Pink Goose
written by: Vida Penezic
Rose flies from New York to Detroit on a six am flight, then she drives a rented aegean blue Honda Civic down I-75 to a small university town in Ohio, which is squatting in the middle of an almost completely flat stretch of land. The visibility on the interstate is fine, but she finds her destination cloaked in fog so dense and disorienting that she’s forced to slow to a crawl.
Following the instructions of the hiring committee, she parks the car in a medium-sized parking lot a block from the main campus, displays the temporary parking decal they have emailed to her, and walks the relatively short distance to the intersection. The light is red—although she can barely make out the red glow at the top of the light box—and she stops obediently. Immersed in the warm, gooey fog, she waits for the green light.
It’s 10:30 in the morning, Monday, the first week of August. The interview is at 11:00, so she has enough time to get to the campus and find the School of Art—but not a minute to waste. She can hear the few passing cars better than she can see them. She’s not even sure she’ll know when the light turns green. She peers up at it, suspended in the middle of the intersection by invisible cables (surely, the cables must be there), just a patch of illuminated space, hovering as if not by human design but by its own intent, like an alien spaceship. As if (surely, it can’t be?) it’s looking back at her.
She believes her chances are good. She’s a New York-based artist, this is a third-tier provincial university. Granted, she’s not well known by the general public, and she never made any significant money with her art, but she has accumulated a long resume of appearances in group exhibits (sometimes to glowing reviews), small grant awards, honorable mentions and certificates, and representations by minor galleries.
The real success, however, the kind that doesn’t need to be explained to the uninitiated, the kind that can feed her so she never again has to beg her parents for money, that final climb out of obscurity and into the limelight after which everyone would know her name and no one would question her life choices—that she has never achieved.
Which brings her here today.
After almost twenty years of diligently practicing her art at the expense of all other aspects of her life, struggling to stay on the cutting experimental edge while juggling three part-time jobs to make ends meet, it’s time to try something different. She knows that getting this job would mean surrendering her original purist dreams of artistic success, but she is also keenly aware that there are many worse options for someone in her position. After all, a peaceful and secure life of a provincial college professor is a kind of success.
Just as the light turns green, something pink moves on the crosswalk in front of her. A sudden presence where there was nothing before, a tumescence from within the cloud. Pink in the middle, purple on the sides. Not quite as tall as Rose (she has to look slightly down at it), but big and wide. Hefty. It keeps emerging out of the fog, like a submerged rubber toy emerges out of the bath water, until it’s fully there: a huge pink goose with purple wings, purple beak, and unfriendly spiteful little eyes.
Alarmed, Rose peers into the fog. Surely, the goose can’t actually be there. So, an apparition of some kind? A hallucination? A couple of robotics students trying out a new gadget? Or did the hiring committee devise an ingenious way of testing her sanity: present her with an improbable hologram and see what she does.
The goose, having read Rose’s mind, opens its purple beak and laughs loudly. Its laughter doesn’t sound like the honking one would expect from a goose. It’s more like dolphins’ trills and screeches—perfectly suited for derision. That’s the stupidest thing the goose has ever heard, the laughter says. Its powers are so much greater than that. It doesn’t even operate on the same plane as the sort of people who sit on hiring committees.
The light is now amber and will soon be red again; red for Rose, green for the cars that are stopped at the other end of the intersection. As far as Rose can make out, there are two of them: a beige pickup truck with grossly oversized wheels and a big, sturdy, dark-colored sport utility vehicle. Most likely, the drivers of those cars are not even aware of the goose. The combination of the fog and the improbability of the sight would make it impossible for them to register its presence.
If the goose is really there. Which Rose can easily determine by doing nothing. She can simply wait for the light to change and watch as the cars drive through the goose, exposing its immaterial nature—or, if the goose is real, plow right into it.
Not that she considers the second outcome actually possible. Of course not. If she did, she’d run into the intersection and frantically wave her arms to warn her fellow humans of the danger ahead.
But when the pickup truck with grossly oversized wheels starts creeping forward, ready to shoot ahead the moment the light turns green, Rose screams:
“Watch out!” Addressing the goose.
Slowly, the goose turns its massive head to check out the threat. It seems more annoyed than worried, but moves nevertheless, with amazing, although clumsy, speed. Its huge, powerful body shakes each time one of its gigantic feet hits the ground, producing a loud thud.
