The Cost of the Land

I am staring at it, and it at me. We’ve been exchanging looks for about an hour. This… free time, a luxury I only started to experience in the last few weeks. Why, you ask? Because I’ve not a damn thing to do, a dozen hands are out in the fields, and I’m left to my cow.

It drinks not even a full bucket of livestock blood, and the seeds would grow to green grass overnight.

Today, however, it didn’t touch the food—blood and flesh, I mean. Concerning… I’ll wait and see.

Someone is calling my name; it’s one of the new hands I hired the other day. The place’s gotten far too big for me to handle on my own.

“What’s the matter?” Can't you see I’m in the middle of something here?

He opens his mouth to say something, I can’t exactly say that I’m following; with the cow fed, nothing could go wrong.

But the cow is not well fed, is it?

His words are starting to force themselves into my earshot, I’m sure I heard him say something about someone getting “injured.”

“Slow down,” looking back at him, he’s shaking. “Speak again, slowly.”

Walking along the boy, stillness hasn’t left my heart. There is no need to worry; accidents happen all the time. I open the door but the handle breaks as soon as I push it. Well, that needs fixing. Suppressed groans of pain from inside the room warned me of what I was about to see; one piece of cloth wrapped around the man’s foot and another he squeezed his hand around, both bloody. The boy who guided me starts speaking from behind, “I was sharpening the sickle… I don’t know how, it just went flying from my hand to his foot.”

And chopped two of his fucking toes?

No, it was an accident. “Put him in the truck.” I’ll take the man to a physician, get him checked and drive back. Then see what I can do about the cow.

The road to the nearest town stretched a couple of miles, a boring ride further spiced up by the fact that the guy next to me wouldn’t stop whining like a bitch. “Do ya mind?” I yell. Laying my eye on him, he looked dead, literally, his face deformed beyond recognition. Startled, I try to focus on the road. My heart racing, my grip tight on the wheel and my breath quick and heavy.

“Boss,” says the man, very much alive. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

I dismissively laugh at the irony of it, sigh in relief and focus back on the road. “It’s just the heat; this heap of a truck is radiating.” It’s all in my head, I ain’t the first to see things in the heat of the summer and won’t be the last.

I step out of the truck the moment we reach town, beating the door several times before it locks properly. The clinic looks peaceful, entirely calm if not for the sound of the electric fan which was rather pleasant. The doctor starts doing his thing, his expression bending in reaction to the injury. “Yeah,” he says, “you’re going nowhere today, not with your foot like that.”

I’ll be driving back to the farm on my own.

The cow hasn’t touched its bucket of food yet. I decide to spend the rest of the evening on my own. The cow stares and stares with that stupid face of a cow, the kind that suggests some sort of deceiving normalcy. I am facing the cow, sitting with the barn’s door behind me. The sun is setting; an elongated shadow of a woman eerily overcasts that of the cow. I think that I know who that is, I expected her, almost… and yet, I can’t bring myself to look back.

“What troubles you?” She asks.

“The cow’s not eating…”

She giggles. “Perhaps the cow is not hungry. Or perhaps your delicacies are simply not to its liking.”

That and she’s gone. I head to bed, nothing bad’s happened yet. The image of the distorted face of the worker from earlier played in my head. More often than not, so realistic I could swear it was there, hanging from the ceiling.

Weeks went by, and it hadn’t rained once. We still had a few weeks before fall, but my worries kept growing and eventually bested me. I tried feeding it all sorts of cattle meat and blood; it wouldn’t touch its food. The cow didn’t even look hungry or weak—just utterly unconcerned.

The woman visited me a couple of times, I learned she was a queen of the fae. Yes, the fairy tale creatures. She offered to marry me, offered her “wisdom and beauty” for a price she will reveal when the right time comes, she said.

And then there was a drought. Not even two days into that weather, I knew it was here to last. That dry, hot air, that wind sending dust grains flying like bullets—it had seen it all before, I fear.

I open my eyes at first light, the fresh morning air forcing me to smile, in spite of everything. I find my way to the barn, full of not much anticipation, but still a little hope.

