The Goose That Laid Golden Eggs

The goose shed on the farmer's land held nothing worth a second look. Straw lay spread evenly over the dirt floor, and the dry, grassy smell of hay hung in the early morning air. A handful of white geese waddled about, just as they always had, for as long as anyone could remember. Every morning went the same way. The farmer walked out to the shed while the dew still clung to its straw roof. He counted each goose, tidied the nests, and then went back inside for breakfast. One day followed another, and nothing happened that was worth telling.

Long ago in ancient Greece, people began passing this story from one teller to the next, through more generations than anyone can count. It is known as an Aesop fable, and it has come down whole to the present day.

But one morning, as the farmer bent over the familiar straw nest as usual, his hand stopped halfway. Something lay in the nest, unlike anything he had ever seen there before.

It was round, and it sat heavy in his palm, nothing like the light weight of the ordinary eggs he found in the nest each morning. He lifted it and turned it gently in the beam of light that slipped through a gap in the shed wall. A blaze of gold flashed back across his whole face. It was not the color of a yolk showing through a thin shell, as with an ordinary egg. It was real gold, solid and heavy, as if a streak of late afternoon sunlight had been locked inside a hard shell. The farmer stood frozen in the middle of the goose shed. He even forgot the geese honking right beside his feet.

That same day the farmer took the strange egg to the market. He held it tight in his pocket the whole way there, still half believing, half doubting. But only moments after he set it on the scale, the whole market was buzzing as people passed the strange news along. It was pure gold, with nothing else mixed in. It was more precious than anything that had ever been laid out for sale at that small market. People crowded around to look and could not stop marveling. That day the farmer carried home more money than he had brought back from any market day in his whole life.

The next morning, another golden egg lay snugly in the straw nest, just like the morning before. The morning after that, there was one more. One egg each morning, as regular as the sunrise, never late and never missing. The farmer took each egg to market, and life in his small house changed visibly from one market day to the next. The roof that had leaked for so many years was now mended, snug and tight. Rain no longer dripped onto the corner of his bed each time the rainy season came around. The meals on his table changed as well. They smelled of hot, hearty food, instead of the thin porridge of the days when there was never quite enough. Each night he pulled up a thick, warm blanket he had just bought. He no longer had to curl up, tossing and turning with worry before he fell asleep, as he used to.

People are strange that way. The more they have, the less it seems like enough. On the day he found the first egg, one gold egg each morning had been the greatest wonder he had ever dared to dream of. Yet as he grew used to plenty, he began to feel that one egg a day was terribly slow, terribly little. The joy of bending over the straw nest each morning slowly faded. In its place grew an impatience that got bigger with every passing day.

Every night he sat counting the coins he had saved from selling the golden eggs. He stacked them in little piles on the table under the oil lamp. The more he counted, the more impatient he became. The thought of waiting slowly for exactly one egg each morning grew larger in his mind, night after night. In the end it crowded out all the common sense a gentle farmer would normally have. Surely, he thought, that goose must hold a great store of gold inside it. Otherwise it would not keep letting the gold out drop by drop, one egg at a time, forever. Better to take it all at once and be done with it, so he would never have to wait another morning.

One morning, instead of going out to the shed and waiting patiently as usual, he decided to take all the gold hidden inside at once, without a single day's delay.

A short while later, it was all over. But when he looked, there was no golden egg there at all. Not a speck of gold, not a single glint like the mornings before. There was only an empty space, just like the inside of any other ordinary goose in the world.

And his goose, the goose that had laid gold so faithfully every morning for so long, was gone.

The farmer sank down beside the empty straw nest, his hands still trembling, with no idea what to say to himself. The early sun still shone through the gaps in the shed, as warm as on any other day. The geese that were left still waddled around his feet, calmly preening their feathers, as if nothing at all had just happened.

The straw nest in front of him was now only a straw nest. No golden egg, not even an ordinary egg, nothing lay there anymore. There was only straw, and an emptiness that nothing in the world could ever fill again.