by the time I left the room my tray was covered with little peanut butter and chocolate tartlets, chocolate cake, croissants, and cookies.

I was walking back to the cafeteria, licking my lips and marveling at how very nice everyone in Hell seemed to be, when I realized that there was no way I'd EVER be able to eat all of my memories in one sitting. But I knew I'd have to. And suddenly I realized the irony of it all - the people in hell weren't nice, they were sadists! And they wanted me to turn into a pig, too!

....somewhere around here I woke up, and although I fell back asleep a few times, everything got disjointed, so that's effectively where the dream ended.

But, good stuff, no? I feel like it's so heavy with symbolism it's practically dripping. Good fodder for a story down the line. I'm very impressed with my brain.

A Rez Rant

Six months of volunteering on the reservation will get you here: parked outside Big Bat’s around 3:00 am while your ex-hookup buddy pukes on the uneven pavement, you retching and trying to hold it back so you don’t have to go near him in your lowered-tolerance inebriation, watching the rear-end of a piebald horse at the gas pump in front of you and wondering if there’s just one funny thing going on in this situation, or too many to count. Given you’re seeing three of everything anyway, it can be hard to keep track.

Being just out of college and stranded in an ocean of ancient ani-misticysim that still makes more sense than the insular ultra-Catholicism of your virtual-strangers-even-after-seven-months housemates can also throw off one’s perspective. Spending most of your waking hours feeling oversized around kindergartners and their tiny chairs can be a little discombobulating for a 5’1”, 100 lb misfit who’s never been bigger than anyone in her life, but leaving the classroom every afternoon for the driver’s seat of a full sized school bus throws things into an even more Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective. Being out here, a hundred miles from anything like civilization and yet parked at a 24-hour convenience mart, just back from the legion hall dance you crashed with your fellow volunteers, waiting for the teetotal-ling designated driver to emerge form the store with some Cheetos, trying to remember what the hell happened over the past three hours, is mind-fuck-quality surrealism.

And then there’s the horse. Standing there, still as a car idling except for a slow swishing of the tail, right in front of your housemate’s Neon, as if it belonged at a gas station at 3:00 in the morning. Refueling. You guess the rider’s inside, probably also buying Cheetos. People out here love Cheetos. Not the regular kind so much as the hot kind. Not sure why, really, they’re pretty distasteful to you. But people here also tend to eat lemons without sugar, and they love – love – pickles. Who knows. They also ride horses around on weekends and take them to the gas station. It makes sense, really; the reservation has one of the highest drunk driving mortality rates in the world, and while a car will take you right into a ditch if you pass out drunk, a horse will get you home no matter what. Unless it comes across Bigfoot or The Tall Man or some other spirit, which according to the locals happens quite a lot and isn’t always a pleasant experience. But so long as you can keep your seat on the animal, which most of the people around here can, having been riding since they were preschoolers, a horse is a safer way to get around on a long howling-at-the-moon night than a piece of heavy machinery.

The horse’s tail swishes at you again. The sound of vomit hitting pavement from outside has stopped. The obvious mental image of the rider coming out of the gas station, pushing a few buttons at the pump, and inserting the business end of the nozzle into the business end of the horse continues to cross your hazy mind, but it seems passé somehow. Too obvious. Yet you still wish you had a camera. Another wave of nausea is coming over you – you steel yourself against the tidal force of bile. God, you think, I hate tequila. Dammit. You’d promised yourself to take it easy tonight – only drink one kind of beer and one kind of liquor to avoid mixing, but the first shot the now-barfing mass outside the car door bought you was Cuervo, and you got locked into a Mexican binge all night. Never a good idea. Nor is busting into the legion hall of a tiny Nebraska town known for its history of lynching the Indians you’re out here volunteering to teach for a year. It was fun at the time, but…

The back door opens and your ex-lover tumbles in, smiling the relieved smile of the empty-stomached drunk. “So where’s Pete with those Cheetos, dude?” His breath stinks but you’re so close to vomiting already that it hardly makes a dent in your confusion and misery. “Dude, I can’t believe you want to eat. You just puked everywhere.”

“Yeah,” he replies, “more room for Cheetos.” You grimace and turn back to the horse at the pump; it takes a moment, but the blurry double-image your drunk eyes perceive eventually focuses into one. Its tail is swishing. A big-boned Lakota woman is climbing up into the Western saddle, cradling her cell phone between her ear and shoulder – you’re constantly marveling at the skill set of people from the prairie. It’s entirely different than what the city taught you about swiping a Metro Card or avoiding other pedestrians mid-crosswalk in front of raging cab drivers.

Your ex watches with you as the animal trots off down the main street of Pine Ridge, South Dakota and into the wild void of the black prairie night. A dog barks in the distance. “So, hey,” mutters Bryan in the slurred late-night tone you came to know during illegal late-night beer binges at his tiny house in Oglala, “I know it’s been kind of weird lately but, we should really…” he hiccups… “get together again before you leave, you know? For old time’s sake.”

You eye him, curled in the corner of the Neon’s backseat, his hands gesturing clumsily as he talks. The high school girls’ basketball coach, now a member of the paid staff after three years volunteering. The only attractive non-Indian for miles around, and an alcoholic. Go figure. You just shake your head and turn back to the night outside the bright 24-hour lights of the parking area. It’s quiet now. You’re the only car in the parking lot. It’s finally gotten late enough for the reservation night to wind down. The Legion Hall kicked you out almost an hour and a half ago and the drive back was interrupted by Bryan’s several vomit stops. You wonder vaguely how Peter, the constant DD, can stand people like the two of you, who drag all the volunteers out into the night to witness your helplessly post-collegiate debauchery. You wonder how this will be remembered. The night everyone got kicked out of the legion hall? The night Bryan puked for two hours straight? Your birthday party?

Too many options, and the mind begins to spin again as nausea bears down on the backseat. If Peter would just get his snacks and get the hell out of Big Bat’s you could make it home without puking, no problem. Maybe one of his students is working the late shift, in which case you probably shouldn’t go in to get him. The sight of a drunken 3 am teacher from the school is a death blow to the reputation at any school, much less one where 90% of the students’ parents are diabetic and abusively alcoholic.

“I mean,” Bryan continues, seemingly unaware of your unresponsiveness, “it’s not like we had a fight or anything. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. It just went weird, you know? We should hook up again. It was fun.”

You stare at him for a moment. A flash to the night he invited you over to the Oglala pad, the night you decided a year of celibacy wasn’t in your future. A mistake, for sure, but one that could be made again for the sake of satiety. His form contorts as a deep hiccup issues from his throat. You roll your eyes and look away to see the door of the store opening, Peter emerging with Cheetos and Gatorade. “Thank GOD, dude,” you say as he opens the door, remembering a moment too late, as always, about how he views taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Sorry,” you mumble as he hands you a blue Gatorade.

And in a moment, with the car interior reeking of processed flour and cheese powder, Bryan crunching away and hiccupping as you nurse your drink and try to hold it down, you’re off again, into the blackness of the reservation night, rez dogs starting up by the side of the road and fading into the dark, the light of dawn approaching greyness from the East. Back up the hill to the volunteer house that’s not quite a home.

Oh, wait!

I know what to blog about! Check me out, I'm published TWICE this week!

Firstly, a while back I may or may not have made a big deal of having a short story accepted as part of an anthology called "Memoirs of Meanness." It's coming out THIS WEEK from Pergola Press, after much hemming and hawing over formatting and such. Dude, it's a BOOK. I don't have many details just yet but when I know more about where you can buy them and if/when/where there are any readings, I'll post up here.

Secondly, my friend Carlos and I had a talk the other day about surrealist fiction, so I sent him two of my stories. They're not relaly surrealist in the hardcore literary analysis way, but they're surreal nonetheless. So, turns out, he loved them! And he published on on his lit mag, The Whiskey Dregs! Check me out!