I can hear it; it’s chewing on something. Never in my life have I been more relieved to hear such a sound. The chewing, there’s something wrong about it… it sounds … crusty. I am sure all I put in the bucket last night was boneless chicken, I’d hoped removing the bones would get the cow to eat something.

I open the barn door and immediately regret it. The air inside is warm, trapped, and foul. While I admit leaving raw meat in a bucket overnight was a bad idea, I would have never imagined that little meat can smell this bad.

I regain my vision and the scene turns my blood into ice. The gruesomeness makes me gasp, breathe in—a huge mistake: the smell of rot along the view, it all makes me want to throw up. Indeed, I lean against the wall and vomit for a long minute.

It’s the man I’ve taken to the doctor, the cow biting his face, turning it into something uncannily familiar.

“Your delicacies are not to its liking.”

I remember the woman’s words, then look at the cow putting on the same stupid face it always had. The same if not for the blood and hair laying down from its mouth. I leave the barn, hurtle away in fear, run until my lungs fail me. The hot air is no help, but I eventually manage to catch my breath. I whisper her name—the fey queen—she knows… she knew all along, and I’ll have her tell me everything.

As if she’d been waiting for my call, she emerges from the corner wearing her usual malignant charm. “You look pale, neither from your concern for the farm—to which I’m accustomed, nor from the heat in the air. Is that fear I smell?”

“It’s the first time the cow has eaten anything for a month…”

I can see her grin, “Merry news!” she celebrates.

“Ain’t a damn thing merry about it, it’s eating a human being.”

She approaches me. “So?” She asks, “Humans are animals.”

I don’t bother with her philosophies and wordplay, “I am not feeding the thing human flesh; if I go to jail, this farm is as good as gone.” Then it hit me: “the body, gotta hide it.”

I look back, slowly walk towards the barn which looks small from this far away; I didn’t realize how far I’d run. As I walk, numbed by the mixture of fear, grief and regret, I feel a fresh breeze, the first is what felt like forever. The soil smells of rain, promises prosperity to this land. The sky, however, is a clear blue.

Once more, It’s all in my head.

I enter the barn, this time prepared for the smell that awaits me. Using a shovel and a large bag, I take the now-barely-recognizable body and dispose of it as far away as I can.

The voice echoes as I dig the hole, “Which is stronger, farmer, that which tethers you to your humanity, or your bond with this farm?”

Thud, the shovel hits the soil dully.

My head is buzzing, deep into the ground goes the bag. In the middle of all of that, all I can think of is, “Please, not the drought… anything but that.” The chance that I could lose the entire farm almost makes the cost—the life of one human—sound… small, insignificant.

“No,” I remind myself, “Your father never taught you to kill innocent people… things will look up, be patient.” I manage to get myself composed. Between all the cleaning, digging, and work, another day has gone by.

A deserted land stretching beyond the horizon, a win so hot it sets my skin ablaze, all of my crops withered, chickens dead. The farm, everything I have… all gone.

I quickly wake up, frightened. It is deep into the night, silent, dark, no sign of life other than mine, the cow, and the mosquitoes swarming around the lamp.

I am lucid, more than I’d like to be doing what I am about to do. I get on the truck and drive to town, the previously boring silent route now fueling my every feeling. I hit the pedal and I know very well that the way back is blocked, that once I enter this pothole, the only way is forward.

The town is dead as the night itself, all the lights are off, save for the sheriff’s office. Thump thump, I hammer on the clinic’s door.

No answer

Thump thump thump.

The door unlocks, “Have you lost your mind, do you know what time it is?” says the doctor.

I explain to him that the man he treated earlier is sick again. Firm and efficient, the doctor takes his toolkit and follows me to the truck.

He asks me questions about the… patient. Where does he feel the pain, what’s his temperature…

And naturally, I avoid some, guess some, and some I make up altogether. He seemed to get more and more suspicious as the ride stretched. But thankfully, we finally get there.

“Where’s my patient?” he hops out of the truck with the heavy toolkit embraced to his person.

“Just around the corner, he’s in the barn.”

The doctor looks back at me, eyes wide and fearful. “Why?” he asks.

“Isn’t it a little too late to ask, doctor?”

The cow is fed.