The Time You Brought a Goat Home

This week's story for paid subscribers is about the time you brought a goat home. I suppose I should apologise to free readers for writing a story about when you brought a goat home and then not allowing you to read it. But such behaviour is not unusual, these days.

Saturday's daily story refers to the simple way of sharing a cake fairly between two people, in which one cuts and the other chooses. If you would like to go down a cake-cutting rabbithole, please enjoy the Wikipedia article on fair cake-cutting. Here you may learn about "the Stromquist moving-knives procedure", and discover that you are only two clicks away from the article on unsolved problems in computer science. In such a world we can never run out of things to write about.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

It's a good life, being the King's poisoner. Well paid, with room and board on top, and the freedom to pursue my research, my healing. Very rarely am I called upon to poison anyone. We have other ways of handling such things these days. When I am needed, of course I serve. If I did not, another poisoner would, and who would make my medicines?

Tuesday

Not much changed after the accident, except that clouds only looked like clouds. There were no faces in the wallpaper or songs in the wind. At times I would lie my healed skull on the heather and look up at the shapeless clouds, and breathe in the moor, and the smell would remind me of nothing at all.

Wednesday

We all lined up for a turn touching the electric fence. The lining up was part of the bravado: pushing to go first, or laughing to show you weren’t scared while the boys in front of you shrieked. When it was my go, I laid my hand on good and firm, thinking it wouldn’t hurt any more, but I’d impress the others. I felt nothing. The fence was dead. But I yelped and snatched my hand back all the same.

Thursday

I was over the river with the chicken when the strangest thing happened. The fox took the sack of grain between its teeth and dragged it away. By the time I got the boat back over they were far enough gone that I couldn’t follow the trail. I crossed once more, and picked up a feather from where my chicken used to be. I had thought I had it all worked out.

Friday

He looked all through the button drawer, but while it seemed that every shape and size and colour and finish could be found there, none of them were close to matching. He brushed a finger over the torn threads that tendriled from his coat. Then he heard that tobacco-torn voice at his shoulder, as her hand reached in and took out something bright and pearlescent: “You’ll never match the old, you daft thing. And why bother if you could? Look for something new and beautiful.”

Saturday

I slice the cake and you choose and that is fair. You slice the cake and I choose and that is fair. I slice the cake while you watch me and set the angle of my cut by the angle of your eyebrows. You slice the cake and keep hold of the knife while I choose, turning it this way and that. You wipe the blade with a napkin and I eat my little portion and agree, yes, this is fair.

Sunday

I took a walk in the moonlight to drop the things that shamed me into the hole. It was a good hole, deep and dark with a steep, sharp edge. We all used it, and all let each other pretend we didn't. As I walked home the moon went in and a steady rain fell, and things began to float past me in the gutter: a letter, a bottle, a photograph. We would clean it up in the morning without exchanging even a glance. We never needed the hole at all.

I have been reading...

• If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver. I'm struck by how uninterested this novel is in incident. When its characters fight or die or kill, it is utterly matter-of-fact: there is no suspense in even its most dangerous moments. All of the energy is reserved for when its characters reflect or grieve or talk, in a novel that insists, more than anything, on unconditional humanity.
• Bondo by Menna Elfyn, translated by Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damion Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. I enjoyed these poems a great deal, and although I know no Welsh I appreciated this being a facing translation. The translations have some obvious differences: a question becoming a statement, an epigraph that is not in the original, a sestina where lines no longer repeat exactly. Walford Davies describes the translations as "not compromise, the latest victory for global English, but something more complex – a two-way transaction in which two utterances, two languages, hail and contend with each other." Even for a parochial English monoglot like me, it's rewarding to see that transaction happen.

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The Time You Brought a Goat Home

You led the goat down the street by a rope fixed around its neck. You did not trust that rope. You thought a goat could probably chew through it. But this was how the goat had been presented to you, by someone you had reason to believe knew more about goats than you did. So you pulled gently on the rope, and the two of you went step by step along the road.

That "gently" may have been an error too. You imagined the girl who handed you the rope leading the animal confidently behind her, knowing that it could drag her along to her death if it sprang off, and knowing that it wouldn't if she showed that she was to be respected. But you were fearful of getting it wrong, and to put a more positive spin on it, you are patient. Besides, aren't goats changeable, unpredictable? “Capricious”, isn't that a goat word, like “Capricorn”? (But then, you thought, surely capri pants are not goatish. And is Capricorn the goat, or is that Aries?)

By now, as you and the goat make your unsteady way home, your patience may be fraying like a rope under a goat's teeth. Of course I know that Capricorn is the goat, you may be thinking. Or, I would not be so timid with the animal. Or perhaps, I know a great deal about goats, thank you very much. It is a trying thing, to be misrepresented in this way. I can only beg your forgiveness. This is a story about the time you brought a goat home.