THE BULL

Eyes the size of tofu bubbles, potbellied by soybeans – one lixiviating sinuses – Little Chuck exaggerates every agony just for mother. “Imagine how you’d look on meat,” she says. With each bite he breaks her back. Hovered above the sickbed, stinking of protein paste, she issues kisses. Her burps are choked with cabbage worms. The days regurgitate.

A rogue bull has pinned the neighbor girl against the barn. “Bout time for some burgers anyway,” is the farmer’s response.

Little Chuck tracks rusted metal fallen off the dissolving wheel wells of the farmer’s truck. He can still taste exhaust. In a field filled with tires, a long-legged boy charges the bull, giggling with the rest. It chomps spuds with idiot harmony. The farmer loads a shell, painting an imaginary X upward from the eyes, shoulders perpendicular to the horn bed. A thud flattens the trash. Little Chuck spits up psyllium husks. Cud coats the thing’s neck. Its penis stiffens and settles, aimlessly. The farmer, looking past denim and mud to the children, holds his hand out.

“You were supposed to bring it,” one kid whines.

“Y’all lucky I only brought one shell.”

Little Chuck fumbles forward, unfolding a blade from its tiny red carriage. “Try my pocketknife.” The farmer sticks the neck, dull edge slipping over arteries, sawing needlessly at stratified tissue. Birds scream from treetops. They stand squashed together in a dead pupil. He looks born into his bloodstains. The head is detaching in stages.

The kids have all backed off. An older girl herds them toward the truck. Heifers take turns head-butting the passenger door. Another props its front hooves on the bed. Steers strike the tailgate until it dangles from a wire. More encircle the farmer and Little Chuck. Suckling, ear-tagged calves hang from them like gorged ticks. Hearing his mother’s wails, Little Chuck vomits tempeh. The truck erupts into an orange ball of smoke. Sweetened beyond expiration by falling hooves, they become suds flecked numb, stomped to suet, a bacterial plot sunk in slumber, their puddles thick enough to leave behind a kind of matrifocal floating, free of memory.

by David Kuhnlein

David Kuhnlein’s writing is featured or forthcoming in 3:AM, Full Stop, Entropy, Expat, Ligeia, Tragickal, Misery Tourism, Burning House, Terror House, Social Text Online, and others. He edits the literary review column Torment, venerating pain and illness, at The Quarterless Review. He lives in Michigan. His website is https://davidkuhnlein.wordpress.com/