Ok, sorry to disappoint....

But I am TOO excited to write about my paranoia today.

Because...

I just found out I'm getting published!

Aaaaaaaah!

A story I wrote while I was living in Chicago, called "The Hair Cut" (which, to be honest, I don't even particularly like), has been selected for publication in a forthcoming book from Pergola Publishing called "Memoirs of Meanness." The book is a compilation of true and fictional stories, and according to the publisher is being picked up by book groups, and high schools as an anti-bullying aid. Apparently due to financial problems (who doesn't have them?), Pergola underwent a change in management over the past year, but has gotten back on track with its publication schedule. So the story, which I submitted last April, is going in. They say they'd like to print next month!

My story is kind of a two-sides-of-one-brain theme, where I have a narrator telling a story that she keeps messing up, and eventually another part of her brain comes in to help her finish it, and, well, that side is mean. Hence the story fitting into the book.

There's no pay involved, but there's prestige! Fame! Accolades! And I get to do publicity if there are any events.

So, screw paranoia! The Universe LOVES me today!

THe Old House by the Highway, pt. 6

We left the hospital the next morning around seven. I was in a full leg cast and had been given crutches, which would take me a while to figure out. I had been given a strong dose of serious pain medication and was grateful for the fog of indifference it had lowered over me regarding the night's evens. Monica hadn't said much beyond asking what had happened. I'd told her I'd fallen through the banister and had seen the goat again, and that seemed to be as much as she needed to hear. She'd just nodded and said, “I knew it,” then turned back to her magazine as the doctor came in. I was glad she'd let the issue go for the time being – I was in too much pain to have explained much more. I knew she would have believed me, but I think my silence told her just as much as the whole story could have.

We pulled up to the house and I started to ready my crutches. “No,” she said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “I'll just be a minute. Stay here and rest.”

I just nodded and let her go, too drugged to care much and relieved in my own cloudy way that I didn't have to go into the house. I may have fallen asleep, but it didn't seem very long before Monica emerged from the house with two duffel bags. She threw them into the backseat of the car, then dug into her pocket. She pulled out the hoof we'd found in the garden and had been keeping on the mantel. It seemed like years ago that we'd found it.

I watched her as she walked down to the highway, waited a few minutes, then ran across the four lanes in one dash. She stopped for a moment, looking at the hoof she held in her hand, then threw it far out into the river.

She came back to the car. “I've been wanting to get rid of that thing ever since we brought it in,” she said. “Gave me the creeps.”

She turned around and unzipped one of the pockets on the duffel bag behind her, then turned back around with a business card in hand. I craned my neck to look at it, but gave up when a nerve went shooting down my neck toward my leg. She tucked it into the dashboard in front of the odometer. “You get some more rest,” she said, and turned the car back on.

“Where are we going?” I mumbled.

“To get some answers,” she said. “Then to a hotel.”

I just nodded and let myself fall back into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

When I woke up again, we were parked outside an unfamiliar ranch style house. A large van sat next to us in the driveway. “J&J Plumbing,” it read along the side. The wording rang a distant bell, but my medication didn't really let me recognize it.

Monica was at my door, opening it and helping me onto my crutches. I got myself upright somehow and began the slow process of moving myself forward, following her up a slight incline toward a well-maintained yard. As I got going, though, some of the painkiller-and-sleep haze started to wear off and the name on the truck struck a chord in me. “We're at Justin's?” I asked blearily.

Monica nodded. “This sonofabitch knows more than he's telling. I'm asking him about the goats.”

She helped me hobble my way up the front walk, then rang the doorbell. There was no immediate answer, so Monica – always the insistent one – knocked on the door. It took a few minutes, but finally Justin, clad in morning stubble and a bathrobe, with a cup of coffee in his hand, answered the door. He looked at us through the screen door, puzzlement and wariness mixing on his face. “Well hi, folks. Didn't think I'd be seeing you again so soon. What can I do for you?”

Monica smiled, but her voice was hard. “Can we come in, please, Justin? We need to talk to you about last night.”

He hesitated, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Last night? I… uh... Was I drunker than I remember?”

Monica smiled again and opened the screen door. “No, not at all. Nothing like that. But we do need to talk.”

He looked over his shoulder again, then shrugged and opened the door for us. Monica thanked him and as I hobbled by I smiled resignedly. Justin’s eyebrows rose as he realized I was on crutches. “Oh my god, I'm sorry,” he said as I passed into the well-kept living room. “I didn't see that... Are you ok there, Ed? What the hell happened to you?”

Monica closed the door behind her. “That's what we're here to talk about. Could we sit down somewhere?”

“Sure, sure,” he said, his bemusement growing as he looked from her to me and back. “Why don't we go into the kitchen and I'll get you two some coffee. You look like you've had a long night.”

He led the way and I settled into a roomy wicker-backed chair at a large kitchen table. The room was decorated with pictures and ornaments of chickens. I was vaguely grateful they weren't some other barnyard animal. The sound of a running shower came from somewhere down the hall.

Ed settled into the chair at the head of the table after handing us two brimming cups of delicious smelling coffee. The scent of it kicked my brain another gear toward functionality. I took a sip.

Monica looked at hers for a moment, then straight at Justin. “Justin,” she said sternly. “Ed fell down the basement stairs last night when the banister broke. He landed on a pipe and broke his leg.”

Justin nodded soberly. “Well I'm mighty sorry to hear that,” he said, shaking his head. “Those stairs are tricky, I’ll give you that.” I could hear that he meant it, but there was an edge to his voice. I think he was afraid we'd ask him to compensate us for the medical expenses, since he'd installed the banister.

Monica smiled. “Well we’re certainly not blaming you,” she said warmly. “It could have happened to anyone. But we do need you to be honest with us about something.”

Ed looked down into his coffee, as if he knew what was coming.

“What happened in that basement, Justin? There is something not right happening down there and we need to know what it is. It’s not just the smell anymore and I think you know what we mean.” When he was silent for a moment, she continued: “Ed wouldn’t have been going down there in the first place if it was just the smell bothering him.”

Justin nodded, gathering himself before he looked up and spoke directly to me. “I should've told you folks, I suppose,” he began slowly. “But, frankly, I'm something of a skeptic, and I guess I was just hoping it wouldn't ever become... an issue.” He looked at Monica, then took a sip.

“My father,” he continued, “was real eccentric, like I told you last night. And, like I said, as he got older, he started keeping animals as pets that should never have been let in that house. He had pigeon roosts and chicken coops inside, some wallows for pot-bellied pigs out back. I told you about his fox. He had a donkey or two out there from time to time, even some giant godawful lizards. I don't even know what all he had most of the time ‘cause the place smelled awful, and with my allergies I could hardly be there ten minutes without sneezing my head off.”

He took another sip.

“Well, one day I went over there and he had a new 'pet.' A big old billy goat he called Rex. He was just in love with that thing, Lord knows why. The animal smelled terrible, just crapped anywhere it felt like it, and chewed on everything in the house. Just a lousy animal. But Dad had a soft spot for it. Kept it at his side all the damn time. Let it go anywhere it wanted.” He shook his head. “The next time I went over there was a few months later, and, well, he'd started up a whole herd of goats! A whole damn flock of 'em. Must have ten, fifteen goats roaming through his house.” He chuckled derisively, then looked at me.

“I mean, can you imagine? An old man, in his seventies, living in a house with a pack of goats! And the damn things are dumb as a box of nails – can't walk down stairs but they can damn well walk up 'em. And here's my old man, who thinks they're the be-all, end-all of domestic pets, and he’s carrying eighty, ninety-pound animals down flights of stairs when they get themselves stuck at the top.” He took a long sip. “I told him, I said, 'Dad, you can't keep doing this. Those animals would be better served living outside where there ain't any stairs.’ I said, ‘You're gonna fall down one of these days and break your damn neck.' I offered to build a shed outside for them to sleep in, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said something about how his babies were worth the risk. I just left. Couldn't stomach the thought of my father living like that. Had to get away, you know?”