The goose reaches safety with barely seconds to spare. The moment it deposits itself next to Rose, the pickup truck swooshes by.
“Phew!” Says the goose. “That was a close one.” It looks at Rose approvingly. “Thank you! I know you were tempted to let them smash into me, but you didn’t succumb.”
Rose can now feel the goose’s robust physical presence—the heat emanating from its body, the scent of its feathers—and she’s frantically trying to account for this without venturing into the mystical. Are some holograms material in nature? Can virtual beings have mass?
The goose studies Rose’s face, apparently trying to make some kind of decision. Finally, it says in its squeaky, unpleasant voice.
“You know what? As a reward, I’ll grant you three wishes.”
Rose sighs. She really really has no time for this right now. She must get to that interview. Whoever is playing this trick has picked a terrible moment. She looks around for the person operating the goose, but she sees no one.
The goose waits for a beat, then says impatiently, clearly annoyed that its offer hasn’t been met with a greater enthusiasm: “Surely, there’s something you desire?”
Rose finally loses her patience. “Yes, there is!” She declares loudly, as if speaking into a microphone, addressing not the mirage in front of her but its puppet master hidden somewhere in the fog. Calling the puppet master’s bluff. “I have an important meeting this morning, and you’re making me late for it. Can you give me back the time you made me waste with your shenanigans? Can you make that happen?”
The goose shrugs its purple wings.
“Of course I can,” it says in an ordinary, casual voice, as if the answer should be obvious.
Suddenly, there’s a slight disturbance, as if someone carefully lifted the whole intersection a few inches into the air, shook it up a bit without causing any damage, and then gently deposited it back onto the ground.
“I took us back thirty minutes,” the goose says after things have settled down again. “That’s more than twice the time you’ve spent on me so far.” Then, seeing Rose’s skeptical expression, “Go ahead, check your phone.”
Rose does. It’s 10:10 am. Last time she looked, before the goose appeared, it was 10:30. They spent about ten minutes together, that would make it 10:40. Take away thirty minutes, and there they are, at 10:10 am!
Incredulous, Rose inspects the phone more closely and, finding nothing unusual, she shakes it a little, like people sometimes do with recalcitrant gadgets. She even brings it up to her right ear and listens hopefully, as if an explanation might come that way. It doesn’t. She checks the time again. It’s now 10:11 am.
Finally, the accumulated evidence forces her to accept the impossible: a huge pink goose is really standing in front of her. They are having a conversation. She has challenged this supernatural being to prove its power—and it did!
“Well?” Says the goose, cutting into Rose’s train of thought. “You have two wishes left. Do you want them or not?”
Nothing in Rose’s previous life has prepared her for this situation. The only thing that offers anything even remotely relevant is the fairy tales she read as a child. She recalls all those characters who caught a golden fish or found a magic lamp, and then (sometimes) didn’t know how to take advantage of the supernatural opportunity. Like that old couple who kept wishing for small, immediate things. First, the husband wished for a sausage because they were poor and he was hungry. Then, the wife, annoyed by his wasting a wish, said, “May that sausage attach itself to your nose!” And it did, wish number two. And then the third wish had to be used to take the sausage off his nose. In short, the couple employed a huge amount of supernatural power only to return to exactly the same place they had started from.
Rose won’t let that happen to her.
“Yes, I do!” She whispers, the whisper being the only voice she can produce at the moment. Then she clears her throat and says loudly and without hesitation: “Yes, I do want them.”
She stops herself from blurting out the first few things that come to mind: get the job she’ll be interviewing for; buy a little house with a garage that can be converted into a studio; lease a good car; maybe find someone to share all this with; definitely have a solo exhibit at some famous gallery…
She must look beyond the immediate hunger, she tells herself. Now she can be a household name like Michelangelo and Picasso. She can have enough money to never worry about it again.
There! Those are her two wishes: fame and fortune. Clear, simple, straightforward. But, she realizes, somewhat trite. Every fifth grader wants fame and fortune. These are still sausages, albeit very big sausages.
Then another fairytale seeps into Rose’s consciousness and soaks it with a new desire. The story and the characters are fuzzy in her memory. All she recalls is that someone (a little boy, she believes) was flown around the world by a big bird and shown what the world was really about. Now, that’s the kind of thing one asks of a supernatural being: to be let in on the secret, so to speak, to be allowed to view the world through their eyes, the eyes that see everything.
