The Troll's name was Umpkin; Umpkin the Bumpkin.

  …And he hated his parents. He hated their land, he hated their people, and he hated their bridge.

  "Seriously!" he thought. "We worked so hard to bring trolls into the modern world and they have to go and have a bridge?! How backward thinking could they be?"

  His parents, being the kind sort from a different generation, suggested that it could bring them money one day. But Umpkin pointed out that it was a broken bridge in the middle of a forest, with no chasm or body of water to cross. Still, they loved their bridge—and he hated them for it.

  As fate would have it, one day, some billy goats asked him to cross their bridge.

  "Cross it to where?!" he asked incredulously. "It doesn't go anywhere!” he exclaimed, hurt by the injustice of it all. “…And my parents eat goats!"

  Thinking of himself as an elevated troll, Umpkin had long styled himself as a vegetarian. Sure, plants weren't that tasty, but he didn't think eating his friends would be received well. Indeed, some of them had even introduced him to various fruits in exchange for not eating them. He adored fruit.

  "To The Great Beyond!!!" echoed the billy goat Umpkin thought to be in charge. His beard seemed to be the longest, and he was wearing sunglasses—which Umpkin knew was always the mark of the elite. His own were very flashy.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  "Where's that?” Umpkin asked with genuine curiously, his bushy eyebrows echoing his feelings as they arched up to add grump to the question. He adored his eyebrows. “This bridge doesn't go anywhere! And it's broken! How would you even get to your location?!" He growled in frustration.

  "Oh, it's there, young sir…” the ridiculous goat bleated as he nudged a bag towards the troll. It looked rather heavy. “I'll even give you my life savings in possessions as payment. I just need to see it."

  "I refuse to charge you for going across a broken bridge…" Umpkin muttered, his eyebrows doubling down on their dismissal.

  "Please sir, it's all I have…” the billy goat urged, removing his sunglasses and revealing eyes that had been tearing up. “I need to give you something or it won't work."

  "Fine then…" said Umpkin begrudgingly, inwardly bemoaning this as an affront to his own particular hipster values. If the billy goat wanted to give him his life savings to pass over a broken bridge, in the middle of nowhere, that didn't cross over to anywhere in particular—who was he to get in their way?

  "On you go… but don’t say I didn’t warn you."

  "Thank you!" they all said as one they walked across into nowhere in particular.

  "Oh yes! There it is! The Great Beyond…" Sunglasses Billy Goat exclaimed. And shortly after doing so, they all vanished.

  The moral of the story is... Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, your parents will eat the goats.