He looked down into his coffee again, as if the scene were playing out on its surface, then started speaking again, softly. “Well,” he said, “it didn't take long for the locals to give him that nickname I told you about, and damned if I didn't join in. Some things are tough to face like a man. I should've gone over there and built him a shack for the damn things whether he liked it or not, forced him to listen to me, but it seemed like his dignity was already near gone. I didn't want to go bossing him around, taking the last of it away, you know?”

I nodded when he looked up, but he looked away again, out through the glass doors onto a patio where a large grill shone in the morning light. “After a few weeks I went back over there to check on the old man, and... I couldn't find him anywhere. Him and his goats, just nowhere to be found. The chickens were there, and the dogs and the cats sniffing at 'em like they hadn't been fed in ages. But no goats and no ‘Old Goat Man.’ But his old station wagon was there. I let myself into the house and... well... you know that smell you were telling me about. I hope to hell it ain't ever been as bad for you folks as it was when I walked in there. Smelled like animals and their shit and something rotten. I went down there and...”

He sighed and looked back at us, his eyes filled with sorrow. “There was my old man, dead in the corner. His leg was broken.” He nodded at me. “Just like yours. The bone was sticking up through his skin and all that. And he was... he was gone, must have fallen down there and couldn't get back up and wasted away, or maybe hit his head, too. Probably carrying a goddamn goat down there for something. And all those goddamn goats were down there with him. Stupid bastards followed him down the stairs, except of course they can't walk down stairs. So they' all fell. And they all broke their damn legs, too, falling down the stairs. So none of 'em could get the hell back up! And they...” He shut his eyes against the tears. “By the time I got there they'd started...”

I held up my hand to stop him. I knew what he was about to say and I didn’t need to hear it. But he shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “They’d already gotten to eating him. My old man. Goats'll eat just about anything if they get the notion... and not just that, but they got the taste of meat and it looked like they started going after each other down there, too.” He opened his eyes again. “It was like something out of a horror movie, I tell you. All these dead goats laying around, and my old man, stripped down to bones in some places, with the live ones mostly limping around like zombies, all covered in blood...”

He stopped talking and swallowed, then took a few bracing gulps of his coffee. He looked back at Monica and me. “I should've known better, really, than to try to cover it up. I had a closed-casket funeral for him, told everyone he'd died in a farming accident and left it at that. Nobody except me and the coroner and undertaker knew what'd happened. I got all those goats and carcasses out of there, and I just hoped if I fixed the place up, there'd be no need to tell anyone. Just get it off my hands, you know. It's a nice house, structurally, and all.” He paused. “I should've known something like that would leave a mark on a place. You can't expect that kind of thing to just go away. But I've never been one to believe in ghost stories and all, so I just hoped... I should have at least put a new basement in, with a decent floor and lighting, but I just... I couldn't bring myself to go down there any more than I had to. I just left it.”

He looked right at me. “I'm awfully sorry, Ed,” he said. “I should've known better.”

I just nodded. It all made so much sense when it was said aloud. I'd been right all along but hadn't been able to voice it. Monica put her hand over mine on the table.

* * *

We sold the house shortly thereafter and were able to negotiate to be released from the mortgage. We moved back to the city, our experience with rural life having scarred us both for good.

We never found out if he told the next buyers about what had happened to his father or to us, but when we came back to check that everything was out, a cement floor had been poured in the basement and a new wall was being put up over the old stones.

It still smelled terrible.


THE END!

The Old House by the Highway, pt. 5

I froze, my mind hitting a brick wall of terror for a moment before I closed my eyes and tried to breathe evenly, willing myself to calm down and for the animal to disappear along with my fear. It probably was all in my head, I remember thinking over and over. Not real. Not real. But when I opened my eyes again, it hadn't moved, and it hadn't disappeared. In the darkness, I saw its short, tufted tail flick from side to side as it tilted its head and sniffed at me. The stink was overwhelming. A piece of flesh fell to the ground, fur coated in charnel.

Suddenly my brain snapped into action, propelling me forward down the stairs in a quick change of heart. I was suddenly furious. This four-footed tyrant had been ruling my life in my own damn house, and I didn’t care whether he was really there or not. “You son of a bitch!” I shouted, hurtling myself down the stairs with one arm raised, fist pumping. “You goddamn goat! Get the hell out of my house!” In my rage I misjudged the distance to the next step and slipped. I found myself falling backward, twisting as I fell, and then landed hard on my butt on the stairs. I grimaced, turning my face away from the goat for just and an instant as I tried leverage myself up using the banister. There was a splintering sound, and the banister gave way beneath my hand as I realized in horror that I was going with it. Into the darkness and the stench and the sinister sounds of movement with no source. I heard the goat on the stairs bleat, and then my vision went white with pain as my shin landed on something hard that did not give way beneath my weight. My right foot went numb while the rest of my leg exploded in agony. I yelped and struggled to push myself into a sitting position. My leg was throbbing, screaming in pain, I was seeing a succession of stars and fireworks with each heartbeat. I touched the shin lightly with my hand, which came away wet with blood. I retched but stopped myself from vomiting, and tried to move my foot but felt nothing below the searing pain in my shin. It seemed I had broken my leg.

I sat still for a while, the pain and shock finally receding to a point from which I could try to get my bearings. I could see the light from the kitchen far away overhead and the outline of the staircase below it; I'd fallen almost straight down from the steps and landed directly to the right of the staircase. From memory I realized there was some metal piping running along the side of the staircase over here – I must have landed on it with my now-shattered shin. I'd have to get myself around to the bottom of the stairs and drag myself using the remaining intact banister. I didn't want to call Monica – if that goat was still around here somewhere she might very well pass out at the sight of it and fall down the stairs herself. I'd wait till I'd gotten myself up to the first floor.

Just then I felt something touch me gently on the shoulder. I whipped my head around in the darkness, my eyes finally adjusting, and came face to face with the goat. I felt my heart jump into my mouth, but somehow stifled a scream that would have brought Monica running. I tried to scramble away, but my leg reminded me in no uncertain terms that I was not going anywhere just yet. The goat balked at my movement and let loose a frightened “Baa,” but didn’t move away from me. He was literally only inches from my face, those bizarre eyes staring intensely into mine, his rotten breath fanning my face around his bloody prize. I stared back, my mind racing but unable to think of any escape over the agony in my leg.

After a few minutes, however, my brain slowly came around to observing the goat I was staring at. It was not the same goat. It was much smaller – its eyes were on a level with mine as I sat, panting, on the floor. And it wasn't spotted. I couldn't tell its color in the dark, but I could tell that there were no horns on its narrow head, and its fur was dark. Its nostrils flared as we regarded each other, then it turned abruptly and trotted off into the darkness. 2 goats. God, they were in cahoots down here. I shivered with pain and fear as I peered into the blackness where the second goat had disappeared.

I followed its vague form in the darkness until it moved through the rectangle of light falling from the open door at the top of the staircase, then gagged as I saw a gaping wound in the animal's side, near its hind leg. A huge red gash was hanging open, tattered flesh flapping around its glistening edges. Its sides and legs were smeared with blood. And, I realized as it moved back into the shadows, the thing was only using three of its legs... its back left leg hung useless from an obvious break just below the knee... had it fallen down the stairs too?

