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GOAS

Our fences, unlike Krieger’s gleaming razor wire (talk that he went out there and barbed it himself when he wasn’t busy running down children), were mostly patchworks made up of hubcaps, sheet metal, plywood, car parts, bedsprings, hammered barrel lids, plastic crates, bricks, goatskins, crushed cans, assorted broken furniture, and in spite of Theofilus’s constant repairs, they didn’t do much but lean away from the wind. Although the cows mostly stayed on the farm, any and all predators—jackals, baboons, hyenas, Kalahari foxes, our friends the dwarfed hedgehogs, leopards, carnivorous bush rabbits, warthogs, neighboring thieving farmhands—all were absolutely welcome at Goas. Our saddest fences, though, were the ones that didn’t even try. Those sections of fence line where the land dipped into dry tributaries and the fence couldn’t follow suit were called “flying fences,” the most useless man-made things in the universe. A bit of cordoned-off void, winging across nothing, the only true mascot of Goas.