The Cows

by Dawn O'Porter

She’s happy living through her fingertips. In her virtual world she is bold, brave and powerful. In the real world, she kind of sucks.

I stared at the back of his head from the kitchen door and mouthed everything I wanted to scream at his face.

How can we look back over the past five hundred years, at how women were knocked into second place because they were the ones that had to bear the children, and not agree that it is a reasonable reaction to want to remain child free?

As a society, we have to stop valuing women on whether they have babies or not.

then I remember what my mother used to tell me. She said if someone is about to hurt you, let them say everything they need to say – so when they are done, you can tell them to shut up if they interrupt you.

It wasn’t that I wanted to die, but I needed a pain I could understand. Something physical that could be treated, rather than the emotional agony that I had no idea how to fix.