I continued to watch it as it made its way to a dark corner where, as my eyes adjusted, I realized with horror that there were more goats lurking back there, all in a group as if they were huddled around something. Their tails were twitching and their heads lowered, as if around a trough of food. I peered into the darkness, knowing instinctively that I didn't want to discover what they were doing, but I was unable to look away. The returning member of the group shoved its way into the fray, pushing out several others, which stood back and stared at each other stupidly, then turned slowly toward me with vague curiosity.

Through the gloom I could see that their hides were ripped open as well, in different spots and to different degrees, but even in the dark I could see blood and gore spilling from holes in their sides, necks, even faces. They all carried pieces of flesh in their mouth, their muzzles covered in blood, and many some had broken legs. I felt my brain getting fuzzy, approaching a state of fear and sensory overload – a scream was rising up my throat and I was hardly feeling any pain from my leg, so great was my desire to run. I forced myself to look away from the slowly limping goats, focusing as well as I could on getting up the stairs. I didn't want to know what they were all crowding around in that corner or why they were all bleeding. I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Knowing I should try to find a way to brace my leg, but too terrified to look around for the broken piece of banister or take the time to rip up my shirt, I began frantically dragging myself backward toward the base of the stairs. The pain was overwhelming as my leg trailed behind me, every clot of dirt or bump in the floor sending me into new reaches of agony, but I kept moving. I was trying to keep my head turned to look over my shoulder and avoid another unexpected run-in with an animal, but in my peripheral vision, the sight of the churning, twitching mass of bloodied goats in the corner drove me onward. The few that had turned toward me seemed to have lost interest and turned back toward the fray, and I could only hope that I could get to the stairs without attracting their attention again.

I had almost reached the stairs when I dragged my leg over an unexpected stone in the dirt floor. It bumped directly against my wound and I let out an involuntary gasp, then stopped still. They'd heard me, and for some reason this time they were interested. All motion in the corner stopped for a split second, then the bodies of the animals all seemed to turn in one motion, broken legs and open wounds all pushing into one another, smearing blood on fur, ears flopping, hooves stamping. This time I couldn't hold back a cry of fear, no longer caring what Monica saw if she could only get me out of the basement. With an act of sheer will, I flipped myself over, my leg sending splinters of white-hot pain through my body, and pulled myself up onto the fist step with my arms.

A few of the large, more curious goats stepped forward tentatively, their muzzles dripping gore from whatever poor thing they were eating. In the background I saw a large, horned animal whirl suddenly around on a smaller one and bite it hard, then pull away and actually rip a piece of its ear off before stepping toward me, chewing contentedly as the other stood strangely still and kept silent. There were at least six of them moving slowly toward me, nostrils flaring and lips twitching, dripping blood from their wounded hides and hideous mouths alike, all quietly breathing out that horrible stinking breath.

I closed my eyes and pulled myself up to the second step, exhausted but determined. The largest of the goats stepped onto the first step a few feet below me, dragging one broken back leg behind it in a limping, zombie-like motion. It belched, then sniffed at my left shoe lazily. I scrambled backward, the step above me grinding into my back as I tried to force myself up. I realized I was talking out loud as the goat slowly and casually followed my broken leg, which was still mostly on the ground as I struggled slowly upward. “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod...” I was repeating.

The goat began to nibble at the laces of my shoe and I felt my mind buckle. I let loose and screamed, praying silently for Monica to come rescue me. If I had been able to move my foot I would have kicked the animals away, but I was immobile and the blood dripping down my leg seemed to draw the animal on. I finally got myself to the third stair and saw my foot start to rise above the ground level. From somewhere very far away I heard Monica's footsteps coming down the stairs from the second floor.

The first goat was following me steadily, gnawing on my shoelace, and its friends were following it, two on the stair behind it sniffing the air. They moved slowly and steadily, my foot out of their reach at last. I grasped onto the frantic thought that maybe, with their broken legs, they wouldn’t be able to mount the stairs to follow me. I was still talking: “Ooooohmygodohmygodohmygod....” I tried to look away from the gore-covered animals, into the darkness of the basement, but immediately regretted the decision. They had all finally moved away from what they had been eating, enough that I could make out a vague shape in the dark corner. It was a human form there in the darkness, glistening with blood, quiet and still in the dark. It had to be...

I felt my head begin to swim, and the stars of pain I'd been seeing became clumps. I tried to pull myself up another step, but knew I was too weak. My vision began to fail and I realized vaguely that I was passing out from terror and loss of blood. The biggest goat jumped forward somehow onto the stairs and began to sniff the dribble of blood on my shin. My head dropped back onto the step behind it...

And then there was Monica behind me, her arms wrapping themselves around my chest. She was talking but I just let myself fall into her embrace. Somehow she got me up the stairs and closed the door behind us.

The Old House by the Highway, pt. 4

We were greeted heartily by the crowd of regulars we'd met the last time we'd been at the Almanac. We had a nice meal – I got a steak that beat anything I'd had in the city, and Monica had a salad the size of her torso – and a few drinks, and slowly felt ourselves unwinding. It was a load off to be away from the house, the smell, the creepy feeling the goat had left, and it was amazing to realize just how anxious we had been as the anxiety slipped away into the evening. Midway through our meal, I saw Justin, the son of our house's previous owner, walk in. We'd met with him a few times over the course of the buying process; he'd helped the realtor do the walk-through of the house and had negotiated a lot of the terms with us. I made a mental note to talk to him about the smell in the basement when we finished eating, to see if he'd heard anything about it in the past and had any hints. I thought of asking if he'd heard of anyone nearby missing a goat, but thought better of it. If I had been imagining it, everyone up at the bar would either think I was crazy or drunk.

When we'd finished and paid for our meal, Monica went to the bathroom and I headed up to the bar. I clapped my hand on Justin's back and said hi. He looked excited to see me, maybe a little sloshed. I hadn't been watching him, but he must have been sucking his lagers down pretty fast while we'd been eating.

“Hey, Ed!” he grabbed my hand and shook it energetically with both of his calloused hands. “Good to see you! How's Dad's old place treating you two? Is Monica here?”

“Yeah, she's in the bathroom. The house is great – as beautiful as ever.”

“Fantastic,” he said, slapping me heartily on the back. “Hey, let me get you a beer! What are you drinking tonight? And your lady, let me get her one, too.”

After the appropriate hemming and hawing over who should pay for whose drinks, Monica returned from the bathroom and we settled down next to Justin for a few rounds. He told us about his job and family. He seemed like a really decent sort of person, a “gentleman farmer,” I guess. He owned a plumbing company that had taken off in recent years, so he'd started raising some crops on the land he'd bought with the revenue from our house sale. He seemed happy.

I finally decided it was time to bring up my gripes, and to see if I could press him for more information on the house. If there was anything to the weird problems we’d been having, I thought he might be drunk enough to reveal it without thinking I was out of my mind. “Hey, Justin,” I asked as the bartender set another round before us. “I have to ask you something. You ever hear your dad tell of a nasty smell coming up from the basement of that old place? We love the house, but there's something foul down there that just makes it reek when the weather's warm.”

He paused, looking into his cup for a little while. Maybe a little longer than he should have. But he was pretty far gone. “Well, Ed,” he looked up at me. His eyes were wide. He looked like a cornered animal. “That's a... that's a real old foundation you've got under that house, you know. You knew that when you moved in. Lots of weird old smells in a dirt floor basement like that, in any house. Especially—“ he burped quietly “—especially near the river like that.”

“Oh, yeah, we know. It’s just pretty foul down there sometimes. We’re going to get a floor put in down there, but in the meantime, it'd be great if we had some advice on how to keep the smell down. Any tips?”

“Sure, sure,” he smiled broadly, relief evident on his face as if he’d dodged a very touchy subject. “Well, you know, that old place is bound to have its issues, you know. There could be a plumbing problem, of course, but honestly I don't think much of the piping runs down there. It's mostly outside into the septic...” He took a swig. “It might be more just the age of the place and the dank air, down there, you know. And yeah, the guy who built it was a butcher, you know. All those creepy meat-hooks in the basement. There are bound to be some unpleasant things hanging around after all that, even if it's just a bit of a stink...”

