Ah yes, the drunk zombie geese story.

This one only 35% happened because it happened to my grandparents’ neighbours like 50 years ago and I heard it from my dad. So since there are so many go-betweens that I can’t personally guarantee to you that this otherwise exceptionally hilarious story is true, I’m going to play it safe with modest percentages.

Also, it involves mentions of dead animals (spoilers: they’re not really dead, which is kind of the point as you’ll see) SO if this is something that upsets you, it’s probably best if you don’t read it.

Like pretty much all of my other rl stories, this one also involves Evil Commie Land and food shortages, except it takes place in a village. The thing with romantic countryside living in Evil Commie Land is that it was both worse and better than living in the city. It was worse because the State took your land and declared it Official State Land and then made you work on it and only gave you a fraction of what you produced, and that pissed people off (we’ll get to that in a bit); but also better because you could raise some chickens and maybe a pig or two for yourself, so you wouldn’t have to go around working the Official State Land while malnourished.

Once upon a time when my dad was a small, carefree and, judging by this story, a tad impressionable child, my grandparents’ neighbours had a bunch of lovely geese which they loved because these geese laid eggs on the regular and occasionally became soup. And the way they kept these geese fed was, like pretty much everyone else, they’d let them loose to graze on Official State Land while the administrators either looked the other way or were forced to confront a cheerful, intractable innocence of the ‘Why comrade, they’re just a bunch of dumb animals that wander off sometimes’ variety.

So these geese would go out in the morning, spend the whole day eating and then come back home in the evening the same way they’d gone, which they knew by heart because they’d been doing this every single day of their placid lives. These geese didn’t get lost because they weren’t smart enough. So one evening when they didn’t show up, my grandparents’ neighbours went looking for them, and about halfway they found the whole flock lying limp, motionless and apparently very dead in the dirt. Cue oh no, our beautiful birds, what shall we do come winter etc. etc.

What they didn’t know was that someone in the village had made moonshine that day and thrown away the leftovers - we’re talking fruit that’s been fermented to shit in a giant barrel for weeks, distilled twice in someone’s basement and then thrown out in a ditch with other leftovers. So any wandering, say, birds that were used to taking their lunch anywhere they could find it might be excused for helping themselves.

The geese weren’t dead. The geese were blackout drunk.

In the absence of this knowledge though, my grandparents’ neighbours thought their birds had been struck dead by some terrible insta-kill virus and decided that, food shortages be damned, they’re not about to eat things that had died in such mysterious circumstances. But this was also a time when people had learned to waste as little as possible. So my grandparents’ neighbours picked up every goose and, with minimal physical contact, plucked them. But like, not completely. They just took the little soft down feathers that are so nice and comfortable in pillows and left the patchy, half-plucked and still apparently super-dead geese in a ditch outside village limits.

And as the story goes, the geese woke up sometime the next day, decided that since they were in surroundings other than they familiar yard it meant that they probably had gone out to graze, so they ate for a while and then went home as usual. So now imagine a bunch of patchy, half-plucked, supposedly dead as fuck geese that the entire village had heard about because my grandparents’ neighbours were really upset. Imagine them waddling home all well-fed and chill and completely oblivious of people’s utter horror because zombie fucking geese

Hungover zombie geese.

So, that’s the story. Presumably.