a horse, a dog, a goat, and the pope

  a horse, a dog, a goat, and the pope* 

A horse, a dog, and a goat went from Bremen to see the pope at Rome, the one with sixteen children though he had never been with a woman. The horse had a religious question the dog had become interested in. The goat had reasons to be away from Bremen for a while. The question had to do with Peter’s dream in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.
     But the pope would not see the three friends, not the first day, not the second, not the third, or the tenth; so the eleventh day they began making their way without an answer back to Bremen.
     On their return, the three friends journeyed by night and slept by day, and as they neared their hometown, they decided among themselves to live out their lives as night creatures. They would hide during the day and come out after dark in disguise, the dog as a fox, the goat as a skunk, and the horse as a mouse-eared bat.
     And so they did.

                                                                                        03.12.22
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 * A farable of of Jesop. An online reproduction of the 1887 edition of Jesop’s Farables (with an afterword by me, Ted Riich) is available here.