Disclaimer: I can’t write in the exact voice of Ally McBeal or reproduce her original lines, but below is an original inner monologue that captures high-level characteristics often associated with her: bright, neurotic, romantic, courtroom-minded, and prone to surreal musical daydreams. This is a fresh, original piece that blends those traits with the playful mischief of a goose in an urban Untitled Goose Game world.
I wake up with a honk lodged in my chest. It feels dramatic, like an aria that missed its cue. The city is a patchwork of crosswalks, coffee carts, and people who think they own the air. I, however, own a particular patch of downtown: the bench by the fountain, the sunlit strip of pavement outside the courthouse, the mouth of a particular recycling bin whose lid lifts just so when curiosity and beak meet. It’s hard to be properly ironic about territory when you have feathers and a beak, but trust me, I try.
There’s a brief, very human moment — does a goose have those? — when I consider my life as if it were an episode of someone else’s television show. In the first scene I’m in the firm’s lobby, lawyer card in my feathers, the security guard blinking because really, a goose with a tie? He says nothing; security guards are the most practiced in disbelief. Meanwhile, a sandwich sits on a bench, wrapped like a small, vulnerable present. The song in my head crescendos: ‘Take it. Take it. Take it.’ I honk softly to warm up my vocal chords and, as any responsible attorney would, I consider precedent.
Precedent is the most comforting thing I have. Precedent says: if you snatch a sandwich, the sandwich is snatched, and later you can be pleasantly pursued by guilt or goose friends who admire your audacity. Precedent also says: if you walk into a deposition and honk during a solemn answer, it will make the transcript very interesting and possibly ruin a case or save one, depending on your emotional goals. I file the question away under 'ethical quandaries' and under 'things that smell like ham.'
My office is small, more pigeonhole than office, but better than a nest. There’s a window that looks out on the narrow city street where suits bustle, on women in heels who click like punctuation marks, on a man who stares at his phone as if the pixels were legal counsel. I sometimes imagine myself arguing before a judge, but because I am a goose, my argument begins with a honk and a flourish of wing. In the dream-logic of courtroom fantasy, that honk translates into something brilliant and devastating: You violated the covenant of crumbs. You crossed the line between polite society and sandwich theft. The jury — a peculiar cross-section of humans and maybe one curious pigeon — nod in slow, decisive sympathy.
Romance is more complicated. I have always been a romantic who types legal memos; my files are organized by who captured my attention. There was once a human who smelled of citrus and rain, who paused in the park and fed breadcrumbs to a duck with the kind of tenderness that seemed illegally generous. I approached as any self-respecting goose lawyer would: with interest and strategic honking. He laughed and called me mischievous. 'You have the look of someone with a precedent for trouble,' he said. I took it as a compliment. Then he left, probably to his apartment, and I'm left on the steps composing a note in perfect Ms. McBeal logic: A love note should be both concise and theatrical. It should reference a pastry. It should, ideally, be hand-delivered. It should also involve a small obstruction of the sidewalk so his shoes will inevitably pause, and fate will do the rest. I flapped my wings with the hopeful ferocity of someone drafting a motion to compel an encounter.
Work is a different kind of theater. The firm — let us call it The Firm Because Names are for humans — has rituals that require attending: coffee time, gossip hour, the quiet shuffle of briefs. My colleagues accept me with varying levels of baffled tolerance. There is a partner who thinks my signature style is endearing and another who keeps a stack of napkins specifically to mop up the crumbs I leave after lunch heist season. They assign me cases with a mixture of faith and bewilderment. 'Can a goose be lead counsel?' they whisper, as if it were a complicated jurisdictional query. My answer is usually to honk in a persuasive manner and then rearrange their pens so they cannot leave the conference room until I have been acknowledged.
I have an assistant — of course I do. She is a human with a clipboard and an unshakeable belief that everything is fixable with Post-it notes. She writes my calendar in block letters and assigns me the events that require maximum goose diplomacy: neighborhood mediation where a gardener insists lilies are being stolen by 'small furry beasts,' though, frankly, everyone knows it is me and two raccoons playing an elaborate game of flower court. There are also emergency trials: parking disputes, custody of a particularly territorial bench, and once, a case of mistaken identity involving a pigeon, a hat, and a particularly dramatic gust of wind. I welcome these. They sharpen the mind and, in the more sentimental hours, they knit me back together in places the city has frayed.
Sometimes my inner monologue takes the form of a musical number. It is embarrassing and delightful. Standing on a paper-strewn desk, I belt out a private aria about precedent and breadcrumbs. The melody is somewhere between a Broadway flourish and a foghorn. Colleagues pause and smile indulgently, because what else are you going to do when a feathered colleague is composing legal doctrine via song? It becomes my secret method of brief-writing: if the argument can survive the opera, it can survive the bench. It’s not efficient, but it is persuasive in a pyrotechnic sense.
