Category: Fiction

there was a man who had a goat. this goat was like any oth­er goat. it could eat tin cans and do com­plex algo­rithms with lit­tle or no paper­work. one day, while the goat was walk­ing around in cir­cles, the man chucked a piece of poly­eth­yl­ene gly­col at it — there­by piss­ing the goat off. the goat pro­ceed­ed to cal­cu­late the pre­cise veloc­i­ty and tra­jec­to­ry required to kill the man, and prompt­ly did so with the high­ly effec­tive use of a bro­ken axe han­dle. upon col­lect­ing the insur­ance from the deceased, the goat used the monies and chat­tels inher­it­ed thus to sub­si­dize the liq­uefi­ca­tion of tin cans into liq­uid tin. this liq­uid tin was then poured into a vat that mea­sured five cubits by ten fath­oms and left to dry overnight. when the morn­ing of the third day began the lord goat arose rather lat­er than usu­al, scratched him­self vig­or­ous­ly and exit­ed his lunar bunker and/or ewe-harem. and lo, when the lord goat looked upon his hand­i­work and saw the per­fec­tion that it was he spake say­ing ‘Behold what I hath made in mine own desire — a craft work of amaze and agape. It shall be called Crou­ton as a sign of my covenant with thee. and ye shall wor­ship it and pro­vide it with ten she-goats and ten ewes dai­ly, else thy will be smote upon by bro­ken axe han­dles and brim­stone. yea ver­i­ly i saw this unto thee that any of ye whoso for­sakes his tithe shall be smote upon for being rather lewd.’ thus did the world enter into the Age of the Goat. at least until three o’clock that after­noon when a small child named Gum­bo threw a bro­ken axe han­dle at the lord goat, smit­ing him vig­or­ous­ly even unto uncon­scious­ness. imme­di­ate­ly there­after the peo­ple made a sac­ri­fice of the lord goat in their igno­rance, and had some real­ly yum­my goat cur­ry.