Stay / That Goose
by Deb Olin Unferth
Stay
She sits on the side of the mountain, dots of light below. After all she’s been through, does she want to go back to Kansas? Why, when there are such better places, would she want to return to the dusty, the dead, the colorless, the orphaned, the over? But she does, we do. She picks wrong, chases wrong, she veers off toward the familiar.
Don’t go. Stay in the bright yellow land with the magical plants and the people who will follow you anywhere, protect you from harm, be your loyal sidekicks as you dance down the dawn brick road.
That Goose
This goose is her friend. She doesn’t care who says he’s not enough. She doesn’t care who thinks it’s sad, or that she’s going to wind up an old woman feeding the park geese out of the wide pockets of her skirt and then standing unsteadily from the bench and creeping off in the direction of her apartment full of outdated appliances. It’s a humble, happy life, hers, mine, and I found my place in it and I had a name for it—that place and that goose—and that name was “home.”
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, including the novel Barn 8. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, and McSweeney’s. A professor at the University of Texas in Austin, she also directs the Pen City Writers, a creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.