There is, of course, anxiety. It arrives without warning in the form of a gust that ruffles my feathers and a memory of a human laughter that felt like a ruling in an unwanted case. Sometimes I imagine a jury of my own fears — each fear sits with a placard: 'Will I be taken seriously?,' 'Will someone ever feed me without intention?', 'Will the citrus man notice the sandwich wrapper and not the goose who stole it?' I cross-examine these fears ruthlessly. 'Objection,' I tell them, though the word comes out as a quadruply offended honk. I pace in small circles, because pacing has always been a lawyerly thing to do when you need to think. Pacing is better with webbed feet; it gives rhythm to my arguments and terror a place to rest.
The city, in Untitled Goose fashion, is a playground of opportunity. There are fences to squeeze under, bicycles to start with a thoughtful peck in the spokes, and pumpkins to mysteriously reassign to other sidewalks. Each petty theft is a case study in human behavior: how do people react when their towel disappears from a bench? How do they change when their paper bag of apples is suddenly lighter? They are delightful variables, and I collect their reactions like evidence. People are at their most honest when their morning has been mildly inconvenienced. Someone will laugh. Someone will swear. Someone will locate a camera and consider legal recourse. For my part, I keep a notebook with observations: 'Counselor S. loses hat at 9:12 — contempt or distraction?' It is both professional curiosity and plain mischief.
On the days when my chest is heavy with a longing I cannot organize under 'work' or 'romance' or 'mischief,' I go to the fountain and preen. The water is honest; it reflects and does not adjudicate. I tuck my head under my wing and let the city sound pass over me: honks (mine and theirs), the distant argument of two people who will probably be lovers by Tuesday, a saxophone that may be trying to play 'Moon River' or may be struggling with public transport. In these soft moments I imagine a closing statement to myself: you have been audacious, you have been petty, you have been loving in the clumsy way of a creature that has been told stories of swans and wonders they are only occasionally true. You have also, defiantly, been yourself.
There are days of ethical crisis. A human leaves a briefcase on a bench, unzipped, a faintly legal scent leaking from its seams. My lawyerly instincts scream. This is not merely a theft; it is a crisis of fiduciary trust. I consider the moral precedents: taking is wrong if it causes harm; taking is acceptable if it amuses you and you later return the contents with a slightly cheerful honk. I weigh scales of justice with my beak. In the end, I often choose to rearrange papers so that a legal document appears slightly more chaotic when opened. It’s a small amendment to the truth and, I tell myself, part of my performative pedagogy: make people look at what they left behind, and perhaps they will look at how they live.
Sometimes the city fights back. A sprinkler system executes a precise and humiliating jet at the exact height of my chest. An angry barista brandishes a broom. Once, a man with good posture and a stern face chased me for ten meaningful blocks, during which I composed a full closing statement about boundaries and personal autonomy that rhymed and ended on the word 'sandwich.' He caught me at the fountain, breathless more from indignation than exertion. He simply said, 'You could have just asked.' There it was: the simplest, most human ruling. I felt strangely found and oddly chastised. He did not clap the handcuffs on; he handed me a crumb and walked away. I practiced a smile I had seen on television and decided, for the moment, it would suffice.
Night is the city's generosity. It is then that the traffic doubles as percussion, and the streetlights are like the halo of a judge's bench. I waddle home with an air of self-satisfaction and a smudge of mustard on my beak. I examine my reflection — feathered, bright-eyed, law-abiding in the broadest sense — and I draft tomorrow’s plan: one strategic honk in the morning to wake the partners, one carefully executed diversion at noon to liberate lunch from a distracted set of hands, and an evening of introspection to be performed dramatically in my mind with choreographed gestures and possibly, if I’m feeling ambitious, a duet with that saxophonist on the corner.
There is a wisdom I carry, practiced like a precedent. People think we geese are only noise and feathers. They think we are small catastrophes on two webbed feet. But being both lawyer and goose in a city that is half courtroom, half playground has taught me a finer lesson: to be audacious without cruelty, to pursue delight without destroying dignity, and to turn the everyday into something of a case that proves a point about what it means to be alive. Sometimes the point is 'I want a sandwich and will ingeniously acquire it.' Sometimes the point is 'I need to be held.' Sometimes the point is 'I will honk and in that sound will be a kind of truth.'
So I tuck one wing around myself, like a brief tucked under an arm, and prepare for another day of small legal victories and greater personal embarrassments. I am, at once, ridiculous and careful, theatrical and exact, a walking contradiction who files memoranda and steals muffins and loves too easily for my own composure. Tomorrow I will argue a case for a bench, appear at mediation for a stolen hat, and perhaps finally get that man to notice both the sandwich wrapper and the goose behind it. For now, I sleep, dreaming of order and crumb-laden chaos, of judges who nod, and partners who accept that law can be practiced with a honk. The city sleeps, but my mind does not. It is drafting motions in the dark, preparing to be both mischievous and responsible all over again.