Cows by Matthew Stokoe

into the torn, dying guts that had hoped one day to swell with the weight of a calf.
    Steven’s eyes closed.

CHAPTER FOURTEN

    A t home. In the kitchen Steven played his mind against itself, diverting it from the slaughter room obscenity with small domestic actions. And then, when the deception of these actions became too obvious, ricocheting back into curtains of blood and streams of semen splashing from jagged cowhide holes.
    He drifted in the kitchen, blank-faced, picking up plates and wiping them, putting them down, wiping them again, polishing cutlery against the side of his leg. Somewhere at the back of the flat the Hagbeast made dim shunting sounds as she moved about, but Steven didn’t hear them.
    The killing of the afternoon was stored inside him, weighted by the heavier, following torture, but he was afraid to examine it, afraid to search for its effects. That part of his brain was temporarily locked.
    And he was afraid of what he was going to do now, with these plates and forks and spoons. This was the beginning he had wished for but never expected to see. Tonight the Beast would eat the first of the meals that would send her down to hell. But if he failed? If he hesitated or was weak? Then she would rise like a gorgon and split him open.
    He had planned, on the bus the morning before Cripps’s horror show, to use some disguised ingredient subtle enough to escape detection and of a borderline virulence that would eventually destroy her but allow him, stanchioned by youth, to recover.
    But now … ? But now … ?
    As he squatted in front of the cupboard under the sink, staring at ancient and unused bottles of disinfectant, bleach and drain cleaner, trying to choose between them, he felt a sudden wild boldness flood his guts. Subtlety was pointless. She would eat whatever he did. She had to, her hate for him would not allow her to refuse the challenge.
    He took two empty plates into the bathroom.
    It was dark when the Hagbeast galleoned into the kitchen. The bare overhead bulb cut hard shadows into the sheets of newspaper tented over the plates on the table. Steven was seated and waiting.
    “So, we have a new cook. What did you cook, Steven? Uncover it. Let’s see if you can match your mother.”
    Steven drew away the paper and watched the tight compression of her smile, the narrowing of her eyes. On the plates, equally portioned, two curving lengths of shit lay dark against veined china.
    “It won’t work, Steven. Do you think this is so alien to my system?”
    It won’t work … Steven went cold. She knew what he was trying to do!
    But she was pulling her plate toward her, pressing her fork into the softness of the stool, lifting a piece to her mouth. Her eyes in their mean folds of fat held his, and for a second the stink of shit absorbed time. Between them space empted of all the mists that usually swirled there and Steven saw how well she understood him.
    Then she moved and the stink was just stink again and Steven had to carry on, whatever she knew. He saw thin fibers and lumps of still recognizable food poking from the broken end of the shit and prayed that her destruction would be swift.
    The Hagbeast waited for him to eat first. He put a section of the shit into his mouth. It rubbed his lips and the chocolate-smear drag of its entry made him shudder. He could not immediately bring his teeth together and the turd lay acridly in the hollow of his tongue, forcing its thick, boggy smell up behind his nose and into his head, cinching his stomach in a rapid serial spasm that threatened to send bile squirting from his nostrils. He forced himself to bite down and chew quickly, but speed didn’t reduce the appalling foulness of the taste.
    The shit was gritty against the roof of his mouth and made crunching sounds with his teeth. It worked itself into a clogging paste that built up under his tongue and inside his cheeks, so stiff he had to use his finger to hook it out. He felt he was drowning in the anus of