Sunset yawns between the clouds near the end of the train tracks, glistening a yellow sheet over the amber platform. The furry creatures I call my bovine family, and then some, crowd near the ledge waiting for the train. Goats stand near the edge, glumly dressed with white whiskers twitching and flaring like birthday kazoos: ‘Rrrrd.’

My shoulders are sore from lugging my bags from the bus stop to the train station. A donkey shoves me forward and I trip over my weight — Caption Cargo is printed on his shirt. Jagged lines sketch spanish mountains over his circumvent shades and the idiot ass doesn’t even apologize. Typical.

I turn my head towards the tracks, ignoring him, knowing that my attention is better off concentrating on the fact that it’s coming. It’s only a matter of minutes.

Pink shards shoot through the sky and it makes me think of traffic — flickering city street lights like Christmas trees. Slumped sidewalk bums might gawk at my udders as I stroll pass. I’ll look down and think it won’t matter; it’s the city of uprights. Incessant slang will replace moo moans and my purse will carry powder — hair gel for globing fur; and a mobile! ... just to be like one of those finger pointing uprights.

I stand on my back feet well-rehearsed, nailing the balance. Other ticket holders shuffle their hooves and sway their ribcages on all fours, like animals. They must be traveling for pleasure I guess, visiting family that live in the city - a weekend getaway. I want to sit at a desk and point my hooves like fingers at people.

Moo-ria poses as a city off the east coast of Spain, but it’s more of a free-range ranch crowded with cows. Amusement arrives when German tourists visit for summer holidays and fry themselves the color of lobster. They smile like drug induced morons and let their bellies hang as they lie on the beach. Fart and burp as they watch waves tumble during the night.

When I first saw an upright human I was a calf, learning how to walk with my granny on the beach. Pebbles were getting stuck between my teeth every time my limbs buckled,. Half my face was covered in muddy grains. A gray-haired upright marched near us with a female and two infant males behind them. Gray-haired plunged a rod in the sand, made it flower jafa, lemon, and blue triangles in midair. She plopped under it, knees folded, on the round shade it cast. I stared at them and they stared back. The two infants squeaked sounds with plastic whistles, pointing fingers towards me, and I felt the first pinch in the pit of my throat, just above my ribs. Granny was nearby cooling her hooves in the water and I could feel her looking as I stood bemused and embarrassed, buckled over my legs. The infant uprights kept laughing and kicking the air, dissolving sand castles between us.

‘Moo..phf,’ granny moaned, and waddled to where I had plopped. She nudged my shoulder with her snout to take me back to the fields. I stood up and walked back to the ranch, listening to the laughter behind me.

‘I wanna stand too, Granny,’ I said, under my breath with pieces of grain scratching my eyes, soaked with tears that I hadn’t known had fallen from my own eyes. ‘I wanna be on two feet! So I can point just like them.’

Granny could hardly hear me; she was old. She folded her brows and stretched her eyes; nodded. Didn’t seem like she cared much.

***

I finally learned how to walk and often went to the beach to refresh my hide during mid-afternoon. My bellies were always full at that hour, and if I saw an upright I’d keep my distance so that they wouldn’t have a chance to make those noises that they liked doing. So much attention made me nervous and I never knew if I had done something wrong or right. As I got older and bigger they stopped paying so much attention. I noticed they liked to point and whistle at the calves more than at us heifers. I sometimes thought they were scared of us.
Like my granny witnessed, I caught a family of uprights one day plopped under a flower umbrella. Two infant uprights went charging to a calf that, like I did, was learning how to get his weight off the ground. Those upright kids whistled and I grew so mad that I went charging towards them, trying to whistle the way they were whistling, but nothing but a hoarse moo moan came out of me and the two infant uprights went running to their parents, crying and screaming because I had scared them. I didn’t know how to whistle. I wanted to make fun of them too, not scare them.
That night I slept out in the field because the ranch hand shoved my out of the barn where we normally slept. My mother didn’t even look at me but bowed her head as though she agreed with the punishment. That night I heard the whistles of nature and felt the gentle eyes of the stars above me. There was a rumble in my mind and I felt it. I was going to do something about these uprights, find my way to embarrass them the way they embarrassed us.
Following day, there was nothing to stop me. I spent weeks researching, flipping, reading anything I could find. I was partly illiterate but it’s amazing how quick you learn when you need something. I started off with the alphabet. Weeks passed and the alphabet turned into words, and words turned into sentences I could comprehend.
After nine months, the advertisement gleamed off the page like a sacred scripture: a listing in the ‘Costa del Sol’ Yellow Pages for a translating company run by ‘Upright’ heifers. And they needed trainees:


‘ENTRE cote Lingua Group’: Trained and Certified bovines in multi-lingual studies assisting bovine owners with psychologically challenged heifers.

