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.

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.

They don't know what it means to slaughter through an eight hour shift, to kill and keep killing until the death of an animal sings to you of things beyond yourself."

Meat doesn't have the brains. It just works till it dies or until someone cuts it up."

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

"We all have it, that dark core. It makes us men. And if we examine it, if we can bear to hold it up to ourselves and acknowledge it as our own, then it makes us more than men. The slaughter room is where we become complete, boy."

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."

He knew it. There might be more steps to take, but she would be the mother, the lover, the hook on which to hang his plagiarised blueprint for living. 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.

What did it matter if they loved each other or not as long as each could be used as a screen against the world?