Cows by Matthew Stokoe Read Free Book Online Page A

the gun away with the bolt already retracted by recoil and watch shit squirt out of one end and blood out of the other.
    Where the room had been empty and awkward that other lunchtime, it was now hot and bent to its purpose, seamlessly fusing the action it housed into an organic whole where airborne blood and shit and beasts and brick walls and steel girders became one in a designed and streamlined operation.
    Steven watched it all and wondered what he was supposed to feel. It was obvious that these men moved within the flow of some connecting and energizing force. They shared a motive confidence that made them even more intensely alive than the others out here in the world. The sight of them roused him to envy, but the staggering deaths of the cattle as they collapsed against the grabbers did nothing to stir a corresponding sternness of self-direction in his own breast.
    “Majesty, boy. The death of animals and the rebirth of men. You can feel it, can’t you? There is glory in this room. Look at them. Many were like you before they learned the secret that killing holds. Timid. Yes, boy, timid, but with the cock to push themselves beyond what they thought they could endure. They didn’t know what they would find, but they went looking anyway. And when they confronted their own uncertainty, when they crossed to the place weaker men had forbidden them to enter, they found a strength greater than they ever dreamed existed. Come close and watch.”
    Cripps led Steven on to the low platform beside one of the grabbers and held him tightly about the waist while they watched the slaughterman work. A cow was driven between the iron jaws of the grabber and Cripps whispered harshly into Steven’s ear.
    “See how it comes, so full of life—eyes seeing, mind thinking. Life! Prized above all other things. Touch it, feel it breathe.”
    Steven leaned over the guardrail and put his hand on the cow’s back. The slaughterman watched, ready with the boltgun but waiting. The cow felt solid and warm.
    “Keep your hand there.”
    Cripps nodded and the slaughterman put his gun close against the straining bovine head. Steven felt no particular affection for the cow, but the fly-shooing tremors that jerked in waves across the animal’s hide shook his arm and jarred loose within him broken-glass splinters of panic. He was about to feel something die.
    When the gun went off the cow threw itself forward and collapsed like an enormous rubber toy, pumping steaming liquid shit down the inside of its thighs … Off into cow darkness.
    Steven snatched his hand away and looked quickly to see if it had absorbed the mark of death, some dark contagion that might multiply beneath the skin and come searching for him.
    There was no mark, but the shock of the killing sent small blurts of bile into his throat. Cripps was laughing and pressing a hardon against the side of his leg.
    “Did you feel it, boy? Did you feel it just … stop? It’s like a switch, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “You must be aching to try it yourself.”
    How far did he have to go for this magical awakening, this unleashing of strength that Cripps talked about? He was already flecked with blood and shit. He had seen the bolt punch into cow head, rip away a circle of hide and bone, and slam deep into cow brain. He had smelled the fear and the last rush of breath and the emptying bowels and the wet-newspaper mustiness of the inside of the cow’s skull. And there had only been horror at the ease of it all, the sickening backward flip of approaching fugue—not the sunrise of a new way to live. But might the secret be waiting a little further on, standing elegant and incurious beyond a bleeding threshold of flayed beef, needing only a little extra letting-go to be caught?
    The boltgun swung heavy and smooth on its supporting chain, its butt warm from the slaughterman’s grip. The chipped gray enamel of its surface was brightly caught in the purple-white net of light that fell from the