Sydney Bollinger

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

My cows are precious and their milk is the drink of the gods. What do these nut “milk” drinkers think they’re doing? Doesn’t everyone want to experience the physical labor of pulling on a cow’s teat to get fresh milk? It’s what I do to Midge every morning. I pull up my stool, place the bucket under her udder, and get to work filling that bucket to add it to the milk vat in the barn. Really, that’s the joy of milk, getting a fresh warm glass from the milk vat and drinking it right there in the barn while you’re thinking about the cows you raised from infancy. 

Don’t get me wrong—the farmer’s life is not for everyone. You have to know how to assert your dominance over the animal. You have to raise them up alongside their mamas and prepare them for that fateful day at the county fair. I paraded old Midge around in my Sunday best with the hopes I’d get the shiny blue ribbon to hang in the barn. My papaw always said I had the prettiest cows with the creamiest milk and that the idiot judges would be idiots to pass on me. Good thing they weren’t idiots. I took home the grand prize in dairy cows six years in a row. I was named Bovine Queen my senior year of high school. 

But it takes work. You gotta train a cow to walk with you, no resistance or questions asked, and still, these city folks are out there trying to milk a nut. You can’t train a nut to do anything. You can’t pull a nut’s teat. It just sits there and lets you do all the work. 

You can’t show off a goddamned almond. Me and my family have been farming land —and animals—for years. It’s not that fucking hard. But we’re a dying breed, us farmers, and that’s why nasty old Patricia called me up for the convening of the county’s small business association, and mind you, my family has lived here for years, for generations! 

But now that Little Rick sold his land to a housing development, it’s coffee shop this and marina that. 

“How do you think Farmer Farmer’s Farms could be involved in the economic development of the county?” Patricia asked me. 

She flattened a map in front of her, which showed the whole county. Someone had drawn lots of red boxes which I reckon will become housing developments. “A lot of folks are getting out of the farm business, you know, and I think it’s time for us to come to the twenty-first century and really change how people see Kelley County.” 

“What do you mean folks are getting out of the farm business? Where are we gonna get our food?” I asked. 

“How many gallons of milk do you produce a year, Lisa, really? Like twelve? You even got any cows left on that farm of yours?” Patricia said. She pointed to an area on the map. My area, all outlined with a blue marker. The fellowship hall got real quiet when she said this because everyone knows that twelve gallons of milk is only one day’s fucking work and Farmer Lisa Farmer does not skimp. 

“You could make a profit if you sold your land,” she said. “Little Rick is doing pretty well for himself right now.” 

I huffed in Patricia’s general direction, thinking about how God granted us all dominion of His green earth and what that means in terms of, like, being in charge of it or whatever, and well it just doesn’t seem right that I should have to abort my livelihood from my own womb in a sticky, squelching mess that no one can clean up except, apparently, these developers. It’s like I’m being trampled by the hooves of my own steer when I hear about this stuff because, well, they might as well go be free in the wild or in the neighborhood since it seems that they don’t need me and I don’t need them anymore. 

So, I’ll sit there drinking the glass of milk I got when I dunked my hand into the vat, covering the whole thing in that white creamy goodness and I’ll walk to the fence-line to look over my fields where the soybean crop finally died for the fall, because I can see Little Rick’s land encroaching on me, walking toward me bit by bit, unsanctioned, without permission. Like if that blue circle on the map just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and then there are suddenly school busses parked in my lot, and the field trip kids run out yelling about how they finally get to meet a real farmer, cause their daddies don’t have fields no more, and there I am walking Midge around in my Sunday best, showing her off while the kids drink the last of the milk I could scrounge together that morning.