The Goathouse

He scurried around the goathouse—wearing only his jeans—looking for a place to hide for the night. He had long since forgotten his sister, who had been the subject of his original search, and was willing to settle for a safe place to sleep. The goathouse was offering few attractive choices.

If you have never been in a goathouse, you need only know that it is similar to a monkeyhouse crossed with a stable, except that there are innumerably more feces. Everywhere he looked he saw feces, writhing masses of feces, in all sorts of shapes and sometimes even in strange and exotic colors.

It was in a three-story barn, with enclosures following the walls on all levels. An enclosure would make an ideal place to hide, he thought, if they didn’t have an even higher concentration of feces. The goats would not make good company either, he thought, and by the look of it they would go out of their way to shit on him in his sleep.

No one had tended to this place in a long, long time. The center of the room was piled high with a story and a half of wood flakes, peppered with goat pellets (both food and feces). He had to step carefully with his bare feet to avoid all sorts of potentially unpleasant fates.

He and the goats were not alone, either. Some other kind of animal had made its home there, something he did not recognize. Ten inches long, with skin a pinkish beige, these miniature groundhog creatures wormed their way through the sawdust and woodchips, shimmying and shaking, writhing, as they emerged unexpectedly from a pile.

Would he really hide here? He may, he thought, be better off dead, better off letting the robot Nazi’s find him. What was so precious to him in life? His sister, who he had only recently abandoned? The rest of his family was dead. Most of his friends soon would be too as town after town was liquidated after outliving its usefulness. What in this world was worth living for? And not only worth living for, but worth spending the night shirtless in a warm pile of writhing pink goat feces, as strange albino creatures walked upon him or cuddled up for warmth. There were hard decisions ahead of him. Sadly, this was one of the easiest.