Mapping the Inner Cow

As cow thirty-seven lazily chewed its cud, Morris steadied himself against her flank. The cow lived with many others in a university research lab developing algae-based cattle feed that didn’t taste like a beached herring. The entire herd had windows on their sides opened as easily as a can of soda, connecting one of their four stomachs to the outside world. Dressed in his clean-room bunny suit Morris twisted the plexiglass cover from the cow port, falling over twice before he successfully mucked about and retrieved a sample.

***

Morris took to putting vodka in his thermos to get him through the long and lonely night shifts. After three years of pouring pellets into the animals, sampling their insides, or collecting their cow pies, he resented their banal indifference. An entire shift could go by without a single cow making eye contact or mooing hello. Over time the vodka wasn’t enough, so although banned by the many signs posted around the lab, Morris started chain-smoking as a further act of rebellion. At first, he had trouble getting rid of the cigarette butts. The lab was spotless, and Morris worried a lab tech or janitor might find a wayward butt. It occurred to him that, thanks to his filterless cigarettes, he could simply dispose of the butts inside the cows. Problem solved. The cows didn’t even care if the butts were still smoking. To make it more fun, he tossed butts at a distance into cow nine who tended to stand especially still. One night he made eleven in a row but stopped when she started to sweat and then spent the next eight hours trying to jump the walls of her pen. Seeing this behavior, the scientist feared the start of a mad cow outbreak and put number nine through extensive testing. Luckily for Morris, the screening did not include nicotine. Morris felt bad for the cow afterward, for whenever it smelled cigarette smoke, it moaned.

***

Morris put a fresh cigarette between his lips and found his lighter wasn’t working. Despite vigorous shaking, it only sparked. He considered tossing it into a nearby cow but thought better of it. A search of the breakroom yielded no flame. Pondering his next move, Morris wondered if you could light a cigarette in the microwave. He then remembered that an actual laboratory complete with Bunsen burners waited for him down the hall just past the men’s room. He left his bucket of pellets and shuffled off toward the lab like a tipsy Easter Bunny.

The laboratory door was unlocked, and Morris flipped the light switch. He saw several large tables with sinks and a hose attached to a burner. Morris turned the burner valve producing a loud hiss and the smell of rotten eggs. He turned it off, waving his hands around to clear the air. Morris looked for a way to light the flame. He remembered that he had the lighter, and turning the gas back on sparked it near the tip of the nozzle. No luck. He kept trying until his thumb was sore.

“Thanks a lot, Bic!” he said, then surveyed the room and suddenly grabbed the lab table to steady himself. “Whoa, bed spins. No, wait. Lab spins! Ha!” Morris smiled at his joke as he clumsily rooted through drawers and finally found a box of matches.

“That’s what I’m talking about.” Morris teetered back to the nozzle and struck the match.

The explosion cracked the walls, blew the laboratory door off its hinges, and knocked Morris unconscious, but he was on the verge of sleep anyway.

In the morning, some graduate students found him on the floor; his eyebrows gone, and his bunny suit singed. They shook him, his eyes popped opened and rolled around unfocussed. Then he suddenly sat up and noticed the twenty-somethings huddled around him. “Who the hell are you?” Morris asked, his head throbbing like an overfed tick.

“Oh God, he reeks,” said a grad student, “he’s drunk.”

“Is he drunk or is the smell from the burnt hair?” another grad student said.

“Correction,” said Morris. “I was drunk. I am now hung-over.”

Morris got to his feet, straightened his bunny suit, and wandered back to the cow room to say goodbye to his bovine friends. “I wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Except you number forty-three. You, I never liked.”