His eyes opened a bit wider as he said it and he turned back to his beer, very much in the manner of someone who had said too much. “I'd be happy to send some guys over there to look at the plumbing if you want,” he mumbled into his beer, then back at me with a wide, open smile. “Free of charge!”

“Oh, Justin, you don't have to do that,” Monica joined in. “We just thought it'd be worth asking about. If your dad had every mentioned the smell or what he did to keep it down, you know. We'll figure it out.” She laid a hand on my leg. When I looked at her, she gave me a piercing stare. She was suspicious of him, I could tell. Something about his behavior was more erratic than the beers he was downing could explain. I nodded.

“It sure is an old place,” I turned to back to Justin. “I love being somewhere with so much history. You don't get much of that in the city where everything's built over so fast.”

He nodded enthusiastically, happy about the change of subject. “Sure does have some history,” he said. “Hell, my dad used to tell me all kinds of stories about that place. Never sure I believed them, though. He was an eccentric guy, and I never spent a whole lot of time in there, what with all the animals.”

I felt Monica's grip on my leg tighten. “Animals?” I said as lightly as I could, my heartbeat picking up. “He had a lot of pets, huh?”

“Sure did,” Justin replied, shaking his head a little. “He was like Noah over there. I always had real bad allergies as a kid, so we never had pets even though Dad was a real animal lover. So when we were all grown up and he bought that place, he just went crazy. He had every kind of animal you can imagine at one time or another. Hell, I think he had a fox or something once. No idea where he got it.”

“A fox! What a thing to have for a pet!” I laughed, feeling Monica’s hand squeeze on my leg again. We were on to something here. “Did he keep it in the house?”

“Well, yes, and no,” he answered. “Most of the critters he had over there came and went as they liked. He had a big fence around the place so they didn't run off, but the door to the house itself was usually open so the animals could come and go as they pleased. He was like Dr. Doolittle over there.” He drank the rest of his beer in several gulps. I ordered him another.

“What a hoot,” I smiled at him. “I'm glad you rehabbed the place before we moved in! I love animals and all, but not in the house!”

He laughed as his next beer was set before him. “I hear you! I mean, if I didn't have allergies I'd be fine with having a dog or a cat inside, you know? But I could never have lived like that, will all kinds of animals in my house.” His face fell a bit, as his memories seemed to take on a more somber note. “Yeah, it was a real zoo. And I hate to say it – I mean I don’t want to be disrespectful to his memory – but by the time Dad passed on, he'd gotten a little strange with the animals. Had them everywhere, only one room of the house to himself and that was his bedroom. People round here...” he looked up and down the bar, then dropped his voice so the other patrons wouldn’t hear him. “They used to call him the ‘Old Goat Man.’”

I clamped my jaw shut to avoid looking too excited. “Really? ‘Goat Man,’ huh?” I goaded him on.

Justin nodded. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “He had so many of them. We tried to convince him to get rid of some of them, but he loved them like they were his own children. Like most people would love a cat or a dog. After a while, well, the damn goats nearly took the place over... Dad wasn't really all there at that point.”

I saw Monica straighten up on the other side of me, her eyes wide. Justin took a long drink, looking forlorn. Trying to salvage the conversation, I smiled again and held my glass up in a toast. “Hey, man,” I said, “at least he did things his own way. Not many people can say that, right?”

Justin looked up at me blearily and clinked his glass to mine, a smile spreading over his face. “You know, Ed, you're right. He did things his way. Here's to The Old Goat Man.”

“Cheers!” Monica and I shared a meaningful glance over our mugs as we toasted the Old Goat Man.

* * *

Monica and I drove home in silence, our thoughts obviously following the same trail as we wound our way back to the house over the country roads. None of the information we were mulling over had explained or helped our situation, and yet there it was, ringing in our ears. “The Old Goat Man. He had so many of them.” My brain was screaming at me that somewhere in Justin’s drunken intimations was an explanation. Maybe one of the goats had stayed in the woods nearby and come to visit its old home, that something logical had to come of this. But logic seemed to fail me every time I thought I’d explained it. My intuition was pushing away all my trains of thought, trying to force something else through: an explanation that wasn't even an explanation. Just a weird idea. Just nonsense. But it wouldn't go away.

When we pulled up to the house, Monica turned to me. “Ed,” she said seriously, “let's pretend, for now, that that conversation with Justin didn't happen. I just want to sleep and not think about it.” Her eyes were a mirror of my thoughts: confused and serious and tired.

I agreed. We went inside and, while Monica got ready for bed, I made myself a little snack of chips and salsa in the kitchen. “The damn goats nearly took the place over...” The words echoed in my head, and I shook it, refusing to let my thoughts continue down the path they were on. Instead I moseyed over to the basement door to let some of the reeking air from the basement out overnight. The door swung open, squeaking just a little. The smell hit me harder than I'd ever experienced it, sending me reeling away, gagging. My hyperactive brain tried to label it – decay, or droppings, or ... death. I shook my head again and forced the thoughts away once again, heading back to the kitchen.

No longer hungry with that smell following me into the room, I stared at my salsa, feeling nauseous. The house was almost silent, except for Monica's small noises from upstairs, but there was a murmur from the basement. I almost sensed it rather than actually hearing it – quiet movement, as if many feet were moving around on the dirt floor, shuffling. I couldn't be sure if I was really hearing anything or just letting my imagination run away with – No. No, that wasn't my imagination. That was a sound. Maybe the fetid air escaping upward. Or maybe…

Bullshit. I was making myself crazy over the drunken ramblings of a plumber whose dad had gone crazy and goat-happy. Mere coincidence, and I damn well knew it, even though my stomach was flopping around like a fish out of water with apprehension. I’d have to show my stomach who was boss and go down there, take a look around. Show it, and my growing fear, that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on here. Teach the hair on my neck to lie back down.

I took a deep breath and walked to the open doorway, holding my breath against the stench from below. I flicked the light switch on the wall. Nothing happened. The old bulb hanging from the ceiling down there must have blown out. Perfect timing. I took a deep breath through my mouth to avoid smelling the air, and took a few steps down before stopping to let my eyes adjust.

There were faint stirring sounds coming from below as before. Probably rats or bugs, I told myself. I peered downward, my hand tight on the railing and my every hair standing on end. My stomach flipped particularly violently and, then – there it was. That same goat. Standing a few steps below me. Chewing on the same piece of flesh and staring at me.

The Old HOuse by the Highway, pt. 3

I tip-toed in and approached Monica tenderly. “Babe,” I said softly, shaking her, “wake up, I need your help.”

She bolted up, eyes wide. She hadn't fallen back asleep, it seemed. “What happened?” she whispered frantically. “Are you ok? Where's the gun?”

I realized she was shaking, her eyes huge and her hands gripping the sheets white-knuckled. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Everything's fine,” I smiled. “There wasn't anybody out there. ...Kind of.”

“Kind of? What do you mean kind of?” She dropped the sheet to her lap.

“Well, there was something there, but it wasn't an intruder.” I felt ludicrous saying this. “It was... It was a goat.”

Her shoulders, which had been up at her ears in anxiety, dropped, and her frightened look was replaced by one of annoyance. “A what?”

I shrugged. “I don't know how it got in here, honey, but there's a goat in our spare room. You heard him clopping up the stairs. Not a burglar.”

She just looked at me for a while, probably trying to determine if I was lying. I just shrugged again. Finally she looked away. “Stupid farm country. I should've known this would happen eventually. Move to the country, get broken into by a barnyard animal. Ridiculous.” She shook her head and laid back down.

