Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume

Author:Sara Baume
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473535688
Publisher: Random House

A boy, a waifish boy with prematurely skimpy hair, asks me to stand by the gate with my arms outstretched so his cows will know which way to go. He’s carrying a switch, twirling it between his fingers like a majorette’s baton. He caught us walking through his field, his father’s field. I thought he’d ask me where I came from, why I’m parting a path through his beet. Instead he asked if I’d help him herd.

They are black and white and mud caked. There are twenty, twenty-five. I can tell from the swollen udders that they’re milking stock, heifers.

I tie you to a fence post and stand beside the gate with my arms spread. From fingertip to fingertip, as long as my unstooped self. Now the cows come plundering toward us. They are disconcertingly fast for animals so thickset, so poorly streamlined. My role is to act as a human hedge, to bar the straight-ahead path so they’ll know to bear round the corner toward the parlour.

The leading heifer waits until her snout is inches from my chest to swerve. I smell a puff of hot fog from her nostrils. It is sort-of sweet, almost cidery. Do you smell it too? Behind me beside the fence post with your hindquarters backed into the ditch, you’re unusually abashed. Now all the other heifers follow. Feel the thunder of hooves as they pass.

The boy comes last, twirling his baton. He thanks me, locks the gate behind himself. Now he follows his cows along the field boundary toward the farm.

I untie you, and as I do, I don’t know why, but I feel euphoric. And you hop up and down in excitement, as though the cows were something we survived. You rush and skip into the beet again, as though you are euphoric too.

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