“I have only one more wish,” Rose says slowly. “Please take me with you and show me what the world is really about.”
The goose smiles kindly, in a condescending kind of kindness a king might bestow on a worm blindly squirming on the ground.
“Those are two wishes,” it says softly. “Take you with me; show you what the world is really about. I can grant both. But remember, after that you’ll have no wishes left.”
“That’s quite alright!” Rose says breezily. What could she possibly wish for afterwards? Once she gains insight into the world’s secret mechanism, there will be nothing she won’t be able to achieve or acquire.
“Okay then!” Says the goose cheerfully, and without further ado, it scoops Rose off the ground with one of its purple wings and deposits her on its back.
“Hold onto my feathers,” it instructs. “It’ll be bumpy in the beginning.”
At first, Rose can’t see much because they’re rising through the fog, and the visibility is practically nonexistent. She feels the hot air on her face and arms and the warmth of the goose’s back through the smooth feathers under her thighs. The ride is bumpy, and she has to hold on tightly.
Eventually, they emerge out of the clouds and find themselves in the clear where the sun is shining and the sky is blue, and Rose doesn’t have to hold onto the goose that hard anymore, although they are continuing to swoop upward, with the sun getting closer, and the enchanted intersection, her rented car, and the small town below are further and further away.
Finally, the goose achieves the desired altitude, levels off, and heads west. Now it feels more like floating than like flying because, miraculously, there’s no air resistance. It’s sort of like being on a plane except that the goose is one with the air-world, and a plane is a noisy intruder. Plus, Rose’s view is unobstructed, the air is warm and sweet-smelling, and she can breathe as easily as if she were standing on the Earth’s surface, although that surface is so far down below her that she can see the curvature of the Earth. Rose raises her arms above her head, like how she’s seen people in movies express unbridled joy, and emits a high-pitched, piercing sound, somewhere between yippee and wow, with just a touch of scream in it.
What Rose sees during this stage of the journey can best be described as geography: The Great Lakes, the cities and towns around them (some obscured by the fog, some clearly visible), rivers and villages, roads and highways, railway tracks, fields of corn and wheat, new developments, each segment curling like a crescent moon with houses dotting its arc, or spreading like a sea star attached to a stick (each stick a road, each star-point a house), some with little patches of blue (pools), others with garages and basketball hoops in the driveways. Every so often, Rose sees malls and department stores with huge parking lots covered by a profusion of tiny shiny rectangles (cars) lined up side-by-side in an orderly fashion like fancily wrapped candy in a box of chocolates. It’s like her eyesight has been magically enhanced and she can see clearly even though she’s looking from a great distance.
The goose is moving fast; roads, settlements, states flash by.
For a while, Rose marvels at the cuteness of this endless colorful manmade blanket covering the Earth, at all those charming little homes and cars and roads laid out before her like toys that she can pick up and play with.
But then it dawns on her that all these people, millions and millions of them, want something. Some because they possess very little, others because nothing is ever enough. They all have needs and desires and expectations, just like she does, and her family, and her friends. And just like all those applicants for all those jobs, and aspirants to film and TV fame, sports fame, art fame, literary fame. And they all also want love and happiness and wives or husbands and children and homes and comfort and fun and success. She’s suddenly brutally aware of all the people trying to make it, to be noticed, acknowledged, loved, appreciated, admired, some prepared to do literally anything to get what they want. She doesn’t see, or at least that’s not what’s overwhelming, billions of bodies too heavy for Mother Earth, like some of her environmentalist friends do. Instead, she feels billions of minds and billions of hearts throbbing with desire. Feels them, hears them. Not voices, not multiple murmurings, not, “I wish. . .”, “I want. . .”, “I need. . .”, “Please give me. . .”, but a sort of deafening pounding, as if billions of heartbeats are thumping in unison, all parts of the same giant living organism stretching across the globe. And the longer she and the goose fly—the more ground they cover, the more human hearts join in—the louder this giant heartbeat becomes, as if some divine hand is turning up the volume on an enormous sound system. Finally, the noise reaches a crescendo Rose can’t bear: this is more desire than hundreds of Earths can sate.
Overwhelmed, she curls her hands into fists and frantically pummels the goose’s feathery, warm back. “Take me down! Take me down!” She screams.
The goose swivels its head around on its long neck to stare at Rose with its spiteful little eyes.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” it says. “You have no wishes left.”
- Pink Goose - May 17, 2025