I touched her shoulder again. “No, honey, don't go back to sleep. He's still in there and we've got to figure out how to get him down the stairs.”

She rolled over to look at me with contempt. “I don't know how to do that,” she said.

“I know, but neither do I. He's pretty big. This is going to take two of us.”

She made a disgusted noise and threw back the covers. “Oh, for Christ sake. Fine, show me the goddamn goat.”

We headed across the landing together, with me silently praying that the animal had put down the bloody flesh.

I stopped at the doorway and looked back at her, motioning to keep quiet. “My plan is to stay quiet so he doesn't take off running,” I whispered. “Then we'll have to grab him, maybe by the horns, and pull him to the stairs. And we'll just go from there. I'll go around this pile of boxes to the right, you go left. We'll come at him both ways.”

She nodded wearily.

We slipped into the room and separated. I got that same apprehensive feeling I'd had the first time. The hair prickled on the back of my neck and my forearms as I moved slowly around the room, listening for any sounds from the animal, but all I heard were Monica's feet shuffling around the stacked boxes from the other side. I heard no clopping, no snuffling, no chewing. He must be holding still, waiting for us somewhere in the dark. Suddenly I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye and jumped around a corner to find myself facing Monica again. I whirled back around, thinking maybe I had overlooked him, but I knew that if neither of us had seen him in our circuits of the room, he must not be there. He was too big to miss. Maybe he had left while I was getting Monica, although I hadn't heard his hoofs clattering down the hallway to the spare bedroom.

“He must have gone somewhere I else,” I said, shrugging. Monica's face was pale, her eyes wide. She must have shared my unexplainable unease. Even if the intruder was an animal, I supposed, it was still unsettling to know it had gotten into your house while you were asleep. Especially if the intruder was a carnivorous, blood-covered quadruped.

“Let's check the other rooms,” I instructed, trying to ignore the flipping of my stomach. “You take our bedroom, although I doubt he could have gotten in there without us noticing. I'll take the other spare room. Shout if you find him, and close the door till I get there.” She nodded slowly, the ridiculousness of the situation weighing on her, and we went to check our respective rooms. I shut the door to the store room firmly to be sure the goat wouldn't re-enter.

I went to the other bedroom, which we'd fitted up with a bed and dressers for guests. Tiptoeing in, fully expecting to find the bastard chewing on our 300-count sheets, I scanned the dark room for signs of the beast. It was difficult to see in the shadows, but I didn't sense any movement except my own breathing and pounding heart. I felt my hair begin to stand up again, though, and my stomach somersault in the now-familiar apprehension of the animal's presence. I switched on the light and squinted, and simultaneously felt the goat brush by my leg on its way out the door. I spun around and leaned into the darkened hallway, my eyes scrambling to adjust, but saw nothing except moonlight streaming in from the window on the landing and the open bedroom door. Had it just been an air-pressure change, or my own hyped-up senses fooling me? I looked back into the spare room. Nothing. My blood was rushing in my ears, but still I was sure I'd have heard the clopping of its hooves on the hardwood floors if it had been there.

Shakily, I closed the door and made my way to the master bedroom, where I found Monica looking confused, as well. “It's not in here,” she said from the edge of the bed where she sat. “It's weird, though. I'm like... terrified right now. I feel like I just got in line for a rollercoaster or something. I’m kind of freaked out.”

I sat down beside her and put an arm around her. “Me too,” I admitted. “It's weird to think that an animal could just wander in. I guess we'll have to be more careful from now on.” She leaned on me and I felt her heartbeat racing, her chest heaving, like my own. I patted her on the shoulder. “Well, it's got to be here somewhere and we've got to get it out before it breaks something, or eats something. I hear goats will eat anything-” I got a snapshot vision of that piece of flesh dripping blood and clotted fur onto the floorboards. I shook my head again to get the vision out, my breath catching as I did so. I set my shoulders and stood up, helping Monica to her feet. “It must have gone downstairs.”

We searched every room in the house, twice. Even the basement, which had started to reek of whatever-it-was again, musty and unexplainable and disgusting. We turned on all the lights and looked in every corner, went back upstairs to double check, and shone a flashlight around the attic. But the animal was nowhere to be found. My heart was in my throat the entire time, the memory of the bloodied chunk of meat and those unsettling yellow eyes on mine keeping my adrenaline pumping. Even more unsettling than the animal's conspicuous absence was the fact that both our front door and the side door were closed and locked. The doorknobs themselves were locked and the deadbolts drawn. Even if the goat had had opposable thumbs, he couldn't have gotten into the house. Unless we had been so drunk that we had let a blood-smeared quadruped into our house when we walked in – which we had definitely not been – there was no way to explain its presence.

Maybe I had still been asleep when I'd seen it – maybe I had had a waking dream. But I couldn't forget the distinct feeling I'd had of its presence, the hairs on my neck prickling, the flips of my stomach. I knew the difference between dreams and reality. That thing had been real. I couldn't explain it. But I told Monica it must have been a dream, that I must have thought I saw something that wasn't there. I'm not sure she believed me, but the alternative explanations for what had happened were so bizarre that we both allowed ourselves to believe it, at least enough to go back to sleep.

* * *

The next few weeks passed quickly. I was busy at work and had been spending long hours at the office. Monica, upset by the goat incident, had been spending a lot of time out of the house as well, running errands and gardening during the day. Her unease in the house was compounded by the smell from the basement, which seemed to be getting worse every day. It was midsummer, and the days were hot and humid, so smells were magnified. Especially so close to the river where the ground was damp and the air more humid than elsewhere, it made sense, but understanding why it smelled so bad didn't make being in the house any more pleasant. We called a local flooring company about pouring cement down there, but we had a month-long wait until they could come out to the house.

One day I came home late from work to find Monica sitting on the porch with a stricken look on her face. She was dirty as if she’d been in the garden, her gloves beside her on the floorboards as she wrung her hands. She looked like she had been crying. I settled beside her on the porch without saying a word, and she clung to me, shaking, then burst into tears.

“Monica, Monica, hey, what happened?” I stroked her hair as she heaved giant sobs into my shoulder.

“The.... the goat -” she gasped. I felt a chill go through me. Not this again. “It – it got back in... into the house! It's in there! I – I saw it!” A giant sob wracked her shoulders. “And... I tried to get it out. I tr-tried to get in, b-b-but it locked the door! It l-locked the damn dd-oor and...” Another sob. “I've b-been out here f-for hours! And... and I'm scared!”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I patted her back and held her to me. “What do you mean, you saw it? Where did you see it? How did it lock you out?”

She sobbed a few more times. I knew she was probably getting tears and snot all over my work shirt. “I heard a n-noise, like... like a noise a goat would make, you know?” She seemed to be collecting herself. “A-and I was in the garden. And I looked at the house and I saw it. A-at the window in the spare bedroom, just looking right back at me!” She sniffled and sat up, wiping at her face with the back of her hands. She squared with me and continued, the sobbing subsiding. “So I ran to the door and it was locked. And my keys are inside! So I've just been sitting here and waiting. And I haven't seen it again, or heard anything from inside. But... but I saw it up there. I know it's in there, probably eating things, and breaking things, and... and I don't know why, but it's just like last time, I'm scared of it. How did it get in there?”

She leaned against me, done crying, but still drawing in giant breaths. I rubbed my hand along her arm. “I'm sure there's some explanation, babe,” I said, knowing in my head that I couldn't think of a single one. “Don't worry, I have my keys, and we'll go in and look around.”

She looked up at me, tears welling back up in her eyes. “B-but what if... what if it's like last time and we can't find it? I'm just... I don't know what to think... I don't think I can take that again.”

I nodded. “I don't know what will happen, but I bet we'll find him in there somewhere. A big goat like that can't disappear twice, right?”

