Rumination (Short Story‪)‬

VISIBLE COW I think of him thinking about his cows. I never even knew he was a dairyman. At the Starbucks in the Student Union where I worked he'd ask me about the steamed milk--real milk, right?--in the latte. I think of that now. He'd nurse the drink all day, staring off into space, the space so thick I could almost see that electromagnetic soup of digital bleats bawling from the laptops, the cell phones, the other students all around him nudging and pawing, grazing through their email, their texts. I drifted over to him, started talking. He bought me a macchiato stained with milk and never let on he left a dairy farm to come to school. Though once early on, now that I think about it, he told me you could major in ice cream if you wanted to. I majored in numbers. Made ends meet. Thinking about it now, there were infinite silences between us like the silences between the bits of the binary alphabets herding around us in the ether. He didn't say much at all, but that is the nature of farm boys, I guessed, or at least the ones I met back then, weaned in the vacuums of all those empty acres out there. All that absence to fill with work or with the internal working of the brain. I guess you get used to it, can hear, in those silences, yourself think. It was only later, when we were breaking up, that he showed me the snapshots of his cows posed on some hillock somewhere out there. They had names of course. The names began with A or B, Apple or Bosse, Alice or Betty, the initials trading places through the generations, A to B to A to B like some equation or formula or the rhyme scheme of an endless sonnet's couplets. I could tell a lot by the way he tiled the photographs like the descending cataract of a table full of solitaire. He had shuffled through the lot of them again and again. He recited the names. I think now this must have been what he was thinking of when I watched him thinking. The album of pictures. The list of names. They all looked alike to me, the cows, all of them, white on black slabs of clouds, stayed by the four little guy-wire-pegged legs pegged to the ground. All of them caught in the act of chewing. He liked to take me then to the dairy barns on the edge of campus, to the herds of milling cows, mewing calves, the blocky steers rubbing their coats on the white, wooden fences. There he found the one sad beast with a flap in her side, a fistula the bovine scientists covered over with a plastic window. The cow, content in her stanchion, snuffed up the grain in neat piles at her feet. I watched him consider the animal all lost in thought. Through the porthole I could see the churning stomach percolate the fermenting feed back and forth. It was complicated, like mixing a drink back at the coffee bar, all agitation and vapor and the chemistry of layers breaking down, so busy, all of this going on, going on on the inside while we, stock still on the outside, stood, lost in thought, struck dumb.