{I wrote this from a prompt from my good friend Ian a few weeks ago.}
She was born on a dairy farm; a quaint place in the rolling hills of America, just outside the bread basket. She had never seen the ocean. When she was young she would walk down the rows of cows in the barn, studying the contraptions man had created for the extraction of the nectar of life from their heavy bodies. Their eyes were removed and glazed over, their long eyelashes filled with watery, cow-sized tears. “Does it hurt?” she asked her father, the tall farmer, eyes squinted shut by days in the merciless sun, but sharp as a hawk’s, sure to catch the passing of a scrap to the family dog under the table. No, Margie, we don’t hurt the cows. “Then why do they cry?” Margie begged for an explanation, too young as she was to understand that her father had long since passed the age of knowing the stock were weeping, passed the age of caring about the creatures that were his livelihood beyond their general health. “Maybe they’re lonely,” he suggested, anxious to continue his work in peace.
That was when Margie learned to sing: in the quiet time, when the frogs in the mucky pond have gone to sleep for the night and the birds have not yet awakened. Then she would slip quietly down the stairs, stealthily skipping the squeaky steps, out the screen door in the kitchen, and to the barn, to sing for the lonely cows. She would walk up and down the rows, stroking their grubby faces, looking deep into their bleary eyes, and willing them to be lonely no longer.
And now, a night club singer in a dreary town somewhere in the Dakotas, Margie has seen the ocean, but she feels like one of the cows of her childhood. Somewhere lost in the rows, waiting for a gentle hand to dissemble the long and tangled machine that sucks the marrow from her creative bones, carefully searching for money in her substance. Someone, anyone to break the bleak loneliness of a dairy cow in the night.
