Cows Read Online Free PDF

it.”
    “Oh, well, I’m sorry. I beg your fucking pardon. Mothers are supposed to talk to their children, Steven. Didn’t you know? It’s the only way to teach you things.”
    He laughed in her face.
    “What did you ever teach me?”
    The mother act fell from the Beast like lizard skin and she leaned across the table, grabbing the edges, white-knuckled.
    “You ungrateful fuck. Everything you are has my mark on it.”
    His stomach heaved again as he half stood to meet her, but he wasn’t ready to let go yet. His hatred paralyzed him and for a moment he stopped breathing.
    And then he was much younger, and she was a towering mass in a blue print dress against which he butted without effect, knee-high and weak in a child anger that had no possibility of resolution and ended as it always did by tearing away, shrieking, looking blindly through tears for the cornfields where all the TV kids ran to escape the adult world. Then he was back.
    “And what am I, you demented whore? Something you fucked up so totally it never had a chance to make it into the world. Jesus, it’s as much as I can do to walk down the street.”
    He vomited tiredly onto the table, bracing himself against it with locked arms. The Hagbeast laughed softly and clumped across the room to stand over Dog on the shit tray.
    “The time wasn’t wasted, then.”
    She lifted her skirt and pissed on the whimpering animal.
    In the drifting monochrome wash of the TV, Dog’s coat looked dark and oiled. The hair parted in a rolling wave as Steven dragged a towel back and forth across it, exposing a narrow moving line of white skin and the occasional cluster of fleas. The stink of the Hagbeast’s piss burned acquisitively through the dead air, snouting out strongholds in the damp-spore that blackened the corners of the bedroom, planning to linger. Dog grunted happily under the attention but its eyes held the sad light of betrayal that surfaced with each of the Hagbeast’s cruelties Steven failed to protect it from.

CHAPTER TEN

    H e had been to the fourth floor before. In the endless years of his growing it had been part of a route that led to a temporary escape from the mad bludgeonings of his mother. Up the stairs that were always unlit and creaked fear into a young boy’s legs, along a landing so thick with its own isolation that the shadows must, absolutely must, hide something hideous and fanged that drooled for the blood of a child, to a ladder at the end that you climbed to a square of meshed glass, then out on to the roof, panting and pushing the skylight open and gulping down the gritty air of the city that seemed back then to expand in your lungs and float you up and out into a world not shared by monsters or mother.
    Beyond an immediate ring of desolation, lights glittered and flashed colors out across the world. And the colors were so significant then—each neon shade tugged at him with its promise of a different way to live, each glowing curl of tubeglass was an entire world that would close around you if you stared at it long enough and carry you off on warm purple nights to a place where there was music and people laughed.
    To stand by the railing at the edge of the roof, kicking at loose bricks and dreaming of moving out into those lights, was payment enough for the shrieks and beatings that inevitably greeted his return to the flat.
    But time clawed its way across the lights and they paled. They took on a new meaning that brought no gladness to Steven’s heart. Where they had once been the fuel of dreams, they now became a cankerous reminder that those dreams had not come true. So Steven stopped climbing the ladder at night and began to search instead the less fickle TV screen for ways to the worlds he had seen from the roof.
    Now the fourth floor was different. Forty watts burned over a dusty gray carpet runner and the sepia light showed Steven only a duplicate of his own landing. The haunted infinite darkness he had imagined as a child had