Withering Returns

Content Warning: This story contains depictions of animal death, emotional/verbal abuse, exploitation/coercive control, and bodily harm.

Author’s Note: “Withering Returns” is a dark fairy tale inspired by Aesop’s “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,” written from the goose’s perspective and filtered through the prose style of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

Act I.

The knife has come and gone. The deepest life within me withdrew and left no echo behind.

Death did not move me from this place.

I remain.

The farmhouse still stands on the hill, white turned grey, every board thinned over countless winters. The wind finds every seam, every place where they were joined without care. At night, it screams through the eaves.

The house answers. It calls back in creaks, not in protests, but a cry of its endurance. The man hears it. It is one of the reasons he cannot sleep.

He made demands of this place. He spoke of what would be done, what would be built, what would be made to last, and what would bring him riches. His plans did not hold a shingle.

The house did not answer him.

Some things stay after the body is gone. My life and death stay with this house, the way cold stays in bone, the way a scent lingers in cloth long after it has been washed.

The house holds all of it.

The land does too.

Act II.

I arrived young, my feathers still soft at the edges. The man of the farm carried me under one arm from the truck and set me down among the others. The ground wet with thaw. The air smelled of mud and waking things.

Spring does not ask permission.

It comes when it comes.

That first spring, I laid no eggs. The others did. I heard their low, satisfied sounds and learned the rhythm of them.

My body held its silence.

It was heavy.

It was my own.

Each morning, the man came. He counted. He gathered. He left.

“Next season,” he said.

His boots struck the gravel the same way each time he came. I learned the sound.

The second spring came. Still, my body did not answer his call. Or perhaps it did, but in a way he did not recognize. My bones still thickening. My blood still finding its pace.

“She eats for nothing,” he said as he kicked me to the side with his muddy boot. The others began to peck at me then. Enough to mark me. I hid next to the farmhouse to wait until the rush passed before I ate.

I watched the woman, moving through the house as steadily as the seasons move through the land. She baked. She scrubbed. She kept the house clean, tidy, presentable. When the neighbors came, the house held itself upright under her care. The man stood taller then. He spoke to them about his plans. He spoke of his future. He spoke as if this house stood by his voice alone.

He did not speak of her. Or at least, he did not speak her praise or of his gratitude.

“I work,” he said, “you play house.” As if the house did not answer her every day.

I watched her when I could. I learned the sound of her steps as I had learned his boots.

Her quiet steps. They did not strike. They passed.

She saw me. Not often. Enough.

Summer passed. Autumn took its share. Wind and winter came again, thinning what had already been worn thin.

The house held. The land held. I held.

No eggs came.

Act III.

The third spring came early. Wind and winter had not finished with the land, and the thaw left the ground slick and treacherous. The keeper’s patience thinned.

I knew before I saw the blade. I knew by the hour of the day, by the set of his shoulders, by the way the yard seemed to draw itself tight around him.

Some dangers announce themselves. Others simply arrive.

I ran.

I struck the wire fence with my wings until the sound rang sharp and useless. The fence did not give. It had been made without care, yet somehow it endured. I understood then that I belonged already to the end, as surely as frost belongs to the fields.

She came between us.

She did not shout. She did not plead. She stood. Nothing more.

The world held its breath. He looked at her as though seeing something misplaced and finding it no longer answered to him.

She did not move. She did not yield. The wind shifted, turning him away from us. She lifted me, her arms closed around my body with a surety that startled me. Her grasp was not light, but it was gentle.

Her heart hammered against me. I felt it as one feels the early tremble before a storm. She carried me across the yard. The cold clung to us. The wind worried at her skirts. She did not stop.

Inside the house, she passed through the common rooms and into the narrow inner chamber set back from the bedroom, a place not meant for living things. The air was clean. The light entered reluctantly through a small, high window and settled without warmth.

She stood there for a moment, holding me still. Then with one arm, she began to make a place. She gathered linens kept aside for careful use. They bore quiet stitching, worked patiently, thread by thread, over long evenings. She smoothed them. She laid me down as though the cloth had been waiting for me all along.

She held up her hands. Nothing was said, yet all was known.

She left, backing slowly out of the room. I stayed.

She brought water. She brought cracked corn in a dish. She returned when the light shifted. She returned when it faded. She did not forget.

Each day, she brought me what she could spare and some things she could not. Crusts of bread, still warm from the oven. Once we shared a soft scrape of cheese.

Often she sat beside me and worked her needle through cloth, the thread drawing order out of loose ends. She spoke little. She did not need to. Her presence settled the room into its proper shape.

Even on the days that she came shaken, the marks of his voice carried not on her skin but in her eyes. On those days, she sat closer. She rested her hand against my back in silent reassurance that I was worth keeping. That I was not wrong.

I learned then that safety is not a thought. It is a condition. It loosens what has been held tight.

For the first time, my breath went deep and did not turn back upon itself. But her breath skimmed the surface of life and never ventured deeper. What she had never known, she had given me—and I carried it thenceforward.

The fear that dwelt in my body receded; only warmth remained.

I laid an egg.

It was small. It was smooth. It was as golden as the sun.

Act IV.

I think she was proud. I think she wanted him to see the fruits of her continuous labor. She called for him.

