COW
All the cows in Cow are cows, which is to say, they’re female.
I watch the film with frozen okra swaddled to my foot. Earlier, I’d walked into a wall.
What do I know about motherhood?
My girl-cousin used to shove two dolls up her shirt, which held their plastic heads in place, their feet hanging out while they fed from the breast.
Cow begins with cloven hooves protruding out the backside of a cow, a cow I learn to recognize by sight, if only by the numbers printed in white on her hide.
I watch her feeding, lowing, grazing; gazing as a farmer reaches deep inside of her and then injects her with hormones to make her fertile, again.
All the cows are Cow are cooed to and called girls.
In the rotary milking parlor, radio is blasted while the automatic cluster milkers pump, because music makes the milk cows make more milk, and it’s Billie Eilish singing wel-come home.
When a bull finally appears, he has a golden nose ring just like I do.
He sniffs, licks and mounts our cow, and fireworks burst in the distance. Then a cut to an ultrasound screen: our cow is pregnant!
When she gives birth to her sixth and last calf, she licks it clean of afterbirth.
The farmers determine the calf is a girl so the farmers rejoice. A cow that can make other cows.
At night I double check my baby’s sex on the OuterCape Portal, and it’s not disappointment I feel as much as betrayal.
Inside, his body feeds on mine. My body, fed on another body’s butter.
Slowly, the thumb of bruise above my metatarsals starts to fade.
My body heals itself.
***
Author photo courtesy of author
