- Write a flash about a cow with a talent.*
I haven’t read this. Even so, I’d make no apologies. There are likely problems with it. I raced the clock as I didn’t know how long it would need to be. October flash is coming. Each prompt speaks large or small horrors to me. If, later, I like this one, I’ll fix it, expand it, make it less Orwell and more Lovecraft. It stands because of my love of Flash Friday. Because it is the process in it’s purest form if not it’s finest.
It was the chickens who came up with theology. ‘Not because they are closest to God,’ the old sow told me once ‘but because there are so damn many of them clucking agreement.’
And the chickens had a lot of revelations, they refused to call it dogma, they were frightened of the dog shape altogether. For one, there is a version wherein on the great farm all the animals aspired to manliness and God, so horrified his favorite creatures would, too, become men, he struck them dumb, caused his priests to cluck, his strong beasts to bray, his messengers to whistle, his beloved (according to the old sow not the chickens) to oink and snort.
That changed when the farmer came home one day from the place, it is rumored among them that dare speak of it, that animals are bought and sold and the children of men throw stones, or eat candy and laugh, he came home with Bessie. Bessie was a shaggy cow, not like the great black and white gentle beasts that once a season rutted with the bull and gave milk year round.
Bessie, like the old sow, understood the chickens, but unlike the old sow Bessie listened, paid attention. The old sow tried her passive aggressive best to stop this, tried to befriend the great shaggy Bessie.
“So, what is a Bessie? I’ve never seen ought quite like you.”
“I am a Bessie. There is nought quite like me. The chickens say man is the only beast that kills for pleasure.”
“The chickens also peck dried grain from the dirt.”
Bessie did not abjure the old sow, but rather took her as a confidante for how the other animals viewed the world.
When Bessie saw the cows that lived in the field, not the silly gals who laid in the stalls with teats full of milk for their Man’s table, marched quietly to the killing floor, she stopped talking to anyone. When she saw the children of the silly gals kept in short stalls and led to the same killing floor, she began talking again, but only to the chickens and after everyone else had gone to straw. No one knew what happened on the killing floor, but they could smell, and except for the dogs no creature that went in ever came out.
The rooster would end his sermon to the single shaggy Bessie every evening with “Man is the only animal that kills.”
After the soft winter in the warm barn, when the fields were green again and the warm air came from the west, Bessie was led out to the field. Dried hay lay in stacks on the green grass.
She tried talking to the others, but they were dumbed. She mooed and brayed “Man is the only animal that kills” and the few that paid attention would gently moo back “I’m going to be alright”. Men on horseback would come sometimes with hounds to steer the dumb and Bessie to other pastures and they’d speak and the dogs would bark.
One night a strong cold rain came and the night sky lit up with streaks of white hot fire. The men came on horseback to gather the frightened dumb cows. As a man came, all alone, atop the aloof and harnessed horse , an animal that worked as hard for men as the hounds, his horse hit a piece of pasture made soft by the cold rain and threw the man. The horse could not get up. Raw bone stuck from his hind leg.
The man lay on the ground making sounds of panic and death the way the chickens did when dogs were nearby. Bessie walked to him. The man seemed comforted by this, the way the dumb were comforted by the cooing sounds of men as they walked the chute to the killing floor.
Bessie turned her head sideways so her one good eye could take the man in. He was not upright. He was drawn. He cooed between his dog sounds. Bessie raised her Front hooves high and came down on the man’s skull with all her weight. He stopped making sounds. He stopped being the only creature that kills. Bessie would tell the chickens. Bessie would be the agent of god. The horse, too, pleaded. Bessie stood in the cold rain and questioned the morality of killing the horse, looking up from the ground, pleading with one good eye, pleading outlaw-wise for mercy. The chickens had never spoken of mercy.
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