| this one isn't finished, but if anyone reads it i need some feed back, cause i don't know if i want to bother finishing it...
The Orange Cows Are Coming
Purple peanuts, hot pink dogs, orange cows. Those sorts of things only exist in small children's drawings and coke head's dreams, right? Well, maybe the purple peanuts and hot pink dogs tend to stay there, but orange cows are an entirely different matter.
Spilling orange juice is not normally a memorable event, but the time it happened on June 17th, right after finishing my college freshman year, was more than memorable. It marked the beginning of the summer of hell. Of course, being a college student, I didn¡¯t wake up until well after noon, but when you wake up is the time for breakfast no matter what the clock says. So even though the terribly tacky cat clock, the timeless favorite of lonely housewives with the twitching eyes and swishing tail keeping in sync with the second hand of the black and white clock it was clutching for dear life, proclaimed it to be one twenty five in the afternoon, I poured a big glass of oj, toasted a hunk of wheat bread and sat at the table to slather it in chunky peanut butter.
Sitting at my small, hand-me down kitchen table, I thought of what wonderful nothingness awaited me. Just sitting in my apartment, watching the tube, maybe calling a friend or two to go down to the main street strip in the evening. Munching on peanut butter and toast and tapping my foot in time to the rock song coming from the small radio on the counter, I hardly noticed Cosmoo come in.
Cosmoo, my fat little puppy, is a mix between a basset hound and a dachshund. He's right in between the two in his overall size, but his ears are a hilarious size compared to the rest of him, always hanging so low as to look as if he's going to step on one and go tumbling. He got his rotund belly as well as his tri colored fur from the basset side of the family and a face from his dachshund mother. But his name stems from the fact that he looks like a miniature cow and he's cosmically crazy just like the cartoon fairy god parent off a nickelodeon show.
Being such a rotund little puppy also comes from his fascination with people food and his undying love for any small table scraps. Passing up his own breakfast by the door, he headed straight for my lap to see if he could score a piece of toast while I was momentarily distracted.
With a thud he bumped the underside of the table with his head, not minding at all, and stuck his head in my lap. Instead of getting a quick bite of the bread I had in my hand like he'd expected, he got a face full of spilt juice. Not that that was a problem in his book, he just began lapping his own whiskers and the floor with his oversized doggy tongue.
Unfortunately, the juice also splashed into my face, as well on my clothes and onto the window behind me. Puppies seem to have a supernatural ability when it comes to making messes; the disaster radius is always twice as large as that of a small atomic bomb. I picked up a dry napkin and dried off my face and neck and then turned to clean the window.
I immediately started laughing. Across the road from the apartment complex (complex sounds like such a big word to apply to the tiny stack of L shaped boxes I lived in, but no word really fits better) was a field that was home to about fifty lazily grazing cows. Normally, a field of cows calmly chewing cud wasn't funny, but when seen through an orange juice streaked pane of glass, they look like radioactive cows made in a parody of the chocolate and strawberry milk producing cartoon cows seen in many an ad. Cosmoo cocked his head at me and gave me a doggy grin that said, "Silly human, juice isn't for giggling, it's for lapping off the floor" then continued dragging his tongue across the tile, searching for the very last drop of juice.
Still giggling, I grabbed the Windex from under the sink and spritzed the glass generously. With a wad of paper towels I wiped off the juice and cleaner mix and then the window was good as new. Or rather, as good as it was before the juice.
But as I chucked the sopping towels across the room into the plastic trash basket, Cosmoo keeping a wary doggy eye on it the whole time, I noticed that one cow still looked a little orange. So I reached over, squirted a new towel with Windex and scrubbed. I lifted the towel away, sure that even the mud monster of the Mississippi would have been washed clean by such a scrubbing, and saw that the cow was still stinking orange. In fact, several of her cow friends were slightly sunny colored. Confused, I ran my bare fingers over the glass to check for pits or gashes that might be hanging on to a drop or two of juice. But none were to be found. And only the cows were displaying a hint of juicy goodness, the grass was green, the sky blue, and the decaying shed that sat in the middle of the pasture was still a grayed and dulled white.
Sure that the glass had to be the problem, cause cows don't just start dying themselves different colors overnight, I unlatched the window and heaved it open. With an aged sigh the sash moved and hit the trim with a thunk. I stuck my head out the window and stared out at the grazing beasts.
They were still orange! Severely perplexed and thinking of when was the last time I got my eyes checked, I pushed the window back down and walked around the corner into my bedroom. Either I was having a bad sight day, going bonkers, or there was one strange farmer living across the street. I decided on the first option and changed my juicy clothes. The color changing milk maidens didn't really weigh on my thoughts again until about a week later.
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I was once again in the kitchen, eating breakfast in the afternoon. A waitressing job at one of the downtown restaurants kept me up late, so mid afternoon toast and juice was becoming routine. Trusty Cosmoo sat at my feet and wagged his tail. His big doggy eyes begged me incessantly for just one bite, one little bite, of toast. Bored of TV, I was watching the local kids throw a big red ball to, and more often at, each other. Off to the side an elderly pair of men had a chess game set up on a fold out table and were intently staring at the pawns and rooks. Across the street stood the orange cows, silently chewing their cud.
