Keith Woodruff
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Cow does not think of herself as haunting the barn. In the loft, she drifts above the bales, watches the blue swallows loop out and in. Waits for the boy to climb the rungs and pop through the hatch in the floor. Sometimes he sings. Sometimes just stares. Cow remembers his kindness. He’d bring the apples she loved, pass them through the fence on his palm. As she crunched them down, he’d stroke her forehead and, remembering a book from his childhood, say Emily, where’s your moo?
When he comes, the boy flops down on bales he’s pushed together and cries. Because he likes to read, in school they’re calling him book fucker. He sucks in a deep breath, grabs a paperback he’s stashed between two bales. I am a book fucker, he says kissing the cover. Fuck y’all. Cow wants to put an apple in his hand.
*
As if lit by the moon she appears, dispersing, coalescing and dispersing again like luminous ribbons of watery dye as she makes her way to the orchard just beyond the barn. Cow folds her legs under, eases into the grass and waits for apples to fall. Every night, she noses them around for hours, failing always to take a single one into her mouth that she could drop in the boy’s hand.
*
Rooster crows. Cow follows whatever traces of her days she remembers, moves among the small grazing herd. Aware of her they lift their heads, nose the air. The day passes. When he comes, the boy is kicking up hay, crying, and punches the bales until his knuckles are torn and bloody. On the bus they’d chanted chicken shit chicken shit but not because he’s a coward; the kids from the nice lake homes say he smells like farm boy chicken shit, is a chicken fucker, and the eggs his babies. Cow opens herself around him; he feels her breath hot on his face, knows the sour wet-grass smell of cud and backs away.
*
The boy has stopped coming. Fireflies drift through her, flashing green. Cow shudders, remembers the booming sky, running, then pain like a hot spike being driven through her leg; remembers the house man in the rain, touching the shotgun barrel softly to her head … then waking in the field. In the distance, cow could see the house and barn calling like a painting she belonged in. Always, on her way to the orchard, cow pauses to watch the one lit window in the house; the light is the boy. Tonight, she makes an apple move.
*
His father is dying. After many apple seasons, the boy comes home. When his dad’s asleep, the boy climbs the bone-smooth rungs. His breath catches, memory squeezing sorrow into his heart when he finds the space empty except for a small pile of shriveled, rust-brown apples. He picks one up, holds it out, palm flat, and waits.
Keith’s prompts were: On a Farm, Ghost, Fruit
Keith Woodruff lives in San Antonio, TX with a backyard full of moody tomato plants. His poetry has appeared in Sundog Lit, Rawhead, and New World Writing Quarterly. His flash/micro appeared in lovely places like Wigleaf, Does it Have Pockets?, HAD, Pithead Chapel, FlashFlood, Roi Faineant Press and Your Impossible Voice. He has work forthcoming in Dishsoap Quarterly and is a 2027 Best of the Net nominee. Read him in Best Small Fictions 2017 and 2019. He was awarded a 2018 Pushcart prize. www.keithawoodruff.com
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Read more from Keith:
Identity Theory – ‘If You Want Your Son to Fall in Love With Fishing the Way You Did,‘
New World Writing Quarterly – ‘Two Pieces‘
TRASH CAT LIT 