COWS

by Matthew Stokoe

That day in his teens was confirmation of what he had suspected since birth - that he was incapable of manipulating life as other people did. Unlike them he could have no effect on the web of events that surrounded him, he could bring about no change.

Good boy. Snapped in half and still killing itself to please.

They were so much more real than himself, the air around them was bright with the definition of their existence. He felt himself blurring with the sunlight and the motion of the bus, as if his outline were sand or fine powder.

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.

He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was.

"Look at it, boy. We haven't just killed it, we've obliterated it."

"They live, don't they? They suffer. Like us. Haven't you seen the poison inside them? Hard and black and stuck in the intestines? Or under the liver or somewhere else?"

"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."

They joked and talked about women, squeezed their balls, draped arms across friends' shoulders. Even killing time, they were more alive than Steven ever expected to be.

"What gift?" "The experience of killing. Of blowing out their brains and taking away their most precious thing. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want. Do you understand me? The things you would do if there was nothing to stop you. Killing is an act of self-realisation, it shows a man the truth of his power. And when you know this, boy, the pettiness they try to shackle us with falls away like shit."

"Because I know how much pus my body churns out. I've measured my shit and my piss and my snot and all the other slime that comes out of me. And it doesn't add up to what being alive pumps into me every fucking day."

There had been no love there, upstairs tonight, but it would come - Lucy would force it into being. She had no choice. She would never find her black lumps of poison or cut them out, and like Steven she would never be part of the world. In time, when she realised this, she would need someone to cling to, someone to absorb and deaden the impacting horror of her sentence. And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love.

Steven snatched his hand away and looked quickly to see if it had absorbed the mark of death, some dark contagion that might multiply beneath the skin and come searching for him.

"I killed a cow yesterday." "Were you trying to look inside it?" "The foreman said it would change me." Lucy laughed softly, sliding towards sleep. "It isn't that easy."

The slaughtermen were peripheral, the world was a grabber and a cow being manoeuvred into it. Around him there was nothing else, except the dead feeling that everything now was inevitable and beyond his control.

"Yeah, well don't start making plans, man. This is cowland and you can't stay."

LMFAOOOOOO

They sat next to each other on the couch and played at being in love. Each of them knew it wasn't real, but both of them needed the deception.

Cripps lived through all of it, but his eyes got dull and he did not see the cuts of meat that piled in outline around him like a snow-angel. Flesh-angel.

This was cow love, just like the Jesus love that people on TV churned out every Sunday afternoon.

HUH

"We're trying to hide inside each other. We called it love to pretend we were normal but it didn't change anything."

"There can't be any happiness with poison inside, it doesn't matter what you make around you. The only thing you can do is cut it out."

"We don't need money, man. Are you blind? We're fucking cows."

LMFAOOOO