(seeking prospective Upright bovines who have a strong command of Spanish/English. German a plus. The TUBL Ceritificate takes two weeks to complete.)


If any mule would’ve told me I could drop a stomach, I wouldn’t have believed him. I found the advert, and my pulse rattled so fast I probably burned a million calories, sent all the dairy in me into a simmer. I had a never-ending vibrating feeling that entire week, as though I were diseased with happiness.

I started roaming closer to upright families near the beach next summer that came around. I moved gently and never made any sudden moves. I let upright children pet me while I listened to them speak. ‘Milh kuh mama! Milh kuh,’ they’d say as they smiled to their mothers, their hands petting my rump. I’d hear American tourists, ‘It’s a Blue Bell!’ Though I had no idea what that meant.

Every night, as part of my devised plan to get out of Moo-ria, I whispered my name under the night by the barn doors. I waited after ranch hands had milked the cows and hogs had eaten, after everyone had fallen asleep. I practiced pronunciation, never caring if anyone heard me. They must’ve thought I was silly, too ambitious just because I was bovine.

‘Mue...ef... Mu...oo.’ Over and over, until I could hear my name in my dreams, in that heavenly civilized tongue: English. I kept pronouncing, out and back. ‘Mu...ro. Muu...riioo.’


***


I look up, and see headlights; the train is coming.

It’s the cheapest train, regional SpanED, which means no air-conditioning, no fold out trays, no headphone jacks; over-seating is expected and extra baggage makes every bit of space claustrophobic.

An obese heifer next to me gets restless; ribcages bump into one another; calves gallop up and down the platform. Cattle tap their hooves. Mules mumble as they grab suitcases. It starts, that feeling of sour milk bubbling, and one of my stomachs turns upside down. The floor trembles. I feel like vomiting.

The SpanED glides in and herds shift to the left... to the right, agitating themselves to find where the train is going to stop.

I’m lucky.

A pair of doors stop right in front of me and I dash in after two donkeys trip out. Without pushing anyone, I find a seat next to a Jordanian mule curled in a corner seat with her belly exposed and her hooves up in the air. Her orchid print shawl disguises half her face.

I sit down with my satchel bag and remain still as limbs, legs, and hooves wave all around me. A fowl sweat sprays through the air, grosser than manure, more placental and unwashed. Passengers growl as they search for a seat; some sit over armrests; some whine and whimper without moving.

I concentrate on breathing as I look outside the window and watch the mountains fade from dust to bruised apples.

The train wheels roll out of the station and bovines continue to turn heads. One heifer has a ticket clasped in her hoof looking for seat numbers – no one has the heart to tell her to sit her pin bone down. Anyplace is as good as any.

A frail and elderly creature dressed in bone wool sleeps across from me, wearing half-moon spectacles balanced off her wrinkly muzzle. She smells elderly like blue Listerine. She bleeds dark wine from a crack in her dew claw, and I stare at the stain, certain that she reminds me of someone. A sudden urge makes me want to wake her and shove her by accident, say, ‘look ! I’m not buckled and shitting on grass. I’m upright granny! I’m upright!’

But I don’t.

I loosen my hide and wonder if she’ll wake up and recognize me. It isn’t her — the shell shape of her eyes when she sleeps. If she could see me, she’d be proud.

The landscape begins to wash with purple chalk and all bovine mammals fall sleepy-eyed, finally, with a fan of shadows. I watch bodies swell, tongues swipe, tails whip ears like drunken snakes. Hoarse mumblings score themselves as background music and everyone folds over each other like a posed photograph. Rolling steadiness. It’s a lullaby you’d remember.

I stay erect, watching, breathing, at peace that we’re on our way. I’m on my way. The night comes over us like a blanket.

It reminds me of evenings at the ranch when everyone fell asleep, and I’d stay up pronouncing English, going over tenses and looking up at the stars. Every found star would be an adjective ... elegant; noble; luminous. If I ran out, they’d magically creep into my dreams... incredulous; superfluous; ridiculous, because after all, it’s meant to be.

I tilt my head against the headrest and look out the window, see a bright star directly over the peak of a mountain ... and think: serendipitous. Yep, a perfect word.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...