LJ Idol Week 11: Wild Goose Chase
It is a legend that has been passed down over the generations. No one really knows where it began or how it was started, but everyone claims they do. The neighbor busybody down the street says her great-, great-, great-grandmother knew the first family. The cashier at the local store swears her aunt’s aunt’s aunt knew someone who knew someone who was really there. The principal at the elementary school can convince anyone that his grandfather’s brother’s wife’s father saw this happen firsthand.
Is any of that true? Some will argue yes, others will laugh and say there is no way, but in the end, does it even matter?
As legends go, this one starts many, many, many moons ago in a small town nowhere near here.
It was a normal night - no strange storm appearing out of nowhere, no mysterious fog blanketing the tiny town, no unexplained wind picking up houses and animals and tossing them every which way. Just a calm, normal night. And on that calm, normal night, a little eight-year-old girl was painstakingly practicing her letters in the little room off the kitchen with the fireplace blazing.
The little girl’s baby siblings were asleep in their cribs and her mother was in the kitchen making stew for her father who had not yet returned from his hard work on the farm, when the little girl looked up and there it was.
The little girl’s mother came running when her daughter screamed. And screamed again. And again. And again.
The little girl was standing on the desk she had been practicing her letters on, pointing at the fireplace, screaming and screaming and screaming. Her siblings woke up and their screams added to the din.
The mother ran to the fireplace and then to the window but all she could see was one lone goose running away from their house.
The little girl was traumatized - she refused to eat, to speak, to sleep, to leave the desk where she had been seated when this all began. All she would do was sit at that little desk and stare at the fireplace - whether lit or not - shaking and occasionally screaming.
Her worried parents tried everything. They brought in every doctor for miles and miles around. They sought advice from preachers and teachers and even the man who owned the farm the little girl’s father worked on.
They tried to take the girl into the city, to see the mind doctors there, but she screamed and screamed and screamed and would not calm and her parents turned around halfway there, worried out of their minds.
What happened next changes by the person retelling the legend - some say the girl began to chant “Goose, goose, goose” and never stopped, others say that one night the mother moved her daughter away from the little desk and sat in the little chair herself and looked upon the crackling fireplace only to see an image of that same lone goose she had seen once before, running away from their house - but in all the legends, it always ends the same way.
The little girl eventually faded away, and the mother, in her grief and her despair and her anger, declared it was that goose who killed her daughter and she vowed revenge, and just days after her daughter was buried, she set out to find the goose responsible.
But the little girl’s mother was never seen from again.
Or was she?
What we do know is years passed, and the little girl’s father, once it became clear that the mother was not returning, took the little girl’s no-longer baby siblings and moved away into the big city, and the little house they had lived in was torn down to pave way for a bigger house and the little town became a bigger town as more people moved in and more houses were built and more stores were opened, and soon there was no one in the town who remembered the little girl or her mother or her father or her baby siblings, and the story people told of them grew bigger and bigger and more and more embellished until people believed that the mother had killed the daughter and then was killed by the father who escaped town to escape justice.
And this seemed like a plausible story to most people and they shuddered when it was mentioned, a stain on their now bigger town’s history but also something to tell to the visitors who wandered into Mel’s Diner or Gloria’s Salon.
But then, on another normal night, when the sky was clear and the stars were twinkling and the moon was a tiny crescent casting a soft yellow glow across the world, there was a man sitting on his porch, drinking his whiskey and taking in the warm night, when something happened.
No one knows what it was, but the man yelled. And yelled. And yelled. And the man’s wife came running outside, to see her husband still sitting on the steps of their porch, screaming in terror and looking off down the road that led to the main road through town, and the woman tried to calm him but he would not be calmed so instead she ran to the road - perhaps to flag down help, perhaps to search for a tiny piece of evidence to what was wrong - but what she saw made her convinced she was hallucinating, for she saw a lone goose running down the street away from her and behind the goose was a woman with long dark hair and in a dress that had not been worn in decades, and the woman was trying to catch the goose, to reach out and snag it, but the goose was always a little ahead, and the wife of the man would later swear that the woman behind the goose was screaming out “My daughter! My daughter!”
Now, you can guess what happened from here.
The man on the porch refused to eat, refused to speak, refused to sleep, refused to come back inside, just sitting on that porch and staring down that road and occasionally screaming, and the wife tried everything and called everyone but it was no use, until one morning she stepped out on to her porch to find her husband gone and she knew he had faded away.
And legend says she screamed into the morning air, “I will have my revenge!”, and then the wife, too, was gone, and was never heard from again.
And again the years passed, and the town grew bigger, and the man on the porch and his wife were forgotten, except for a notation in the town’s history books and people’s questioning of what really happened.
But just when the legend would have died out, it happened again. But this time it kept happening.
A teenager walking home from school, and her best friend who had stopped into the corner store to buy a cola when her friend started screaming.
An old lady in her bed and her husband who was making her breakfast downstairs in their kitchen.
A man swimming in his pool, and the neighbor who ran out when he heard the yell.
And each story ended as all the stories ended: The victim fading away, disappearing into nothingness, and the person who was there vowing revenge, never to be seen from again.
But through all this time, the town kept growing and became a city, and new houses were built and new stores were opened and new people moved in, and some people believed and a lot of people didn’t, but the stories swirled and grew and changed until no one really knew what had happened but everyone claimed they did.
But to this day, on normal nights, and sometimes normal days, someone occasionally sees a lone goose running through town and a mob of people running after it, and no one knows if it’s a hallucination or a dream or a ghost or a curse, but beware if you are the one to see this goose and these people, because it never ends well and you may find yourself chasing after a goose in a race you will never win.
Fiction. Or is it???
This was written for Week 11 of therealljidol. I hope you enjoyed it! If you would like to read more entries, you can head over here. Voting will come next week!