The Peel

Maine's Largest Export Is Toothpicks

The man was too tall. He looked like a string bean. If string beans had a bad case of five o'clock shadow, a chewing tobacco problem, and traffic-cone orange hair. He smiled down at me and I could tell he was looking at my many assets. Great. Another creep in love with me that I would have to fend off. This was just a daily problem for a person like me.

As he leered at my face, he began to speak. "You must be Arnie. I'm Albatross."

"It's Arnold. What kind of name is Albatross?"

At this, Albatross let out a deep belly laugh, though I couldn't figure out why he was even laughing in the first place. When he finished laughing, Albatross prepared to spit out his used-up wad of tobacco, and took aim. The spit-covered mass sailed through the air, heading directly for my mother. My mother, not missing a beat, opened up her mouth, catching the slimy mass on her tongue and swallowing it whole. Yum.

"It's a funny story actually," Albatross said with a smirk. There was a piece of broccoli stuck between each tooth. I couldn't hide the fact that I was impressed by this. Such precision! "When I was a young lad, an albatross swooped into my house and ate my entire family. I was the only one to survive the digestive tract, and by the end of it all, I couldn't remember my own name, so I called myself Albatross. Al for short. That bird actually went on to raise me, which is why to this day I only eat fish, chewing tobacco, and those weird plastic things they put around six-packs of Gatorade."

This fact only made the broccoli in his teeth all the more fascinating. How did it get there, if he wasn't eating broccoli? Did he put each piece in by hand? I was dying to know more, and for this reason and this reason alone, I was fully willing to leave with this man and discover my new future with the Boy Scouts of America. I never looked back, and didn't even say goodbye to my mom. Perhaps if I had, I would have been able to warn her about the horrifying goose-shaped demon that had been hovering directly behind her as I left my home for good, but it's too late now. She's already dead.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

If you didn't know that much about geese, you'd probably be under the impression that they're kind and beautiful creatures. Their crime, should they have been accused of one, could be no more than stealing some bread. Any sane person surely couldn't blame a couple of birds for eating a little bread or honking more loudly than Old Man Ernest's refined taste in the sonar landscape surrounding him would prefer. The string of homicides closely linked to the migration of a flock of geese over the town in August 1998 was completely unrelated, of course, and the fact that your grandmother cries every time she sees a goose is just a sign that millenials are killing another industry.

The August of 1998 was a special one indeed. My own father's sock manufacturing plant had just started to gain momentum, and soon the entire building was forming a black hole due to its never-before-seen rapid acceleration. When he died due to space rocks or nuclear reaction or something that had to do with his sock plant, my mother and I rejoiced at the thought of life insurance settlement money! But as we all know, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and she gambled it all away before the month's end; simultaneously spiraling into a tragic depression and developing a devastating addiction to opiates, she too died in a freak accident somehow involving our next-door neighbor's grandmother collection. My name's Pablo and I'm a goose and I have no eyes. My mother was a fig and consumed the President every morning before reincarnating as a different heirloom vegetable. This is my story.

When your mother shaved my leg hair, I screamed bloody murder. Most geese don't like having their legs caressed, not even gently. This happened for the first time in July of 1998. You happened for the first time shortly after that. In the meantime, I vored clarinets at least twice a week, but that was never enough to keep your mother satisfied. I'm not saying I had any part in what happened to her, but I won't deny it, and when you factor in all of the times you almost connected the dots before having your plans unraveled faster than the toilet paper your cat's accessed in the guest bathroom, well, that's a lot of times. And I feel kind of guilty now for what happened to her.