Three Good Deeds Read Free

he went so far that he got lost, and then even if he
did
do the old witch's stupid three good deeds, he couldn't find his way back to tell her about it so she could return him to his real form?
    Or what if the old witch realized she'd been much too harsh with him and that it really was Roscoe she should have punished, and she changed her mind but she couldn't find him—or worse yet, turned him back into a boy while he was up in the air?
    So, no flying.
    "Who's there?" he demanded in his fiercest goose hiss.
    "Sorry," a voice honked at him, soft and uncertain as a honk could be. "I didn't mean to startle you. I was just wondering what was wrong."
    Recent experience had turned Howard into a suspicious goose. "You didn't answer my question," he pointed out. "Who are you?"
    The tall weeds parted just the tiniest bit. Howard caught a glimpse of a goose's beak. "Well, so far I have been called Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow."
    Howard snorted. "That has to be the silliest name I've ever heard."
    There was a sniffle from the other goose. "I'm sorry," she said, as though her name were her fault. She still didn't step out from her hiding place. "What's your name?"
    "Howard."
    "How-Word," the other goose repeated carefully as though she'd never heard that name before. Then she said, "I've been called Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow since the time I was little more than a hatchling and I got separated from my brothers and sisters. Our parents searched for the rest of the day, but they couldn't find me until after the moon rose and shed it's light on the pond. How did you come to be called How-Word?"
    "Oh," Howard said. He had no idea how his parents had chosen his name. Rather than admit that, he asked, "Why do you keep talking like your name's about to change?"
    Still hidden, for the most part, behind the weeds, Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow gave a shuddery sigh. "Well," she said, "you know how geese can be."
    "I do?" Howard asked. He knew how people could be, and wondered if that was the same.
    "I'm afraid once they see what's happened to me, they'll call me cruel names, and one of those will stick, and then I'll be called that for the rest of my life."
    So apparently geese and people
did
have something in common.
    "What's happened to you?" Howard asked.
    Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow must have taken a step back, because even her beak disappeared among the fronds of the water weeds. "Oh," she said, sounding distressed, "never mind. I'll just go now."
    She sounded as miserable as Howard felt. And she was the one person ... well, the one creature ... who had shown any concern while he'd been calling for help.
    Howard stumbled upon just the right thing to say. He said, "
I
would never call you a cruel name no matter what it is that's happened to you." He said this even though just the past summer he had called Roscoe's sister Gertrude "Baldy" when her mother had to cut her hair really short because of an infestation of lice.
    "You wouldn't?" Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow asked. "That's very kind of you."
    It felt nice to be called kind. Curious, Howard again asked, "What
did
happen to you?"
    "Are you sure you won't laugh?"
    "No matter what," Howard assured her.
    The blades of grass separated. Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow moved very, very slowly. At first Howard couldn't see anything wrong: She had only one head; she had two big dark eyes, a beak that seemed to be the right shape and size, two feet, a pair of wings....
    "It's all right," he encouraged her, because she was lingering in the shadow of the weeds and he couldn't get a good look. Something—he was assuming some nearby plant—seemed to be casting a red sheen to the feathers on her head and back so that he couldn't see what was the problem. "You look fine to me," he said. He wondered if—like himself—she wasn't supposed to be a goose. On the other hand, he guessed, with her strange name, she probably wasn't