The contrast was the first thing that struck me. It was a fine spring day, almost warm enough to be balmy, with buttercups just beginning to open to the sunshine, yellow on yellow. Each breath of the pasture air filled my head, smelling lightly of apple blossoms, more heavily spiced with wet soil and freshly bitten grass, all underscored by that peculiar scent cow manure has when the herd is first allowed to graze on the green fields in spring. It was a clean smell, characteristic of nature, and I felt safe, knowing that it was the way things were supposed to be.
Stepping carefully to avoid the cow pies, I followed my friend, Johnny, through the pasture. He wanted to show me "something neat." Johnny squeezed between two cows that were blocking the way, and leaned on one to make her move aside. She shifted her weight, lazily chewing her cud, and shuffled over just enough for us to pass. I patted her neck as we passed, stopping to rub her forehead in apology for the disturbance, then had to run up the hill to catch up. Johnny was standing just past the crest, hands in his pockets, looking at something on the ground. As short as I was, I couldn't tell what lay there until I reached the top.
It was a two-headed calf, lying in a dead heap. The newborn looked perfect to me, white with black patches, a Holstein, like most of the herd. I could tell it had just been born by the traces of blood on and around it and the shreds of birth caul it lay in. The heads and necks were clean, though, the fur smoothed all in one direction where its mother had been washing it with her tongue. She must have given up when her baby wouldn't respond. All its limbs were there, right where they belonged. Even its heads, both of them, appeared to be perfectly normal. Still, it was dead.
As I said, the contrast bothered me the most at first; the contrast between spring and death, birth and death, my own curiosity and my repugnance. Nature, the nurturing Mother of my universe, had played a cruel and vicious joke. She had afflicted this tiny calf, before it could even be born, with a handicap that would not only kill it, but humiliate it as well. Nature was unfair. Flies gathered on the evidence.
Johnny turned to me, explaining, "It was s'posed to be twins, but something went wrong. Isn't it neat? Too bad it's dead, though. It would be so cool if it could grow up like that. Imagine a two-headed cow on our farm!"
Johnny, whose parents owned the dairy farm, and who, as the oldest of seven children in the family, worked the farm alongside his father, had seen too many births and deaths to be awed by another. Only the oddity of the unfortunate calf snagged his attention.
Yet I, who only yesterday had broken into tears at the sight of a dead woodchuck alongside the road, stood dry-eyed and silent, staring at the little corpse. Glaring at it, I straightened my shoulders, lifted my chin, stood a little taller. I felt a tightening in my chest, like clay hardening to stone, as I gave the answer Johnny was expecting, "Yeah, it's pretty neat."
"Well, I gotta go bury it," he said, moving reluctantly toward the tool shed. "I just wanted to show it to you first."
It seemed to take longer to walk back out of the pasture, ignoring the cows, seeing only the bare patches that were safe to step in. Reaching the fence, I bent to slip between the splintering boards and come out behind the pig pens. Large flakes of old white paint fell from the fence where I brushed through. As I straightened up, the stench from the pig sty overwhelmed me. Hand over my nose and mouth, I turned away.
Lorie Calkins lives in Washington State with her husband and a Miniature Schnauzer named Magic. Her work (Lorie's, not the Schnauzer's) has been published in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, Once Upon A World, Planet Relish, and Sword & Sorceress 19.