Cows by Matthew Stokoe Page B

Steven.” She hit his face. “Look at yourself.”
    Steven looked down and saw what had always been there—soft white skin over bones, ribs, dick hanging.
    She laughed, prodding his chest and stomach, lifting his balls to look underneath.
    “I don’t see it, Steven. Where is this strength of yours?”
    He stood mute. She was too powerful for him to survive direct and active confrontation.
    The Hagbeast reached down and pulled her dress over her head. She wore nothing underneath and the sharpness of her crotch burned his throat.
    “Are you as strong as this?”
    She slapped her dimpled saddlebag hips, ran her hands over rolls of hard fat stacked from groin to breast. Steven looked at her matted gray cunt and the blood sticking in clots to the insides of her thighs.
    “Look at this mountain of flesh, Steven. Throw yourself against it. Have you ever calculated its weight? This is strength, you whining bucket of piss. This is what you must measure yourself against. It stands between you and everything you want and you’ll never get past it.”
    Steven knew she was wrong and he wanted to spit it in her face. Lucy was going to open up like a tunnel and he would crawl through her into a world impossible for the Hagbeast to touch. But it was too early yet to strut this before Mama, she could still destroy it at a stroke. So he stayed quiet through her ranting.
    Later, in his room, the shit in his belly made him sick and he lay curled around Dog on the floor by the bed. Dog licked sweat from his master’s forehead and whimpered at his shiverings. Steven felt the animal’s nuzzlings through the gauze of his pain and dreamed he was somewhere underground with the velvet lips of a cow against his neck. In his fever he merged with it, knowing its thoughts, its fears, and the timeless species-desire for a place where men never came.
    At dawn he was able to rise, pale and drained, and Dog yelped with joy and gave thanks to Dog God that there was still something left to love.
    In the hall, as he left the flat, splashes of the Hagbeast’s vomit bloomed on the floor from the kitchen to her room, like flowers of hope. Steven felt good when he saw them.

CHAPTER FIFTEN

    T he door was unlocked and Lucy was up, so Steven walked in and stood behind her as she sat bent over a table. He kissed the back of her neck and looked over her shoulder. Pinned to a wooden block, a lab-bred rat lay on its back, alive, guts open to Lucy’s probing fingers. The rodent’s stretched eyes darted uselessly through a limited range of vision, searching for some way to escape the pain.
    Lucy gave up with her fingers, took a scalpel from a clutter of sharp surgical instruments at her side, and began to remove, one by one, the exposed organs. She held each one up to the light and inspected it, then cut it into pieces on the wooden block.
    Steven kissed her hair as she worked, running scenes of the future when she would tend to him with the same devotion she now reserved for the small rat organs. He would lie in a large bed under her kisses and plans for life would flutter down about them like rose petals.
    When the rat was empty Lucy dropped her scalpel and leaned back against him, too disgusted to support her own weight. He could feel desperation radiate from her.
    She put his hands on her breasts, but this was too little protection. She stood for him to hold her and closed her eyes and pressed loose fists to her chin like a baby sleeping.
    Steven saw her night’s work on the floor—a pile of hollowed rats and a plastic bucket of guts—and knew that love was coming quickly. Her search for something to cut out of herself was getting frantic.
    They fucked in a cold room hung with photographs of surgically opened bodies. Steven looked at them while he pumped. The light in the shots was hard and the exposed organs gleamed under it—dark kidneys and livers and hearts, paler stomachs and bladders, all of them floating in cavities of blood like the makings of