On four limbs you’ll run to me, with topaz eyes and tentacle curls, gloriously alive. I’ll know you even with horns pointing like thumbs. Remember reading about the Goat Boy, recovered in the Andes? Researchers renamed him “Daniel,” flew him to Kansas City, studied him.
You loved rice pudding. Beating a blue spoon from your highchair, chanting, “Pu-nee!” I warmed cream, rosewater, rice. Cooled the cloud with breath, fed your bud mouth. I worried I’d rot your teeth nubs with sweets—now I know, mothers worry about the wrong things.
After you wandered from our tent, your father grieved for us all. “I’m scared for your eyes,” he told me, “so red from crying, you’ll go blind.” Finally he barked, “Our son is dead—taken, drowned, murdered!”
But in my dreams, you scamper on hardened hands and feet, whispering, “I’m alive.” I drape a leaf skirt over your bottom. Stroke your sun-browned face, your yellowed hooves. The Andes Goat Boy survived on roots and berries, nursing from nanny goats’ pointed teats. Wrapping his limbs round womb-soft bellies, sleeping warm beneath a snowy pile of goats. Thank the bleating mama goat who carries you for me. Once, we were one being, you inside the tent of me. I’ll wait for your spring arrival. Soon. I’ll oil your knuckles—hardened to hooves from walking on them. I’ll kiss, grunt, pudding you, my only boy. You following Nanny Goat, scurrying sure-footed over daisies down the rocky hill toward me.
Nicole Brogdon is an Austin, Texas, trauma therapist interested in strugglers and stories, with fiction in Vestal Review, Cleaver, Flash Frontier, Bending Genres, Bright Flash, SoFloPoJo, Cafe Irreal, 101Words, Centifictionist, etc. Best Microfiction 2024; Best Microfiction 2025. X NBrogdonWrites! & nbrogdonwrites.bsky.social.