During his crazed and distraught wanderings, Jackass stumbled eventually into the wasteland behind the barn where the trash heap lay. There he encountered Billygoat, adding the holey bucket to his precious stash of refuse. Billygoat was known to be territorial about his corner of the farm midden.
Jackass stood there, disconsolate, a shell of his former self. “I wanted only to love the feminine, to exalt it, to worship it,” he murmured, “the Virgin and the Mother, both. In Heaven and on Earth, both. And I lost them both.”
“Buck up, Jackie-boy!” Billygoat told him. “The best things in life are a paradox.”
“Listen to you,” Jackass said bitterly, “King of the Junk Yard. Lord of the Trash Pile.”
“Junk! Trash!” Billygoat roared with a cheerful grin. “This is my museum, a rare collection, artifacts of fabulous failure, all of them unearthed by that great social archeologist, Duke Eligor. Here,” and Billygoat pawed with one cloven hoof at his treasures. “This brass bowl is what remains of Athena’s temple in Troy. This hairpin survives from Marie Antoinette's final coiffure. And here’s a relic, a knuckle-bone from Goliath, the Philistine giant. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, Jackie-boy.”
“I hate it when you call me that,” said Jackass.
Billygoat winked one yellow eye. “The holey bucket is a fine aquisition, a jewel amid gravel, gold amid dross.”
Jackass turned away then, unable to bear the goat's company. The grieving beast made it as far as the highway, where he collapsed for the last time.