His answer came sharp and unchecked. He spoke as though her voice itself had dared to overstep, the summons already a fault. The house drew inward under the familiar weight of his contempt.

Then he saw what lay in her hands. I watched as he seized it with his careless grasp. As if what had been brought into this world by patience might survive rough handling by chance alone.

His gaze found me and held no gratitude.

In that moment, I was no longer what she had sheltered. What she had nurtured. I was reduced to what might yet be drawn from me.

He built a new cage. He moved me there himself, his hands firm. Not rough. Not kind. The cage was larger than the pen I had known, but it held no warmth. No place for rest. Only space for increase.

Though my will had withdrawn, the eggs persisted. One each day. An impossible clutch. Her care found what had waited in me, and my body answered, heedless of how briefly it had been provided.

He barely worked in the fields. His days were consumed with bringing men to watch me, to witness what I could not stop. Their language changed his mouth.

“Consistent yield,” he said, repeating what they had called it.

“A proven producer,” he said, holding up a fresh, golden egg.

“Ten birds like this, a hundred—the numbers speak for themselves,” he said, as if words alone could build what his hands had not.

He no longer wore his boots. He stood in soft leather shoes like the other men, polished and untouched, as though he had already stepped into their number.

She stopped coming to the window. At first, I thought it was the men, or his watchfulness, or weariness. Then wind and winter crept thick across the glass until it surrendered its last clear pane. With it went my only sight of her moving through the kitchen.

I do not know how long she had been withheld from me. Not in days. Not in eggs taken too quickly to count. But in the cold silence where her presence had once passed.

Act V.

When the fourth spring came, my body had nothing left to give.

The rich, strange feed sat wrong in my crop. The lights that never dimmed did not allow rest to come. My body knew only watchfulness.

The eggs stopped. He stood at the pen each morning, arms crossed, jaw set. He changed the feed. He moved the lights closer. He brought another man in to examine me. His hands were quick. His judgment quicker.

“It’s not clear,” he said. “Your conditions are optimal.”

He was wrong. Care was optimal. Quiet was optimal. She was optimal.

He threw me in a smaller pen, far from the others, as though failure were catching. Iron met wood. The lock turned once, and in that sound lay the promise of forever. I could not spread my wings. At night, I heard the geese call to one another. They did not respond to mine.

Summer passed. Autumn took its share. The men came less often, their voices sharper each time they did.

Wind and winter returned in earnest. He stopped coming daily. He cracked the door, throwing pellets onto the frozen ground. He left.

I had become an afterthought. Chained to the wall as one chains a tool, not for use, but to keep it from being misplaced.

I ate what the wind returned to me. Crumbs. Ice. Memories.

Body hollowed, feathers dulled, the cold settled into my bones and did not leave. She did not come. The house stayed sealed. Its windows dark, save for one dim light in the inner room, too far for me to see in.

Snow came. It drifted against the pen until the lower slats vanished. My strength to stand receded. I folded myself small and waited for the sun to offer a few weak hours of warmth.

Act VI.

The fifth spring came. The pen filled with men, but I could not lift my head to see them, but I knew them from their polished shoes, now marred with mud.

“This changes the valuation,” one said.

“We invested on continuity,” said another.

“We require restitution,” said a third.

The door swung open. They left behind muddy footprints. Nothing else.

I strained to see the green grass beyond the door. But the man dropped to his knees in front of me. Weeping. When he found no redemption, he looked upon me without seeing, only knowing that I had been his undoing.

“If you won’t lay them,” he said, “I’ll take them out myself.”

His voice broke into laughter. I did not understand his words. I understood his hands. I understood the blade.

“No!” She screamed. She could not reach me in time.

Her face filled my sight. That was enough.

Act VII.

There was no gold inside of me. Only blood. Only organs. Only the small, ordinary bones of a goose.

He stood there. His hands darkened with what he had done, staring at the absence of treasure as though it might yet appear if he waited long enough.

She stood in the doorway. She did not move.

“It was the only way,” he said, lifting his hands in surrender. “I had to know for certain.”

The false yielding loosened her. She turned back towards the house, crossing the yard as she had a thousand times before. He stayed.

When night fell and his truck pulled away, she left. I followed her into the cab. When she drove off, I remained.

Untethered from my body. Not from this place.

He returned before dawn. His breath thick with drink. He stood over what remained of me for a long time. I thought he might bury me.

He did not.

He left me chained until only bone remained.

Act VIII.

The farmhouse failed in small ways first. Store-bought bread turned green. The crops browned and broke. Shingles loosened. Then the roof gave way.

He tried to mend it. The work did not hold, the nails loosened, the boards warped. What he set straight leaned again by morning. Drink did the rest.

His commands filled the house as he worked, as though the walls might answer him if he addressed directly. They did not. He forgot—or never knew—that the house had stood because she had kept it so. Every day. Every season. Work he named play.

The other geese stopped laying. Then they went silent. They do not remain here.

I am here as the wind is here. I do not touch him. I do not need to. He is haunted by what he ruined. He is haunted by what he cannot name.

Feathers gather around him where they should not. Wind sounds like wings. Storms rattle the broken windows, and all he hears are the cries of a dying goose.

Sometimes I return to the inner room with the linens, now dulled with dust and opened to the sky. I remember her hands. I remember rest.

The house no longer keeps the wind out.

But I remain.

To witness.