COWS

by Matthew Stokoe

He wasn't like the people on the streets. They lived so perfectly. They knew exactly what to do to be happy and they did it without even having to think.

Like sleep it was an escape. The flow of the water soothed him, threw a cover over his emptiness.

The air they breathed was not his air and the light that fell on them came from a warmer source than his sun. He longed to imitate them, to share in the mass normality that rolled in cathode waves across the dead nights of his loneliness.

"The only thing I saw up close was the heart. They weigh six pounds, you know. It was still beating when I held it, like it was trying to suck something in. But it stopped in the end." Lucy looked suddenly tired. "Our hearts are only two pounds, not much room for love."

On screen the templates for life were easy to find, but the methods of their construction, as always, remained hidden.

It was a cow.

"Yeah, I'm a cow, man. Touch me." Steven stuck his fingers through the grille. The cow was a cow, warm and solid.

"You might be wrong. How can a cow know what changes a man?" The cow stamped and rolled its shoulders. "Hey, fuck you, man. You think we're stupid?

"God Jesus Christ I love cows."

A cow in the crowd shouted: "Well, the fucker's dead."

"As soon as it's born the poison will start building up in it. Parents destroy their children simply by their presence. And we won't be any different. Shit gets passed on. You can't stop the infection. It seeps through your skin and builds up until it triggers your own shit and pus and then there's no room left inside you for anything else."

This cunt cow was becoming a new problem when a lifetime of others had been so recently overcome.

Conflict was inevitable, but it would come later.

He was safe and warm and free of doubt, recharged by murder.