Wait, I thought, they're orange again? I tossed the last bit of crispy crust to Cosmoo and moved closer to the window. Yes, they were certainly orange this time. The color had only enhanced from my last look at them. Flabbergasted, I rubbed my eyes with my fists and looked yet again. Still orange.
They looked like nickelodeon blimps with legs and tails. But they sure didn't notice. They just stood huddled around the decrepit shed and munched grass as if were any old, normal, white cow day.
"Hey Cosmoo, want to go for a walk? Huh boy?" He answered by jumping up and down enthusiastically, even though he was nowhere near close to getting his back feet off the floor. "Let's get your leash and go!" He ran to the front door and started barking at the leash and harness that hung on a hook to the right of it. Running to catch up before he started scratching the wall, I thought of just how close I could get to those strange cows on our impromptu walk.
The day was nice and warm, though not too hot yet, and I almost forgot about the mutant cows as I enjoyed the weather. But then I caught an odd scent on the mild wind. A sort of sweet yet chemical smell, like someone was eating an orange in the middle of the hospital. Only the smell didn¡¯t have the familiar qualities of any fruit I¡¯d ever come across. Cosmoo picked up the strange scent too, and immediately started jerking his head around to sniff it out to the source. When he caught the smell strong on the wind, he went off running straight to the farmer¡¯s field. I was dragged along, clinging desperately to the tattered red leash and praying I didn¡¯t end up falling on my face.
He reached the wooden fence in ten seconds flat and stuck his face through the large gap. He took a few seconds to sniff, then promptly started barking his brains out. I, on the other hand, came along behind him and gracelessly careened into the splinter laden fence post. Although I saved my face by whipping my hands out in front of me, I was only rewarded with wood stippled palms.
Up close, the pungent chemical scent was stronger. It was definitely emanating from the strange colored cows, which they certainly were. No more tricks of the light or dirty glass, the cows were a confirmed shade of orange. Absentmindedly picking the splinters out of my right hand with my left, I leaned over the fence, which came to belly button height, and tried to get a good look at the shed in the middle of the grass. There were a couple of four-paned windows that looked like they were last washed when Washington crossed the Delaware and a door with nothing much but rust for hinges. Yet the proud owner had closed it up with a shiny steel padlock about half the size of my dog. It looked as though it would assist any would be robber in tearing off the handle rather than keep out unwanted visitors. I laughed low to myself and started in on my left hand splinters. Now why in the world would you bother to put a modern, brand spanking new lock on a crumbled down shed that was most likely built by your great grand pappy? Wouldn¡¯t it be more money wise and worthwhile to build a new shed? I guess farmer John was just nuts, I mean, he was apparently creating a new breed of Crayola Cows, why not padlock the secret formula for tangerine bovine in the oldest shed in America?
I let myself think all this on the surface, but somewhere in my unconscious things struck a sour chord. Shiny padlocks and orange cows just don¡¯t mix well, a blend reminiscent of the classic oil and water. But the afternoon was too nice to spoil with science fiction, and I let it go. Pulling with enough force to turn a semi end over end, I got Cosmoo away from the fence and onto the other side of the road. Soon he noticed a steamy pile of someone else¡¯s dog poo and totally forgot about the medicinal fruit smell.
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But that night I was once again faced with the problem of the shed. It was midnight when I finally let my head hit the pillow and I was totally exhausted. But it couldn¡¯t have been an hour later that I found myself waking up, standing up, right next to that makeshift shed. The night was dark and foreboding, with the half moon peering at me through long, thin clouds.
A long shiver ran up my spine and left me with goose pimples all over. The door in front of me looked just as old and decrepit as it did earlier, but now had a creepy haunted house feel. Keeping a wary eye on the door, as if it would fly open any moment revealing something hideous and hairy, I started to back away. My footsteps were slow at first, from fear of the shed and fear of falling over backward into cow dung, but they soon sped up. Once I was six feet away I turned and stated blindly running back toward the apartment complex. But I didn¡¯t get but two steps before I crashed chest first into a luminescent cow. I screamed, the cow mooed and a light sprang on inside the shed. Now totally scared out of my wits, I jumped to my feet, tearing my delicate nightgown in the process, and ran for all I was worth. Behind me, the shed door crept open with a banshee¡¯s squeal to reveal a haggard farmer. ¡°Get off my field!¡± He screamed, waving a pitchfork in his right hand, a flashlight in the left, ¡°You won¡¯t find what you¡¯re looking for, I hid it!! Ha ha, I hid it darn good you nasty government creep!¡± I took one look back, he was gross and unshaven, a man who would lose in a beauty contest against Rip Van Winkle for sure. I decided not to make the mistake of ever looking in that guy¡¯s direction again, and headed for the hills.
He didn¡¯t follow me out of that field, but his words did. As I got in bed for the second time that night, his croaks and cries reverberated in my head. Why would some hill-billy farmer think the government was spying on him through a girl in her night gown? Although I should have just left it at the guy being totally off his walnut rocker, I couldn¡¯t stop thinking that there was much more than just one to many drinks in the guy.
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