The Farm, Revisited

Boy, I was a downer before, wasn't I? To lighten things up, I'll tell a story from my youth. Now as I mentioned before, I was a very good girl and a very trusting girl. If an adult told me something, I believed them. I might have taken things a bit too literally-- so that's where the boy gets it-- and a bit too much to heart.

I'm not quite sure how we ever got on the subject, but I remember talking to my grandma about goats once. She told me that they would eat anything and everything. That, to my overly active child's mind, meant that they particularly loved the taste of child flesh. (See what I mean by literal?) This is what started my fear of goats. The comment grew and morphed and got all twisted in my little mind until they were Satan brought here on earth to punish bad little children by slowly gnawing them to death. (I think I might've read one too many German children's fairy tales as a child and the morbid little books made an impression on my malleable mind.) Even their eyes were evil. They had to be avoided.

One day, my grandma took me to a petting zoo. This was a rare treat because: 1. I was rarely let outdoors and 2. my grandparents didn't have a whole lot of money to spend. Why they thought a petting zoo would appeal to a child that was allergic to everything on god's green earth-- and one who hated getting the least bit dirty-- was beyond me, but I tried my best to appear enthused by the prospect.

The petting zoo was set up rather like a safari ride. They had the topless bus that drove us from pen to pen. I enjoyed looking at the animals, but I had no urge to actually pet one. Eventually, we wound up at the goat pen. There was no way in hell you could get me in there with those flesh-eating demons. I was not that brave. So I was left on the bus while everyone else went in. Even grandma went in, but I wasn't shocked by that since I'd always known she was brave.

Then it happened. Someone forgot to properly shut the gate and one of the goats got out. Where did it go? You got it. Right onto the bus. And there was I, a mere child, trapped with a goat coming down the bus aisle. I screamed for help, but no one could hear me above all the bleating going on and I did the only thing I could thing to do. I jumped over the side of the bus-- something I'd never do normally-- and ran straight into the pen and up to my grandma.

I was in a tizzy, there was a goat on the bus, someone let a goat get on the bus and it tried to eat me and that's when I saw a goat nibbling on the hem of her pants and I let out the mother of all shrieks. That's also when I realized I'd jumped out of the frying pan and into the fucking goat pen.

The rest is a blur. All I know is that I never had to go to a petting zoo ever after that and for that I was grateful.