Merry Christmas! Story Chapter 1

So its Christmas time, and I figured I'd give everyone a little present: the greatest contribution to world literature by a Melville since Moby Dick. So without further ado...here it is enjoy. There's no title yet...so bear with me. I'll post it in installments every now and then...whenever I feel like it basically...

There are some who would argue that Dakar is hardly a city worth fighting over. All they see is the dust that blows down from the Mauritanian desert lining the streets. They see children begging on the streets, beaten if they don’t bring home more than a couple hundred francs, and their optimism withers in the face of such extreme poverty. Trying to cross the street, they are turned back by exhaust fumes, rushing taxis, horse-pulled carts, and clouds of dust kicked up by the cars. And they wonder why anyone would want to live here.

This story however, is about the others; those who see piles of trash strewn in the overgrown empty lots next to half-built houses and think “Ahh, this is a place to raise my kids.” This story is about those who see Dakar as a mere starting point, a platform from which to jump to bigger, better things. Today Dakar, tomorrow the world, as the saying goes. This story is about evil goats.

The evil goats of Dakar see this bustling African capital as one thing and one thing only: a place from which they can bide their time and plot their evil takeover of the world, establishing an Evil Goat World Dominion which looks suspiciously like the UN Security Council. In the meantime, they roam the streets of the city in evil packs, eating garbage, climbing on half-built walls like the cliffs of the Great African Escarpment of the time before the Great Exodus, and in a game known as “traffic dodging” in the evil goat community, causing crippling traffic jams throughout the city (“embouteillages” as they’re called – bottle necks – which may or may not come from the fact that one must have consumed an entire bottle of wine before braving these city-wide traffic jams).

Late on Friday nights (or early Saturday mornings depending on how you look like it), as the people of Dakar are just getting ready to go out to clubs, concerts, or other venues of mass entertainment, the evil goats are getting together in their respective neighborhood commissions, and preparing for their eventual world-domination. But the evil goat commissions are habitually divided. For one thing, goats aren’t allowed on the misnamed car rapides (they’re in fact, not very rapide at all) without the accompaniment of a human handler, which makes transportation around the city rather difficult, especially if one is planning world domination. Even if evil goats were allowed on the misnamed method of transport, they wouldn’t get very far as by some cruel trick of nature, goats have no pockets and can’t carry change to pay the fare. Because of the difficulties in travel, the goat commissions rarely get a chance to interact with each other, and as a result, the goat domination movement is fractured by neighborhoodal (I know I’m making up words again, but this is my story so cut me some slack) interests vying to take power for themselves.

This week, however, the excitement centers on a neighborhood commission in Sacre Coeur 3, where the evil goat who goes by the code name Charles (to protect his identity from the authorities) has begun implementing plans to unite the evil goat community under his rule. Evil goat leaders from all of Dakar’s neighborhood commissions are present. It is a momentous moment indeed, as for the first time in the evil goat history of Dakar, representatives from all across the city are meeting to discuss plans for the future. Evil goats from all over the city have spent days trudging through the crowded streets of Dakar, getting lost in back alleys along streets that seem to change direction every hour (or every half hour if you’re coming through Mermoz). Even evil goats from outside the city have come, braving potholed roads, sandstorms, and the odd bush taxi. The St. Louis evil representative (Code name: Lou) is sitting next to the evil representative from Tambacounda (Code name Tom) while Zinguinchor’s evil representative (Code name Ziggy) debates the proper technique for eating mangoes with the evil representative from Kolda (with the worst code name of them all: Shirly). They’re all here, and there’s business to be dealt with.

The impetus for this momentous moment concerns news that Lou brought to Charle’s attention weeks ago. They were born in the same litter (what’s an evil group of evil goat kids called again?), and still maintain touch despite the distance between them. Evidently, the eviler pelicans in Lou’s district have begun preparations for an invasion of Dakar: a bold move that if successful, would severely hamper the evil goat’s intentions of world domination. Lou was alerted by an informant in the eviler pelican community, a little diving bird named Hal.

“Order! Order! I demand order!” Charles called over the din of arguing goats. He was standing on a pile of gravel that had been left by the humans. “Brothers! We are all gathered here, for the first time in our evil goat history, for there is a dire situation before us. Brother Lou has brought us intelligence from up north that concerns us all. Brother Lou?”

Lou jumped up onto the gravel pile and spoke. “Thank you, Brother Charles. Brother Goats! As he said, a dire situation is upon us.” His voice was raspy from the many years he had spent up in the dry, dry heat breathing the dust that blew in from the Mauritanian desert. “It has been brought to my attention that the eviler pelicans are plotting a plot that is so eviler in nature, so horrific in its consequences, that it makes any evil plot that we plot seem downright magnanimous in comparison.”

A chorus of evil voices erupted in an evil din that made the demon spirits that inhabited the city late at night dive back into Hell from whence they had been borne into this world to cause mayhem and mischief. “Oh help us!” “The eviler pelicans!” “What are we going to do?” and “How are we going to take over the world now?”

“Please, please! Brothers, please calm down!” Charles yelled over the din. “Please, now I realize that this situation is dire, but we must not give in. I mean sure the pelicans are eviler than we, and sure they’re plans for world domination don’t include plans for craggy crags in every city, town, and village, for our kids to play on but we must fight them!”

“How, Brother Charles?” said Herman, as the representative from Liberté 6 was called. Herman’s evil goat head raised above the evil hoard of evil goats. His horns were curved, in the fashion of the evil goat horns from Libertés one through eight. “The pelicans can fly, and furthermore, they eat fish, a far superior protein source than cardboard.”

“True Brother Herman, the pelicans are militarily superior than we, and their superior protein source makes them more than a little bit stronger than us. I did not say it would be easy. But this is my home, I was born here, I played on these very streets as a kid with Brother Lou over there. And I for one won’t let the pelicans win! Who’s with me?”

There was an awkward silence as the evil hoard of evil goats assembled before Charles shuffled uneasily from front-left hoof to front-back hoof and back again, avoiding Charles’ searching eyes, glowing like evil coals in his head.

“Alright, if that is the way that you guys want it. If you want your kids growing up under the domination of the eviler pelican flock, then I suppose there’s nothing that I can say or do to convince you otherwise. When the pelicans arrive though, I will be fighting them, be it alone or with an evil hoard of evil goats behind me.” And with that final exhortation of a defeated leader, Charles nimbly hopped from the gravel pile to a thin stick perched precariously between two cement blocks and turned to walk away.

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I hope you guys enjoyed that. That's all for now. Merry Christmas!
Love,
Jake