Cows Read Free Page B

and undigested vegetable matter speckled the frilly corrugations of its inner surface. He touched it with a finger.
    The Beast, already chewing, noticed the movement.
    “I know you like this. I made it special so you could have a nice dinner after your first day at work. Go on, start.”
    Steven didn’t move and the Hagbeast grinned at him.
    “Mmmm. It melts like butter. Hurry up, don’t let it go cold.”
    “No.”
    “Oh, yummy, yummy, yummy. I’ve cooked you up a treat here. Eat, eat.”
    The singsong in her voice worried him, there was a deadliness behind it. Things were escalating.
    “I said no. I’m not eating it.”
    The Beast put her spoon down slowly. “And just exactly what is wrong with it, Mister Cocksucker?”
    “People don’t eat things like this. People don’t cut something out of an animal and put it straight on a plate. It’s not clean.”
    The Hagbeast choked on laughter and blew snot and tripe across the table.
    “Oh, people. Peeeple. Look at the cunt, such an expert now. Ooo, a whole day out there. You must know everything.”
    Steven squeezed his fork until it hurt his hand.
    “You’re a fucking idiot, Steven. You think going out there for a day makes you like them? You think you got strong today? Show me how strong you are, cunt. Walk out of here and find somewhere to live … You moron. Without me, without this home I’ve given you, how long would you last?”
    He felt his guts liquify. He wanted to scream at her that he could be like them, that one day he would have love and a wife and everything else. But he knew the bitch was right, he couldn’t leave. He had plans. He needed safety in which to copy the lives he saw on TV. The dreams he had of rebuilding himself would be impossible to fulfill without it.
    “You get too cocky, you little cunt, and I’ll put you out myself. How would you like that? All those people around you forever and ever and no place to get away from them. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
    “No.” It was hard to breathe, his chest felt too tight.
    “What was that? Mama didn’t hear you.”
    “It wouldn’t be fun.”
    “No it wouldn’t, would it? So eat your fucking food.”
    Steven cut into the organ on his plate and put some of it in his mouth. It took forever to chew. The rubbery flesh slipped around his teeth and made him heave.
    “Yes, yes, that’s a good boy. That’s Mama’s good boy, eating it all up.”
    But Steven wasn’t listening. In the middle of a vomitocean of misery he was busy deciding on the meaning of her words.
    The flat was hers to take away as she wished. This had always been so, but she had never used its removal as a threat before. So why now? Had the bravery of his first day at work made it plain to her that he had hopes for the future?
    If this was so he would have to be careful, the bitch would kill him for sure if she thought he might escape the hell she had spent so long building around him. Perhaps the upscaling in food disgustingness was her first move.
    He chewed on and forced the sheep’s belly into his own. The Hagbeast squirmed to unstick her bleeding ass from the chair.
    Steven watched TV a long time that night, searching the scattered pixels for some way to armor-plate himself against the Beast. On screen the templates for life were easy to find, but the methods of their construction, as always, remained hidden.
    He’d puked his dinner in the corner of the bedroom and Dog had eaten it. Having been inside its master’s body the offal and bile were sacrament to the animal, and their consumption scorched its brain with dreams of becoming man. The air was still sour and the soft membrane behind Steven’s nose burned.
    Upstairs Lucy moved, creaking floorboards as she walked from somewhere to somewhere else. Steven imagined what he would see if she was naked and the ceiling was glass.
    He probed his guts with stiff fingers to see if he could feel anything hard and poisonous that might be the cause of his abnormality. But