A Goose With no Wings

The winds is brewing, the air is cool to the touch. The grass is greying. The flowers sink into the ground, waiting for winter to pass.

           The spiders and other insects move in with the humans, relying on luck and friendly hands for survival- human hands are rarely friendly to small creatures- maybe one day.

                                                                                                                        The geese will fly west, where the Earth isn’t too cold to mate, rest, and eat.

           Peppee looks at the sky, as her friends and their family move along. Her family is always last to leave.

“Why do we always fly last?!” Peppee’s little brother whines to their Papa and Mama.

“And why do you always ask questions that have been answered ?!” Papa snaps, wings raised, ready to pounce on the boy.

“You know traffic is nasty, son.” Mama jumps in between the two, facing the boy, using her body to block Papa’s chance to pounce.

“You spoil the boy.” Papa grumbles into Mama’s ear.

           Peppee ignores them, keeping her eyes on the sky. She could wait until morning to fly. The sky begins to darken.

                                                                                                                         Flying always made Peppee dizzy. She was often accused of not being a real bird or being a chicken in a goose’s body. “Chicken’s get eaten.” She was told. She sometimes wondered if she was a human.

           Papa calls humans: those naked things. He speculated, if humans could fly, they’d hunt all of the geese and other flying birds. He believes that anything that isn’t a goose, is a thing that wants goose meat for dinner. Some reason he doesn’t like the way the humans talk, walk, nor look at him. “If I could decide, this world wouldn’t have any humans!” He’d always shout after a groggy nap.

 But, Peppee knows better. She seen humans fly, one in her dream, and the other time, in real-life. Oh, Papa would no longer know how to fly if Peppee were to tell him.

She didn’t know where she was flying to or from, but it was to or from somewhere.

           The sun was sinking, the wind barely spoke, the clouds were orange, but the Night was far away.

           He caught her eye. A boy who’s skin was the color of dirt. Hair like leaves. He had wings! It wasn’t the wings that she has; the wings were clear like water, and slim like tree branches. They flapped slow, but graceful.

           He didn’t see her, but she was focused on him—mostly for caution—but she was greatly astonished. He didn’t fly like her, side to side; he flew higher and higher into the sky. He broke through the clouds. She thought that humans only knew how to function on land. He was beating her at her natural game, traveling at a height that her wings can’t flap through.

           Before he disappeared into a cloud, Peppee seen him holding another human’s hand. This human had no colored skin or hair, blending into the sky. She never knew this type of human existed. Where are they going? She wondered

           When they left, the sky darkened, and it began to rain. The wind howled Her wings stopped working. She woke up.

She tried to find those two humans. The day after the dream, she flew until her wings ached, eating nothing more than a few blades of grass. She flew until she hallucinated the two humans, and hallucinated until she was rattled by a booming sound of another flying human.

                                                                                                           The other geese call it a plane. One day while she was flying, Peppee overheard a flock speaking of this thing called a plane.

“And how do you know what it’s called?” A curious goose asked.

“Just trust me. Grandpa knows what he speaks about. I’m not lying to you.” The grandpa goose reassured.

“I just want to know, Grandpa.”

“Your grandfather knows what he speaks of, just trust him, kid.” Another adult goose said, speaking up for the kid’s grandpa.

           Peppee didn’t know what to think of what the grandpa was saying, nor did she understand why the other goose was so sure of what he was saying. She understood that adults are great at tricking a kid’s mind, a kid that didn’t question what they were told, until the adult became too annoyed to resist a truthful answer.  

“How do you know that its called a plane.” Peppee shouted.

           Everyone looked back at her. They whispered: who’s that girl?

“I mean..How do you know what it’s called, sir?”

           The grandpa goose smirked. “Welp, I’ll let the story begin.”

                                                                                                                                   He spoke of great history. How humans had a desire to fly, relying on brilliant minds to turn that desire into a thing that stood with the clouds. But those brilliant minds created things that would get stuck in a tree or would be destroyed before it left the ground.

           He admitted of something that was too story-like to be true. He said that two humans approached him and his brother..

“My brother Charles. My good old brother Charles!”

Two men, he said. They were brothers as well. They wanted to learn how birds flew the way that they did, without crashing into the ground.

“I admit. I didn’t want to help those humans. I didn’t want humans flying like birds.

“Why not?”

“THEY’RE HUMANS!”

“So why did you help?”

Peppee found the grandpa to be a greedy man when he revealed why he helped the human brothers.

“They offered us roots, seeds, and blades of grass that could feed the entire sky.”

Peppee was beginning to open her wings, believing that the grandpa was just another old man speaking of his mind’s story. But he said something that shuttered her wings.

“We didn’t just help because of those roots, seeds, and blades of grass. We helped because we understood that humans wanted to be something more than things that walked on the ground. They had a thirst for adventure; they admired us, just for that.”

“That’s it?!” A kid yelled, which the other kids agreed with. “Is that it?!”

           Peppee understood. She didn’t mind being a chicken in a goose’s body.