I drive to a bakery. Near the bakery is a colonnade, two storeys raised, inbuilt with a spread of wallcut channels around its overhang that faucet into a pool below. Centered, in the colonnade: flutes of spray in a tiered fountain, uncovered and grass-wrapped, pumping water like a big summer heart. Stone walkways, stone stairs. Stone columns, holding roof. The color teal all over. Copper drains pit at inward angles, where excess will go when excess exists. They vein back into troughs underground, most likely, to fill the pool, the pumps, the channels. They help keep water moving. So water keeps moving.

At the pool level, 16 geese gaggle. I have counted them. One by one, the geese bob into the pool like dark corks. They shake their tails before they hop in. They swim a little drunkenly in C-shapes and bump into each other.

Everywhere is swathed in geese shit. Everywhere.

The shit is dried pucks of food stone. The shit piles into two storeys, sometimes three, and centers around residue from previous shit. It is grass-wrapped, channeled with bread crumbs that faucet into brickcrack. The shit is tiny popped crumble buttons from a thousand jackets. The shit is checker pattern, old kitchen tile. The shit is a high school SCANTRON. Where excess shit is, is more shit: more on more, and no means of ending it. Nobody’s scooping. The geese aren’t, at least. These 16 geese have shit everywhere. And they continue to shit everywhere.

I eat a muffin and watch a goose avoid its own shit as it hops back out of the pool.

I recall the Top Gun anthem as this goose exits. I watch Goose, in a tailspin, attempt to eject from the cockpit of his F-14A Tomcat and into the all-teal around him. Sparks flare. The guitars wail. His body circles the glass, a loose feather.