Fiction

The flood goats

In the town known as the flood town, every kind of object – living and dead – floated down the river in flood. Chairs, trees, cars, snakes and once a goat, which came to be called the flood goat. No farmer claimed it, no child cried for her pet, and the man who fished it out wanted to eat it. Then came a second goat, and a third, and a different man said, we’ll put all the flood goats together. Soon they formed a herd, a collection of unclaimed goats, fished from the water.

It kept raining. The flood town kept flooding and the flood goats were moved to higher ground. No one knew why it kept raining and no one – apart from the man who wanted to eat the goat – knew what to do with the flood goats.

The man who wanted to eat a flood goat came from a faraway country where goats were eaten on feast days, roasted for hours over a fire, with only the legs cut off. The head was threaded onto a long metal pole along with the rest of the body – the length of it – even though no one in the man’s country had ever heard of head-to-toe cuisine. The man had never heard of the flood town either before he came to live in it, nor of any place where the rain never stopped. For months it did not cease, until the earth was sodden, the very air the townspeople breathed saturated with moisture.

Should we milk the goats, someone said, but the flood goats did not appear to have teats. Perhaps we could cut their hair and wash it? Did anyone know the ancient art of preparing animal hair into fibre for spinning? For that matter, did anyone know how to spin? One elderly woman remembered her grandmother had kept a spinning wheel but that was last century, long before the rains came and the flood goats washed down the river.

One day someone said that when he was a child in the country, goats were used to keep the grasses down. After that, the flood goats were lent out like library books. All across the flood town the flood goats were borrowed on seven-day loan – to help someone with a weed problem – or to clear a messy area around a shed.

The flood goats did not mind that it rained all day and night. They stood about with their flat, empty eyes, as if they did not have a single thought in their heads. If they were thinking of something, it was not clear what it was, as if they did not give a fig for a glimpse of the sun.

At other times the flood goats were borrowed for children’s parties, children in brightly coloured gumboots who had started to forget a sky without rain. What had happened to the sun? What had befallen the earth revolving up there in its black, cold space? In the sun’s absence, children played in the rain with this flood goat or that, sometimes dressing the black one in a pink bonnet or tying a balloon to the brown and white one’s tail. Everyone grew to love the flood goats – especially the children and the man who wanted to eat one, because he remembered how sweet and succulent roast goat tasted.

Then one morning – it was still raining – the flood town awoke to find the flood goats gone. How had they escaped? The paddock gates were locked – the boundary fences in the paddock unbroken and without holes – yet they had vanished. Had the man who wanted to eat the first flood goat eaten them after all? The people of the flood town rounded on him, calling on him to confess. Now they came to think of it, the rains had started with the arrival of the man who wanted to eat the first flood goat and the rains had not stopped since. Who knew what special spells the man had brought from his faraway country? Hadn’t there always been something unnatural about him? What sort of man fished a living creature from the water and wanted to eat it? When some of the other men marched off towards his house, other men did not restrain them. They ransacked his house – looking for signs of either the flood goats or the eating of them – yet when none was found, they still declared the man to be guilty.

The people of the flood town felt they had endured enough – rain, mould, their houses wrecked, mud in the crevices of walls, inside shoes, their wedding dresses spoiled – and they could not endure another loss. And so, without haste, they ran the man who wanted to eat the first flood goat out of town. The last anyone saw of him – or the flood goats – was the man walking down the main street, heading for the highway, the questing rain dripping off his hat.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "The flood goats".

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