The Approximate Distance of Haunting

The goose smoked a menthol cigarette in a seedy bar and watched his wife sway and swing to the rhythms of the jazz band behind her. He was in love with her, or more accurately, he was in love with her voice, or even more accurately, he was in love with the outer edges of her voice. The sound of her singing bubbled against his present and he ached to fall into it and never stumble out, but he had never managed to stay stuck. Though the goose would never tell her that unless he drank approximately twelve watered-down whiskey sours. Which he was doing. And when his lovely wife, the jazz singer, was finished, she went home with a different goose— it seems that she can’t quite tell the difference between drunk geese—and left him there, among his empties, with his forehead feathers stuck to something sticky on the bar top. And after he’d been roused from his slumber by hands set on closing, and paid his crazy expensive tab, he flew home just to sit on the far curb and watch, through veiled curtains, the flickering flare of his wife’s cigarette.