I bent level with Avalyn. The cow stood over us, breathing heavily, her warm air fluttering my hair. I was sweating, and Avalyn’s dress stuck to my skin like a tongue against dry ice. I could feel the heat emanating from her body to blend with mine. “Here he is,” Avalyn said.
The form on the ground was a young calf; the adult cow, I presumed, was his mother, standing guard beside him. The moonlight made the calf look silky, cocooning it in a faint glow. I could see its hide’s pattern, black spots against white, and the tiny coarse hairs on its face. I touched its ears, the curved cartilage like rubber cups. I touched its fragile eyelashes, the pad of its nose. Instead of damp and velvety, the nose was dry and stiff. The calf was dead. When I understood this, I looked at the full of its body. There was a gash in the calf’s neck, a smile wedged into its flesh. Most of the animal’s form was unharmed, but under its stomach was another cut, this one an immense gouge between its back legs. The calf’s genitals had been severed.
The cow softly lowed again, a sound not unlike the noise a human mother in mourning would make. “This has happened before,” Avalyn said. “Farmers around here have been finding mutilated cattle for years now. Happens all across Kansas. I told ‘World of Mystery’ about it, but they edited it out. And my father still denies the truth, even though he himself found two of our holsteins dead on the same night last autumn. He insists it’s a bunch of maniacs or Satan worshipers that drive around chopping up cows. Ha ha.” She touched the calf’s throat, tracing the incision’s border with her finger. “What kind of maniac cuts with this precision?”
Avalyn lifted her hand from the calf, and it landed on my own hand. “Feel this,” she said. Together, we reached toward the wound in the calf’s underside. I ran my fingers over it, feeling a meaty organ, a mass of guts that coiled around my fingers like cooked onions. “This is what’s left,” Avalyn said. “They take the sex organs away, the udders and the slits on the females, the you-know-whats on the males, even their anuses. The aliens experiment on cows, because animals can’t complain, they can’t voice themselves like humans.”
Something was building from deep inside my throat, something rising toward my mouth that could have been vomit or a scream but felt sickeningly like a fist, a fist slowly opening. Avalyn continued, her voice muted and far away, as if spoken from behind a mask: “Us, on the other hand, they can’t kill. But we have to live with the memory of what they do. And really, it’s what they do to us that’s worse.”
She still held my hand, pressing it into the wound. “Notice anything else strange? I’ll answer for you. There’s no blood. They took that, too.”
Avalyn was right. The calf’s throat had been cut, and it had been bizarrely eviscerated. But the grass wasn’t glistening with its blood. I knew the aliens had taken it, necessary fluid for more of their enigmatic experiments. I moved closer to the calf, shuffling my knees forward in the grass, and as I did I drew my hand from Avalyn’s. With no reason, no reason at all, I pried my fingers under one of the exposed organs, probing deeper inside the wound. The innards were bloodless, but still as damp and sloppy as sponges. They closed around my wrist, accommodating my hand. I moved farther inside the body, searching for any remaining drops of blood.
Within minutes I was up to my elbow. I closed my eyes, and at that moment the clouds across my mind broke. Something like this, I knew, had happened before.
In my head I saw him just as he’d appeared in dreams: the boy, my Little League teammate, crouching beside me. Open your eyes, he said. Here we go. He whispered in my ear. It’s okay, he likes it, he’ll give you money. It feels nice. It’s fun isn’t it, tell him you think it’s fun. I heard him speaking to me, but I couldn’t comprehend his words, tangled chunks of sentences that meant nothing to me. He told me to open my eyes, to see what was happening, but I wouldn’t do it. I was eight years old again, and I wouldn’t open my eyes.
Like before, the boy was nothing more than a vision. This time, however, I wasn’t certain how to control the dream; it seemed far removed from the usual security of sleep and the sheltering knowledge that I would soon wake up.
I was up to my elbow. It feels nice, the boy’s voice said.
I lost hold of the fact I wasn’t alone, must have briefly forgotten Avalyn and Patches and the cow beside me, because I started crying. I tried to hold it, but the sob broke like glass in my throat. Avalyn held me, her arm around me as shocking as icy water. I leaned into her and cried, cried because, at that moment, I considered the possibility that everything I’d recently accepted as fact was wrong-my new beliefs about my buried memories, the aliens and their series of abductions, these perfect explanations for my problems. What if all of it, each particle of this new truth, were false? What then?
The animal’s mother mooed, and the silence closed around us. We sat there, no one in the world but Avalyn and me. I tried to persuade myself they were watching us, hidden away in some cubbyhole of the heavens, analyzing our every move with their infinite black eyes, waiting for the upcoming day when they would once again touch us with their mushroomy skin.
Avalyn pulled me closer. After a while, she took her hair from its bun; it cascaded across her face like a black veil. The hair smelled extravagant and secret, the smell of a rare flower that only bloomed at night. Avalyn rested her head against my shoulder, and I breathed that scent.
Minutes passed. I tried to erase the picture of the boy from my mind, because I knew that whatever had happened then-whatever I’d done, the unspeakable thing he’d wanted me to open my eyes and see-was beyond anything I could handle. I stopped crying and pressed into Avalyn. “It was the aliens,” I said. My arm grew numb, still inside the calf. “It was, wasn’t it.”
“Yes,” Avalyn said. “And it’s okay. As hard as it is to believe, it’s going to be okay.” Her right hand gripped my shoulder, and then, gradually, her left hand snaked into the wound. I felt the warm slide of her skin as her fingers reached, reached slowly up, searching higher into the calf’s carcass until her fingers stopped to intertwine with mine.
ten
New York beckoned, two weeks away. Both Mom and Eric avoided the topic, choosing instead to speak about the twenty-cents-an-hour raise offered by the grocery store (Mom) or the grandparents’ latest dessert concoction (Eric). Neither wanted me to leave. Mom did everything she could to keep me at home; Eric went so far as to buy me drugs with the weekly allowance from his grannies.
Whenever opportunity knocked, I tricked, usually on nights Mom was working. I had saved enough to survive a while in the city, and Wendy promised I wouldn’t pay rent until I could manage. But Kansas sex began boring me. As my departure date neared, I spent evenings watching horror films on the VCR with Eric. On the Wednesday during Nail Gun Massacre, he fell asleep, his head on my lap. I wanted to be elsewhere. “Sleep tight,” I said. I kissed Eric’s knuckle, something I wouldn’t have done had he been awake.
The Impala stalled at traffic lights. It was on its last legs, but at least the stereo worked. I blasted the volume on a song’s whirlpooling guitar feedback, rolled the window down, and burned rubber. A cluster of kids gawked from their spot on the corner of Eleventh and Main. I recognized them from schooclass="underline" their drugged faces, their short-on-top/long-in-back haircuts, their clothes advertising heavy metal bands. They conformed to a past I’d soon forget. I yelled “Fuck you” out the window and thanked god I wouldn’t live in Hutchinson much longer.