The Goose on the Road

I regret leaving that goose on the road. 

I drove through the strands of morning sun, filtered by the swaying trees above. I sang quietly and clumsily along with the music as I let my car accelerate through each winding turn. Rolling down my windows, I felt the young day’s chill on my cheeks. And in my blissful unawareness, I let my eyes drift; rolled my attention from morning doves to dew drops on the grass. And that's when I saw her. 

On the opposite side of traffic, laying right up against the closest shoulder to me, the goose riled. Her neck was contorting and stiff, her mouth agape as her chest struggled to open for breath. My eyes widened. I didn't break eye contact, even as my car zoomed past with me inside, I stretched my neck back to look. Until I couldn't anymore, and so I looked away. 

But I never stopped seeing her broken body, the struggling breaths, or the dark matted feathers. 

I turned off my music and stared off at nothing, my body taking me to work from its own memory as my mind got stuck elsewhere. My hands stiffened on my steering wheel; my foot hesitated on the break pad. But I did not stop. I kept driving, leaving the goose on the road. 

As I pulled into my office's parking lot, I took a secluded parking spot under the shade. Already having reached into my work bag on my passenger seat, I tapped my phone awake before even shutting off my car. I didn't put my car into park, still thinking of the goose on the road. 

I didn't have time for this, people needed me at work. 

But I had no work emails; no texts. No one needed me. 

I put my car in park. 

Opening a search engine, I searched with shaking thumbs and a thumping heart: what to do if you find an animal on the road. As the loading screen circled again and again, searching, I suddenly became aware of a feeling growing in my chest. 

I wanted it to tell me to leave it be; that the best thing to do was to do nothing at all. 

Guilt swelled in me. I thought of how it would feel to be crushed by a tire, left to suffer on the hot asphalt as more cars swarmed around me, leaving me for rot. I thought of how the fear would feel as it embedded in my heart with every revving engine; each breath a struggle to take. 

My phone populated a link to the nearest animal shelter: 45 minutes away. My heart sank with the weight of too many conflicting emotions. I would call them, but even then, they wouldn't be able to get there for over an hour at best. My finger hovered over the green button. 

They probably wouldn't get there in time. Maybe they couldn't even do anything to help. Maybe they would tell me to let nature do it's course, that it wasn't my place to interfere; that someone else like the local law enforcement would do something. The goose hadn't even been in the middle of the road, it wasn't in immediate danger of being hit. At least, not by accident...

I held my finger over the button. Then put my phone away, and headed into the office. 

As I stepped off the pavement and onto the sidewalk, dazed, I noticed a crumbled water bottle in the grass. And walked inside. 

Remorse coiled around my throat for the rest of the day, squeezing the images back into the front of my mind. I saw her taught neck twist under the pain as I opened excel; saw her heaving chest as I made myself coffee. And most of all, I saw her eyes, dull and frantic, glistening in the morning dawn. I realized I had assigned the goose a gender without even noticing, I had no way to know after all; I hadn't even stopped to get within five feet of her.

As I poured my morning coffee, already fidgeting and apprehensive, I noticed the location of where the coffee beans had been harvested on the side of the box. I did not check though, as the machine squeezed its last drop into my cup. 

At lunch, as I bit a shallow bit into my sandwich, my coworker pulled out their phone to search a topic we had been casually discussing. In the corner of my eye, I saw them swipe past news articles of a wars overseas, like it had never been there. A blink and our minds forgot the dead children and embraced the trivial topic being shown to us. I put my sandwich down, I had lost my appetite. 

The goose still flailed about in my mind; I could almost feel the weight of her crushed rib cage as if it were my own. I shook my head, what good was my empathy now? I was safe and healthy, and the goose was not; what suffering had I endured to earn this panic in my chest? 

My shift ended suddenly; my mind was off with the goose all day. I packed my things, staring into my dissociation as I waved absently my goodbyes. On the way to my car, I stopped at the gas station next to my office for some pain relievers for the growing headache in my temples. The sun glared down at me, as if in disapproval; as if reminding me of how I had left her in this heat all day... to slowly labor in the last moments of her life. 

As I swiped my card, my mind still ungrounded somewhere outside me, I was prompted to donate one cent to some relief fund. Instinctually, unthinking, I clicked it away. My heart fell from my chest. I hadn’t even seen which relief fund it was. 

How many times had I left the goose on the road today? I cringed at my own urgency to push such an insignificant responsibility away; how a minor inconvenience trumped my own morals. My reflection stared back at me from the sheen of the pin pad screen.

It read: “Thank you."

My throat tightened.

I sped down the road, not towards home, but back where I had come from; the same roads I had taken this very morning. As I turned the corner, I pulled into the shoulder, letting cars pass me. I bounced on my feet as I sprang from my car, peering through the rushing through traffic to the median. The cars passed, I slowly lowered off my tippy toes, and unstrained my neck. I shook my head slightly to myself. The goose was gone, not even a feather remained. 

I sat in my car, silent and contemplating the fate of the goose on the road, and my lack of plot within it. 

And cried.

After some time, my vision refocused on the present, onto a crumbled water bottle on the side of the road. Straightening, I opened my door, picked up the crumbled plastic, and walked it to the nearest garbage can. I knew my actions, in part, were only to quell my own remorse and guilt. But, I knew that this was better than just leaving the goose on the road, once again.