Burger Town by Nathan Willis
Shorts reader Andy Hofmann on today’s short: You roost on your local park's benches and feed the flocks of resident birds. You bask in the sunshine, scatter seeds or bread, and enjoy the peace. But what if you had people from far and wide vying around one specific and very big bird? Nathan Willis's "Burger Town" takes wing into the absurdity of a fledging tourist trap and all it entails.
burger town
There’s a giant goose in the park. It sits on the stretch of grass between the pond and the road.
Some people say it’s not that big. It’s an optical illusion. Sometimes they say it’s not even there at all.
But it is, and she’s almost as big as the gazebo.
When the giant goose first arrived, the town tried to make it leave, citing concerns of liability and destruction of property. Then word got out and people came from all over to get a picture with the goose. Then more and more and more people came. Then the town changed their position. They built a log fence around the goose and cast a net of fishing-line over the top to keep it in place.
They put up signs that said do not feed the water fowl. But it is ok to feed the giant water fowl. She prefers burgers. Local burgers. Like what we have in the burger station.
The burger station is an insulated box on a mailpost next to the fence. It has a maximum capacity of twenty-seven hamburgers. The burgers are provided by the local burger place that was once featured on the show Small Town Gems. On most days, it’s stocked with four or five burgers. The burger station has an ambient warming element that kicks on every ten minutes whether there are burgers inside or not. There is a cash box affixed to the side of the station with the words Buy Local above the slot for cash. There is no cost per burger listed.
The people who visit the goose come by themselves, and they’ve all read about how the goose has always been giant and how she stayed in one place when she got here and then we built a fence so we could say she is protected in the park and they ask how long the fence has been there.
The fence has been there for a very long time. Longer than anyone ever says. What we usually say is that it’s been there for about a year, and the visitors say, well, how do you know she still wants to be here, and we tell them the truth. We say that we don’t. Then we give them a warm hamburger from the burger station and they have to decide if they are going to feed it to the goose, or eat it themselves.
We pretend not to watch, but we do and we see them smuggle the burger back to their car and take pictures of themselves eating. We see them edit the pictures and we see them send them out into the world.
Then we see them come back for seconds.
We see them load up for the ride home.
The giant goose has not eaten for a very long time, probably about a year, but she isn’t getting any smaller. She’s getting bigger.
There’s talk of rebuilding the fence to accommodate her growth, which will be costly, but the burden won’t fall to the people of the town. The project will be sponsored by the hamburger place, the gem, on the condition that the town is renamed Burger Town.
But no one wants to visit or live in a place called Burger Town, so the visitors stop coming, and the residents move away.
When the town is empty the fence and net will still be in place and the goose will try to remember what made her come here in the first place. She’ll try to remember what made her stay.
It will all come back to her eventually, and when it does, she will be overwhelmed with hunger. But by then there will be no burgers and no burger money. There will only be the ambient warmer, kicking on every ten minutes with a quiet, fuzzy hum; the sound of a promise that will never be fulfilled.
Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared in Split Lip, hex, matchbook, Swamp Pink, Moon City Review, Farewell Transmission and elsewhere. His stories have been nominated for Best Small Fictions and appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com.
He can also be found on Bluesky at @nathanwillis.bsky.social and at Instagram at @nathan_willis1280.
