“I’ll tie these up for now,” I said, pushing the shutters closed on the windows, showing the geese as the chipped wooden frames clicked into place. “But eventually I’ll probably put locks on. You can have them open during the day. You lot are sleeping in here tonight.” I pointed, stern. “You’re not sleeping with me. It’s getting weird.”

Woman, the only white goose, wandered close at the sound of my voice and tilted her small head, eyeballing me. I reached out to pat her but she swung her head away as she usually did, muttering. She’d never been very affectionate, but I’d never stopped trying to win her over.

“Two shelves for roosting.” I showed her, leveling my hands halfway up the house, mapping out my vision. “And I’ll put in some of that straw you like. Snug and safe, the lot of you. It’ll be grand—probably grander than you need, but I’m a nice guy. What can I say?”

I shrugged, looked for an answer. The goose looked away.

I talked to my geese all the time. Particularly Woman. I recognized that I had started doing it at the same time as I realized it was too late to stop. I talked to her like a wife. Updated her about things I’d seen while out and about in the town, chatted to her absentmindedly, let her in on my thought processes. I would talk to the bird through the screen door to the kitchen while I cooked dinner, throwing things into the pot on the stove, the bird settled on the porch just outside the door, preening. I’d heard that lonely people talk to themselves. I’m not sure I was lonely, exactly, but I sorely missed having a wife. Kelly used to sit at the kitchen table when I was cooking, drinking wine, flipping through magazines, as disinterested in my ramblings as the regal mother bird. You can talk to people in prison, of course; there are no rules against it. But the guards will invariably answer you in single words until you give up and go away, and I was housed in protective segregation because of the nature of my charges. The inmates in my pod were mostly pedophiles, and pedophiles rarely come into the company of others of their kind in the outside world. So they like to talk about what they have in common. A lot. The only feedback I ever got from the geese was questioning looks and indecipherable bird babble—but I never had nightmares about that.