She nodded, but the look in her eyes must have mirrored my own. We were both nervous. We took a few deep breaths, then I unlocked the door and we entered quietly, locking the door behind us to block the animal's escape route. We separated like we had before, our hearts both beating fast and our senses running on high. I have to admit, I was on edge. The animal's presence was so unexplained and unsettling. I’m the kind of person who likes knowing how and why things happen, especially in my own house, and yet this goat thing was totally beyond me. It was possible that I had been half-asleep when I thought I saw it the first time, and that maybe my story had upset Monica so badly that she'd locked herself out and imagined she had seen it, too. But something rang false with that explanation, and that same something made the idea of it seeing it again unsettling.

We searched the entire house, and to neither of our surprise, we found nothing. No traces of an animal having been there, and certainly no goat. Nothing was out of place or chewed up or broken. In fact, nothing even hinted that a large hoofed animal might have passed through. Monica and I finally reconvened in the kitchen, where I cracked open two beers to help us calm our nerves.

She looked at me earnestly from across the kitchen table while I took a long gulp. “Ed, I don't like this,” she said. “Something's not right here.”

I stopped myself from nodding. “Well, let's face it,” I replied. “We've both had a bad scare. What happened that night was bizarre, and we've both been on edge because of the basement smelling. Our eyes and our brains must be playing tricks on us. There's no reason to be so upset. I'm sure things like this happen all the time.”

She shook her head. “I know what I saw, Ed. There was a goat upstairs.”

I sipped my beer. “Well, I thought I knew what I saw, too. But it just can't be what actually happened. It's impossible for an animal that size to be prowling our house without us finding it, or at least some evidence of it, Monica.”

She crossed her arms and stared at me.

“Well,” I pushed on, “think of it this way. We've just made a giant transition in our life together, you know? We're both a little scared of being out in the country for the first time. And I mean, if you put it all together, the night I thought I saw it, we'd just come back from the bar, where the locals were telling us about all the farms in the area. I mean, it's perfectly logical that our nerves were more on edge than we realized and we just kind of freaked out together. And I know you were upset by it... maybe we're just feeding off each other's fears. Maybe we need to just calm down a little.”

She was shaking her head between sips of beer. I stumbled on: “Who knows, maybe this smell from the basement is some sort of gas that’s interfering with our brains somehow. Radon, or whatever it’s called. We’ll get it checked out. I bet that once this flooring gets put in and we're more settled, this will all go away, and we'll laugh at ourselves for it.” Even as I heard myself talking, I didn't quite believe it.

Monica was quiet for a minute, thoughtfully peeling the label off her beer bottle. “Ok,” she finally said, leveling a piercing look at me. “Here’s a question: What did the goat you saw look like?”

The image of the beast, grizzly scrap dangling from its maw, its face and body streaked in blood, popped into my head so clearly I almost choked on my mouthful. But I pretended to have to think about it for Monica's benefit. “Wow, it's getting kind of fuzzy now, like a dream or something...” I sipped my beer and peeked at Monica. She did not look convinced. “Well,” I said, wiping my mouth, “I guess it was pretty big, at least up to my waist. And it had horns... not big curly ones or anything, but pretty serious horns. And floppy ears. And it was black and white, not spotted, but blotchy, almost like a cow. You know, just a normal goat.”

Monica waited while I avoided her eye, her stance assuring me that she was about to say something I found unpleasant. When I was finally looking her in the eye, she said slowly and distinctly: “That's exactly what I saw. It was the same goat.”

I shrugged, “Well that makes sense, I mean if we're both unsettled by all this, of course you'd imagine seeing what I saw, right?”

She picked up her beer. “But Ed, you never told me what you saw. We didn’t talk about what it looked like.” She threw back her head and took a few big swallows.

I wanted to argue, but I knew she was right. I'd never described the animal to her. She'd never asked. We stood in silence for a few minutes, nursing our beers. I didn't know what to say, and she knew that she'd made her point.

Finally I put my empty bottle down. “Hey, why don't we go to the Almanac and have dinner and a few drinks? Just get out of here and relax, and see some of our new bar buddies. I bet it'll get our minds off the goat, and that's exactly what we need.”

She looked as if she wanted to argue, but there really was no point. We weren’t going to get anywhere by debating who saw what. So she agreed and headed upstairs to take a shower while I tried to figure out what could be happening with the mystery goat. By the time she was ready to go 45 minutes later, I had still not come up with an answer.

The Old House by the Highway, pt. 2

A few weeks later I came home early from work to find Monica in the garden. She'd been working at it steadily, turning up the dirt in patches and planting a little at a time. First carrots, then cabbage and onions, then some string beans and squash. Being so close to the river, she told me, the soil was exceptionally rich. Dark and soft and full of moisture, as if it had been fertilized for years. Monica was bound to have a full harvest this fall, and she could hardly be more excited. She'd always wanted a garden in lieu of the pets we could never keep because of my allergies. She needed something to care for, something to divert her maternal instincts for the time being. We'd started trying for a baby almost the moment we bought the house, but had had no luck yet.

I loved coming home and seeing her out there - no floppy hat, but sometimes a bandana or baseball cap. She’d be all dirty and sweaty and beaming with pride in her work. So satisfied and confident. The woman I’d married years ago, sweated away the hot city nights with in our cramped apartment, dreaming of one day when we’d have space and grass and a garden. Here she was, on her knees in the middle of our success, and I thought then that I hadn’t loved her this much since the moment we said our vowels. But the wait had been worth it. She was beautiful. She was on her knees facing away from me, with her trowel in her left hand, sitting still as if examining something or deep in thought.

She didn’t move beyond cocking her head from one side to the other as I walked up the hill toward her, and she started violently when I tapped her on the shoulder. She turned her face up at me, a puzzled expression revealed in the late afternoon light. “Look what I found,” she said thoughtfully, stretching her hand up to me and dropping something hard into it.

It was small, hard and smooth, not as heavy as a rock, but harder than wood, covered with dirt. It was small enough to fit in my hand easily, rounded but with a split down the center, with one side flat and the other rounding off irregularly in a protrusion of a slightly different, harder material. “What is it?” I asked. “A root or something? Like a tuber?”

She shook her head, looking as confused as I felt. “I don’t know. I dug it up trying to plant pumpkins. It wasn’t too far down, but it doesn’t look like any plant I know of. Look at that stuff on the top,” she pointed to the pock-marked, harder material above the split section. “It looks like… well, like bone. I think it’s a part of an animal!”

I stopped turning it in my hand, looking more closely. “But what part? I mean, what bone looks like this?” I pointed at the split section, knocking my fingernails against it gently.

She shook her head. “No idea. Let’s take it inside.”

I didn’t really want to bring a random animal part in the house, but my curiosity was piqued, so we brought it in and did an extensive internet search on animal bones. It took us some time, since we ended up at a lot of university websites with unintelligible biology jargon, but we eventually identified it as part of a hoof belonging to a cloven-hoofed animal of medium stature. Probably a sheep or a goat. Monica was a little unsettled by it at first, but we both realized that the basic structure of the house was over a hundred years old, and the people who’d lived here back then were sure to have some animals. Hell, a butcher had built the place. Finding bones made sense, even if it was a little creepy.

Having gotten past my initial hesitation, I convinced her that we should keep it on the mantel in the living room as a reminder of our house’s past. We washed it a few times and when it dried out, it was actually kind of beautiful.

* * *
The next weekend Monica and I made our first outing to the local bar, "The Almanac." We hadn't had a chance yet to meet many of our neighbors and didn't know what to expect, so we were a little nervous that we’d find ourselves surrounded by rednecks. But most of the people there were friendly while they weren’t exactly rednecks, they were certainly the salt of the earth. It was refreshing to meet people who could give Monica gardening hints, and provide home improvement advice for me; in the city we'd have been met with confused looks and suggestions of who was the best person to hire. And they knew how to be hospitable, and how to drink.

