When the goose produced her first golden egg she had no idea of the fuss it would cause. The egg appeared quite innocent on the outside, its shell a glazed white, not golden—contrary to what you might have heard—and it was, if anything, slightly smaller than average, but how much weightier!

The farmer’s wife noticed immediately and assumed it must be a double-yolker, which would’ve made the cake she was baking especially rich, but upon cracking the egg a single ball of gold dropped into the bottom of the bowl. She ran into the yard screaming and hollering.

‘How was it possible?’ the farmer, his wife, and their son asked each other as they stared at the goose, whom they had set on the kitchen table as if on a pedestal. ‘Where did the gold come from? It didn’t make sense.’

In the end, they decided it didn’t matter how the little miracle came about. They were rich, and that’s all there was to it. The bird blinked back at them, nervous of the sudden attention, while they discussed what they might do with their newfound wealth.

The son wanted a party, a big one with pies and plenty of ale, but his mother was loathe to let any strangers in the house for fear they might discover the secret of their wealth. (In truth, folk rather suspected fraud, or theft, or a deal with the devil.) He could have a horse, she suggested, and they would turn the outhouses into stables. In that case, we must first buy more land, declared the farmer, who had his eye on a forty-acre field across the way.

The goose, meanwhile, was treated like royalty. She was given a cosy bed in the corner of the kitchen and the vegetable garden, once strictly out of bounds, became her personal larder. She dined for a few minutes each day on lettuce, green beans, and purple sage.

But after providing three golden eggs in as many weeks, the goose stopped laying and her keepers began to worry. “What if that’s the end of it?” the son asked with a note of panic. “It’ll be the end of the laying season, is all,” his mother reassured him. “She’ll produce again next spring, as long as we keep her out of mischief.”

“Next spring? No no no no no!” the farmer rumbled. “Next spring in’t no good. We’ll have to be paying for the forty-acres before then. In full. If not, we lose the deposit. We lose near on everything. You didn’t say owt about any laying season.”

“And you didn’t say owt about a deposit. I thought the forty-acres wor taken care of,” the farmer’s wife countered. “It wor taken care of, woman, if your bird had carried on its business.” “My bird?” “Aye, your blessed bird. We need another two or three yolks out of it or we’re done.”

Agitated by all the shouting, the goose began to hiss and honk. This was a mistake. The farmer grabbed it by the neck and with a twist of his burly wrists cut short its protests. Then, right there on the table, he split the bird open and began to investigate its warm guts, muttering ‘where does it keep it? where does it keep the blessed stuff?’ as his wife and son looked on in horror.

He did not find any gold.

© Richard Parkin, 2023