Cows Read Free

was gone and mah lips was ripped up so bad they never got found. Like it, ya little bastard? Bet you think it’s a real good story, dontcha, ya little fuck? Well you better remember it. Cows taste like heaven but ya can’t trust ’em a single fuckin’ inch.”
    Gummy started work on another head and Steven went back to the grinder.

CHAPTER FIVE

    O utside his building, in the dark. Sodium vapor drained color from the blackened walls of the ruin and Steven found it hard to focus on the crumbling planes. Everything was too bright or too black and the wash of streetlight ocher fritzed his eyes. The place had a shunned look, as though whatever gave personality to a structure had flown in disgust from this one long ago. And, left abandoned in a field of belching, farting, puking factories, the rotting four-story Victorian had grown shuttered and autistic.
    Steven paused on the steps and watched the evening trucks blow litter along the empty sidewalk, and wondered where they were going.
    In the gloom of the third-floor landing, as he stood at the door of the flat steeling himself against the Hagbeast, he felt the unfriendly air move. Darkness swirled on the stairs then parted and she was walking toward him in slow-motion strides. Lucy—black T-shirt, black leggings, dark hair streaming in some self-generated slipstream. Half Indian, half Jewess. She ran her eyes over his face like a blind woman using her fingers, concerned not to communicate immediately, but to search for possible hostility. Steven stood passive while she picked a piece of ground meat from his hair. She held it on her palm and stared at it.
    “I do that at work. It’s my new job.”
    She lifted her gaze and looked intently at him.
    “When you cut them open do you get to see inside? Do you reach inside and look around?”
    Steven shifted his feet. “For what?”
    “They live, don’t they? They suffer. Like us. Haven’t you seen the poison inside them? Hard and black and stuck in the intestines? Or under the liver or somewhere else?”
    “I just saw guts. Toxins are stored in muscle, anyway. Not in lumps between organs.”
    “I’m not talking about toxins. You think I’m talking about sugar and caffeine and all that shit? Fuck, just being alive does it. That and what your parents do to you before you get strong enough to stop them. And even when you can stop them it’s too late. The seed’s there and it grows and grows until it jams all the systems in your body and your mind fucks up. Didn’t you see anything like that?”
    She sounded desperate.
    “I didn’t really look, maybe there was something.”
    Her intensity made Steven uneasy, but she was a woman, a possible source of love, and he didn’t want to disappoint her.
    “The only thing I saw up close was the heart. They weigh six pounds, you know. It was still beating when I held it, like it was trying to suck something in. But it stopped in the end.”
    Lucy looked suddenly tired. “Our hearts are only two pounds, not much room for love.”
    He watched her drift back up the stairs to the fourth floor, watched her brown fingers trail along the bannister and imagined them on his cheek.
    ***

    The flat was cold. The Beast in her gluttonously accumulated blubber did not feel it. Steven went straight to the bathroom, he needed a shit. He could feel it heavy in his guts, squeezing closed the large veins in his groin, making his legs ache. Minute fecal particles would be sifting through the wall of his colon, heading straight for the cells of his face and brain, aging, aging, aging … stealing the future.
    He locked the door, squatted, flipped his dick inside the toilet seat, leaned forward and strained. After a moment of pissing and resistance his sphincter relaxed and a foot and a half of gray shit shot out of his ass and left a thick smear on the dry porcelain above the water. Steven twisted to look at it. Although it was large, one end was broken raggedly across and he knew his dump hadn’t