We ended up being there much longer than expected, listening to stories about the area and how it had been changing over recent years. There were still farms around, they said, but not like there used to be. Most of the old farmers had passed away or been shut down by the bigger operations. Most of the area was now suburbanites and gentlemen farmers who liked dealing with crops or animals, but who made there real money elsewhere. We were a little to drunk to feel guilty about our gentleman-farmerly ways at that point, and when we finally got home late we passed out sprawled across our new bed.

I woke up sometime in the night to feel Monica smacking me in the back. Groggy and still inebriated, I grunted a few times and swatted her hand away, but she was persistent. Eventually the fog in my head cleared enough to hear her. She was whispering urgently, almost hissing: "Ed, Ed, wake up! There is someone in the house! There is someone in the house, wake up! Oh Jesus!"

My heart stopped. Those are words I hadn’t wanted to hear. I sat up slowly and put finger to my lips to quiet her. But I heard nothing. Monica was sitting up straight, the covers pulled up high, her eyes so wide they reflected the moonlight off the river. "I don't hear anything," I mouthed.

She shook her head. "I heard something downstairs. Someone walking. I swear I heard it. Go check!"

I started to argue with her, my head spinning a little with fumes form the booze, but just then there was a creak from the staircase, and a loud thud. I sobered up. Monica seemed to get smaller beneath the blanket, her eyes opening wider as she nodded frantically at me. The thudding continued, certainly but unsteadily making its way up the stairs. It sounded like at least two people in heavy boots. As I slipped out of bed and moved toward the sound, I vaguely wondered why burglars wouldn't take pains to stay quieter as they approached the bedroom in a sleeping house. They were being ridiculously loud. Then I realized that maybe they didn't intend to sneak through the house and rob us. Maybe they meant to hurt us, even kill us.

My heart stopped when this thought occurred to me, and I forced myself to keep moving toward my dresser. I opened the top drawer and withdrew my handgun from beneath the socks. I heard Monica draw a quick breath behind me, but I was focused on the noise outside. The slow, faltering clatter of feet on the stairs. The growing certainty that those footsteps were aimed toward my wife with ill intentions. I tried to block out the mental images that sprang up of Monica, bloodied and broken... I cocked the gun.

Monica had argued against me buying it, but ownership of our new house had sparked a protective instinct in me. I was glad now that I had the cool metal in my hand, the surprising weight of the weapon reassuring in the dark night. I glided silently across the bedroom floor to stand behind the door, every sense piqued. The intruders were near the top of the staircase now, their loud, clumsy footsteps obviously intent on reaching the landing just outside my door. I tensed, waiting for the perfect moment to spring, one hand resting lightly on the doorknob, the gun heavy in the other, every muscle tensed and every hair on end. I could hear Monica trying to breathe quietly but trembling on the bed behind me.

The footsteps reached the landing and stopped. Letting my mind go blank for a split second, I exploded through the door, yelling something out of a police drama. I don’t know what I said exactly, but I found myself on the landing, gun straight out in front of me in both hands and aimed at where I expected the chest of the intruder to be. It took a few seconds for the adrenaline to clear enough for me to notice that there was no chest in front of the gun. No person in front of the gun at all. My over-stimulated brain stopped working for a moment, confused.

I lowered the gun and looked down. It was a goat. A big, stupid-looking, black and white goat with small horns and big floppy ears. It looked at me for a moment, uninterestedly chewing on something. I stared back at it, stunned. The adrenaline was still buzzing in my ears, but my embarrassment at having gotten so worked up over the animal buzzed louder. I shook my head at it. The goat made a small bleating noise and shook its head, too, then clopped away from me and into the spare bedroom we’d been using for still-packed boxes. I gaped after it. A goat. No way.

I scratched my head, the alcohol swimming back into focus as my brain tried to wrap itself around what had just happened. My brain, detached, informed me that the four hooves on the stairs explained why I’d thought it was two loud, evil-intentioned men. I found myself nodding in assent. But wait. Hold on. How in God’s name had that thing gotten in? I tried to remember if I had locked the door – hell, if I had even closed the door – when we’d come home. I had been drunk, but definitely not drunk enough to have forgotten something as simple as that. I didn’t have a clear memory of it, but there was a possibility I’d left it unlocked. Maybe it just hadn’t been closed the whole way and the goat had head-butted its way in. I’d heard goats did the head-butting thing.

Just then I heard a clatter from the spare room, as the goat sounded like it ran into something large and wooden. I realized I’d better get it out before it started head-butting our possessions; never mind how it got in. I tiptoed over to the door and peeked into the room. No sign of the animal, but the room itself was eerie in the moonlight, stacks of boxes piled higher than my head and vaguely shaped furniture covered in sheets. No sign of the goat. I felt a cold shudder pass through my body as I realized I was apprehensive about facing the goat. Its mysterious presence in the house made it seem almost as formidable an enemy as the human intruder I’d expected. And anyway, I knew nothing about goats or their habits. The thing could rush at me, horns lowered, and gouge me to death, or somehow get into the master bedroom and do the same thing to Monica. I heard a soft sound from the corner, maybe its furry side rubbing up against a box. The sound sent chills through me.

I crept into the room, senses running high as the leftover adrenaline from earlier kicked into action. I set the gun down on a box nearby as quietly as possible and stood perfectly still. From across the room I could hear an almost steady succession of noises from the animal, the clatter of its hooves on the wood floor as it moved about, a constant chewing noise as it chomped on something (probably our dish towels, the bastard!), a subdued snuffling. I came around an old wardrobe we’d been pondering selling and saw its tail disappear behind a stack of boxes just ahead. I tiptoed forward, ready to spring, and crouched down to prepare myself. When I peered around the boxes I found myself face to face with the beast – it had turned around and, rather than sneaking up behind it, I was now starting into its strange eyes, both of us frozen in surprise. I’d never looked at a goat’s eyes before; they were yellow and vacant, with large, square pupils that contracted into rectangles as it stepped toward me, snuffling at my shorts around a large chunk of something in its mouth. As it got closer I remembered my intention and hunkered down to lunge at it, coming almost even with its mouth, and suddenly stifled a yelp as I leaped backward.

It was chewing on a piece of flesh! It wasn’t meat, exactly – it didn’t look like muscle, but it was certainly part of an animal. It was blloody and dripping, bits of hair falling in clotted chunks as the goat gnawed it lazily. The animal’s jaw was covered in blood, its bizarre rectangular eyes focusing on me as I found myself backing slowly away, horrified.

I turned the corner away from the goat and ran for the door, which I slammed shut behind me. I stood still, re-evaluating the situation at hand. How was I going to grab the goat without getting myself all bloody? For that matter, how was I going to get it down the stairs? I hadn’t even thought about it before, but the thing was pretty large, its head above my waist by a good six inches, and it would probably flail and bleat and kick and head-butt if I tried to pick it up. And, even if it didn’t put up a fight, the simple mechanics of getting a hundred-pound, hoofed animal down a flight of slippery wooden stairs in my socks was daunting. I had to rethink my strategy.

And, shit, I mean, a carnivorous goat? I’d always heard that goats would eat anything, but I had thought their diet was restricted to bizarre household objects and plants, and anyway, where had it gotten a bloody piece of hairy meat? Had it run down a neighbor’s dog? Grabbed a bite of roadkill from the highway? Wherever it had come from, I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with this bloodthirsty animal just now, particularly after the nonchalant way it had stared at me, unflinching, gnawing on some other furry animal’s hide!

Several moments of unproductive thought later, I shook my head and turned toward the bedroom. I’d have to get Monica to help; there was no way around it. I’d just have to hope she didn’t freak out about the blood.