Storytellers takes a glimpse into an artist’s inner psyche through a story of their choice.

In this edition, Nicholas Nicholas talks about his love for the Goosebumps series, his dad’s love for rollerblading, and recounts a story about a duck/goose dilemma he and his father found themselves in.

The duck arrived the same day as the goose. They were an Easter present.

I was ten years old with a large collection of tie-died shirts. I compulsively put hair gel in my hair at odd hours of the day. I put a Goosebumps sticker on my first guitar because I thought it was cool. My dad scolded me for this, telling me I “wouldn’t care about Goosebumps in two months.” I was convinced it would be cool forever. We were both right. Rejecting more of his advice, I fell asleep every night to R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People (“you’ll have bad dreams”) on loop and awoke to the same songs until the CD warped after a couple months. I remember feeling genuinely disturbed on the first morning the warp became apparent—these familiar sounds suddenly sounding underwater and far away. It’s one of the first times I can recall feeling sad for no particular reason. Confused, I lay on my bed and turned to the window (more stickers). The sound and smell of my dad mowing the lawn. The sound and smell of being ten and hopelessly bored. Until it came to an abrupt stop and I heard another sound: that sound a duck makes (the word starts with a Q, but it bothers me when I write it here, so I’m going to skip it). I made nothing of it until I remembered we lived miles from any water or fowl enthusiasts.

The rest of the day hangs in my mind as if it were an Unsolved Mysteries reenactment I’ve watched over and over—mythologized, lens flares, cross fades—though I’m sure it was more mundane in a way that my brain has not allowed me to hold on to. What I do remember: a duck and a goose wandered into our backyard—white, spotless, their walking measured, one behind the other. Unusual, but not as curious as the shift that occurred within my dad (not what you would call an animal lover) as soon as they arrived. He had made some silent decision that he was going to care for the birds.

He seemed to learn something new about the ducks every 40 minutes or so. Making several different, hurried trips to a store.

First: he returned with a new loaf of white bread—an instinct forged by visits to the cemetery pond where we would toss globs of wonder bread at birds.

Second: A big plastic kiddie pool with cartoon sea creatures on the inside. A smiling octopus. A fish wearing lipstick.

I watched him fill the pool. He was like a statue with a working hose fastened to its hand.

Third: he retrieved a wooden ramp, painted safety fluorescent yellow. He had made this by hand for himself a couple weeks before as thanks to a midlife renaissance that found him obsessed with rollerblading. He would drive to deserted parking lots in full gear and jump off the ramp for hours. He placed it by the pool, allowing the birds to enter and exit the pool as they pleased. They used it without instruction.

He left to get a fourth thing but I didn’t see what it was.

By now it was getting dark and the birds had more or less become incorporated into our backyard. Like the hammock where my Dad alternated napping and listening to a battery powered radio. Asleep. Not asleep. Asleep. Not Asleep. Asleep.

The next morning I awoke to see my father standing in the statue position again. His head toward the ground, staring at the plastic pool. The duck and the goose were both very dead. They floated perfectly in the pool.

Feeling shocked, sad, and a little bit like the way I felt about the R.E.M CD, I asked my dad why they were dead (in the way children ask questions like that). He said (in the way parents answer questions like that): “I don’t know. I think they were friends.” Dissatisfied, he followed up with, “actually someone probably got them as yellow chicks for an Easter present and then ditched when they got big and white.” Ten minutes later the birds were in plastic bags and we were digging a hole. Dad put the yellow ramp into his trunk and drove to a parking lot to go rollerblading.

Stream Nicholas Nicholas’ Comfort Falls full-length below, and purchase it here.