Now, heifers don’t teethe — they tear by shaking their heads, No…denial, declination, as if they’re answering the only question they know: are you yet sated; meaning, hasn’t this been enough…they shake their own heads to shake the heads up and out of the ground, all recognizably mangled, a few still necking onto torso or limb, but most severed, decapitated, bulbously without body — corpses to be zipped up in unmarked shrouds then sold backcountry, to General Support’s old fratfriend, the Rebbe, who it’s been said brokers the deal with his brother, socalled, in truth that’s a rumor a ninetyyearold Palesteinian woman who keeps herself in a suite at the King David Hotel equipped for OR, vitals to be transplanted, alien blood contaminant, an impurity, spreading…as for the heifers, they don’t bite, son, they chew, I mean with their teeth, those dozens of them — they munch at the skull to swallow it all mealy and mushed, on down to the rumen, the reticulum, which is the ruminant’s primary stomach of many, too many; as many stomachs as there are heavens and more, there where these heads would further soften, loosening skin, bone and brain if only for all to be sent back up as cud, cycled, as if to return sustenance back to the earth, as if kvetching, not warm enough, overdone, a petty complaint, says General Support — it’s bitching, forgive them: then, they’d be chewed again, he goes on explaining to anyone he’s ordered to listen — how he’d raised cattle back home on the farm, remembering to his menschs a ranch out in Texas with a hundred head as he tells it, twice that on another occasion, down by the border I’m talking, a youth spent at Mexico’s edge…by the molars, he says, then swallowed back down to the reticulorumen, that’s its name, there past the papillæ, don’t ask, they resemble fingers, like tickling, you know, the acids, a giggling like, then the omasum, you with me, that’s where the water’s absorbed, the abomasum next, finally, the true stomach, the last in the ebb and flow of digestion until the intestine (right here — and he traces its snake down and around the stomach of a teenaged girl who’d died preggers), down that tract then muscled out the other end, he says, dreck and so forth, and then everything begins again, the cycle, sustenance and waste, the most intimate kind of return. Goddamnit, he says, ain’t it gorgeous? Nature, what nachas. This time of year daddy’d be preparing for spring. Insemination time, breeding the chattel. He was the first in the state to give up his pigs. We’re all very proud.
Heads litter the fields of the field as far as the wind. Aeroplanes, they’re no longer surveilling, they’re bombing again, friendlyfire, not quite: clearing the air to the east, destroying what evidence (of just one mensch’s interpretation of inhumanity, we’re talking the Rebbe’s, Protector of this particular quarter), along the way racking up not a few casualties civilian and service; besides the ostensibly humanitarian quorum of motherly maids, airdropped earlier and presently busy at their stations of triage, dusting at pants, removing pants, with their retractable rollers removing lint from garments deemed particularly valuable (at least with solid potential for resale: ostensibly unisex sweaters, sportsjackets, women’s wear, skirts and sundresses wrapped in unlabeled plastic, then hummered on out), nominally Affiliated peasants of almost every precarity’s allegiance are being exploded high from the earth that birthed them in what’ll have to be described as a regrettable instance of pilot error, or mechanical failure, whatever else the addressing of would help us improve what we do while at the same time justifying our taking the lives of these witnessing wretches — more work for the burntembered cows, whose own sacrifice, it’s argued, remains sacred only in how it might, through the absolution of their digestion, obliterate any ashed traces of this operation, our officialized sin the only merit of which has been the thoroughlessness of its execution: to breakdown, ferment then calm with muscles and water, this wasting away, to a soil, to soil — only to grow, which is to dissent, yet again…honorary menschs promoted poor of family, of language and nation, withered stalks impoverished by order and fear into ghastling groups, then assigned to their own dizzying but dwindling clocks of clearing and wood, equipped with pointed staves to pick up sharpfirst what inhuman trash’s been left behind from the camps and, offtime, as slaves, tolerated, to gather for their own any blown crust — what even the heifers won’t low to consume.
A headlong incendiary, no greater than the others except in its threat, only nearer. An aeroplane flying low flying wildly, as if almost out of gas its engines down stalled, heaving forward, convulsing, its womb opening slowly, to birth: a bomb on your house, a bomb on your heads, one for each ear. A lone, ribhuddled heifer, the most starved around, the weakest and slowestdriven, the gruntiest, runnysnouted runt, it’s tearing at this huge hulk, an enormous round of gleaming ordnance or mine netted underneath a knot of corpses, an alien body amongst bodies hard and strange, a pearly prickly fallen thing presently parturient from a tangle of fleshy kelp and weather: two keratinous juts coming out of its sides, curving up to the sharp taper of blades; twin chitinous growths, cutting the air to pierce at the sun — strongstalked, one’s a rock, the other’s a stone. Or else, they’re horns. Around these volutinous spans as white as bone, streaked with blood, a mass of lackluster, thinning more than ever but lately kinky hair, unremembered this shade the dark of underground night, such a saddening change from the previous blond, and lately infested, too, with every kind of louse known to mensch and mouse alike: a few lousy species no sage has yet managed to identify, other louses they don’t even know yet exist, though no one does, and the lice hardly know themselves: they’re just simple creatures; all they want is to steal life from the living, their existence an effortless halflung, to suck the blood of a host — which explains these stains trailing to blemish the crescenting moons that are icicles; that are horns. Up from the unbarbered forehead, which is peely and flaking and dandruffed with drift. About that head proper — amazingly, a miracle, we’re speechless, please, still, give me a moment, I’m being torn up…the horns, they’re grown from a head, and the head, it’s grown, is growing still, from a body, out from the earth, a wrigglingly living wracked sac of a souclass="underline" it’s B, me, over here, the Untermensch, unto the mensch under the Under-mensch, udderly menscheddown, demoted and dirtied, I’m full of filth and sick horny, having buried myself to hide, amid a copse of corpses, for safety, to think and rest up, to wait it out, eternity and all, just my luck.