Tiny Little Goat

After you left, a goat took up residence in the left ventricle of my heart.

I didn’t know about my little stowaway at first. I thought I simply wished to say “no” more often and while screaming. I thought the quality of my enunciation had merely slipped the same way my housekeeping had. I thought I was finally becoming the curmudgeonly old man I had dreamt of being since I was a little girl. Freedom, I thought, is no pants and a tin can to chew on.

I lost feeling in my extremities. Brown fingertips and little mushroom toes went pale purple, lavender maybe—quite nice a color if I were a flower, which I’m not. On a good day, I am a person.

“We care about you,” some of my friends said.

“We know this is hard,” said others.

“You need to get this shit looked at it,” said the best ones. “It ain’t right.” That’s how I ended up on my back in an MRI machine, which is a tube that contains more than its fair share of dread.

“Aw,” the doctor said. “There he is.”

“What?” I said. “Abort it!”

“It’s not a baby,” said a friend. “Oh my God. Look at it. It’s so cute.”

“It’s a tiny little goat,” said the doctor. “Right in your heart. That’s the organ that pumps blood through your body.”

“I know what a heart is,” I said. “Why is there a goat in it?”

“Same as any parasite,” the doctor said. “Not exactly run of the mill, but this sort of thing is not actually that uncommon. A simple surgical procedure, and you’ll be good as new.”

I was rolled out of the MRI machine and shown a picture of my goat. He’d taken a great big shit right in my inferior vena cava. He was chewing on some grass. He was wall-eyed and smiling.

“What happens when you take him out?” I asked.

“You get a sticker and go home,” said the doctor. “That’s where you live.”

“No, I mean, what happens to him? Do you give him to a petting zoo or something?”

“Oh my, no,” said the doctor. “He’ll die instantly. That means right away.”

“What happens if I don’t get rid of him, then?”

“You’ll die gradually,” the doctor said.

“That means real slow,” my friend said.

“You’ll stop being able to see colors,” the doctor said. “Food won’t taste like anything. You’ll be tired all the time on account of his blocking up your blood flow. And in the end, you’ll just fade away.”

“And the goat?”

“He’ll burst out of your ribcage and terrorize the town in a fit of bloodlust.”

“Just schedule the surgery,” my friend said. “Everything will look better without a goat in your heart.”

But I went home that night, and I took a piss on my grandma’s antique davenport. I took off all my clothes and wandered out into the yard. I left the door open. I followed the scent of sweet clover.

Originally published in The Conium Review.