- The Cattle-Maiden by Megan Barickmanby Megan Barickman
Businessmen do not often dwell far from the fluorescent halls of their elective palaces. Still, businessmen go walking. They commute from the private to the public, from the consumer to the producer, and in this vulnerable time, strange or wonderful occurrences sometimes come to meet them. One such occurrence: a certain businessman fell in love with the specter of a great, large creature as she stood at the bank of a stream chewing her ethereal cud.
He had been walking along a narrow path, head down, striving for his offices as quickly as he could. His mind was immune to the brown meadow as he passed, and the dry hill, and the gray and trickly stream that ran along the rocks just beyond. But that phantom, a new sight, smeared by the sun into soft white opacities, did catch his eye; it could not have been otherwise. Infinitely beautiful she was as he perceived her there with the sunlight fizzled and burnt into the mists of her ghostly form. He had the feeling that he himself had drawn the essence out of her, that it was his own face he could see reflected in her glittering fog.
Strange thing: beside the spirit lay her unzipped skin, neatly folded up, and the dun-white bones stacked carefully on top. He snuck and hid them in a close-by ravine behind a blackened bush. He kicked the gray dirt on top of them until the black and white fur matched the rocks around, and her white bones dimmed and saddened into dust. So, she became his. Then, he went and led the luminous, protesting creature to the glass-walled offices where his flock of profits grazed.
Dearly he did love her. He called all the other businessmen and people of the town to her side.
“A marvel,” said the spectators, gathering.
“There is a future in ghosts,” said the businessman proudly. “Ghosts are the future.”
“Pure value,” they murmured. And many wished they too knew the secret of it. For they yearned alternately to have her and to be like unto her.
But for herself, the creature was fitful and hungry, and she longed for her meat and the dried, sparse flowers of the valley she had loved. Here, and like as she was, she could not find a thing that she could eat. She sucked and gnawed at the apples in the stalls; the apples sat there still and sad as glass. Days passed, and the crowd grew, cooing. She nibbled at the grasses that grew up by the houses, and the grasses went untouched. Still days passed, and the throng grew yet again, so loud in their fawning voices. In despair one day, she extended her tongue, a long, pink-flecked cloud of sizzling steam, and licked into the mingled people.
This is not a happy story: one by one, the people, they were withered and were eaten and were killed, still marveling. They were marveling at how the specter had suddenly begun to grow. Indeed, she grew tremendously as she ate them, quickly as a maggot. The businessman was in a rapture seeing how she grew. He delighted in all increase. She swelled; the gleaming custard-colored bulk of her wobbled, expanded, and threatened to break open. The businessman cried out in ecstasy. His thoughts were full of prospects; he could not see the danger there before him, and so he too was taken.
But the end goes thus: when all the eyes were gone, and the specter had eaten all that she could eat, she set herself down on the land and rested for a time. Much later, she returned in her new freedom to the stream where she had been before. Behind the blackened bush she found the parts of her slightly damp, mammalian body. They fit, and welcomed her, and having put them on, she wandered out whole again into the valley. The newly breaking flowers stirred in the breeze. Sparse birds called in sharp, thin trills across the plain. And the sun warmed the fur on her broad back and brought the steam off of it, so that it mixed together with the steam of the grass in the dappled, bluing air of the morning.
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Megan Barickman is a writer based in Colorado. You can find her on Bluesky at @barickme.