Carrots
Fennel gently — and ineffectively — tried to urge the goat forward by offering it a fistful of carrots, but the goat had little interest in allowing Fennel to keep any scrap of his dignity. It balked at his attempt at bribery, stood its ground, and yelled.
“Oh, come on,” Fennel complained, sweeping a clump of greasy hair off his glasses. “You eat everything. Now’s the time you’ve decided to diet?”
The goat yelled again — Fennel hated when they did that; too uncanny — then took a dump in the middle of the footpath.
“Of all the goats in the pen, I had to take the comedian,” Fennel grumbled. He adjusted the backpack weighing down his slight shoulders, tucked the carrots into an armpit, and kept going. Hopefully, once he ignored it, the goat would follow.
The path grew wilder with every determined footstep Fennel took. Soon, the family homestead was no longer in view. The foliage grew thicker, the branches of trees whipping against his skin. It was only once he’d made his way through the worst of it that he turned around to see his goat. While it had followed him, it pretended to pointedly ignore him the moment he looked at it.
Fennel was too excited to harbour much annoyance. There, in a clearing, he spied what he’d been looking for.
“This is it!” he said. “Check out that North-facing slope! That’ll protect us from the wind in winter, and enable us to have a South-facing greenhouse with maximum sun. Hell yeah!”
The goat, unfortunately, had no understanding of Earthship architecture and remained unimpressed. Fortunately, this did little to dampen Fennel’s enthusiasm.
“Just imagine — a completely self-sustaining communal living situation. Solar energy! Food production! You name it. Just me and my friends, making something great together. The old world’s gone, but that just means we can build something even better in its place!” he said. “Even you’ll have a job here. Once you eat all these nettles, I can start sketching out a — HEY!”
The goat had seized its opportunity. It sprung up and snatched the bushel of carrots from Fennel’s arms, then galloped into the clearing, kicking its hooves in defiance.
Fennel sighed, happy that nobody was around to see him bested by an ungulate. He wasn’t too worried about the carrots. If all went according to plan, there would be more where those came from sometime soon.