The cow calmly chewed its cud as Morris removed the window from its stomach. The cow lived with many others in a university research lab where new and better food supplements for cattle were developed. This was cow thirty-seven, and like all the other cows she had a portal installed on her side connecting one of her four stomachs to the outside world. It was put there when she was a calf, so she thought nothing of the man in the white bunny suit popping it open like a can of peanuts and reaching inside to muck about.
Morris had been working in the lab for over three years, pouring pellets into cows or collecting their cud or cow pies. He was never given any information about what he was putting into or removing from the cows, he simply followed the nightly checklist. He mostly paid attention to his work but the repetition became a dull pantomime making it difficult to concentrate and be sure everything wound up in the right place. Morris worked alone, and as year two turned to three his commitment to quality began to waiver. He’d taken to putting vodka in his thermos to get him through the long nights.
He started bringing in booze to add a bit of a thrill to the night. The first time he brought a loaded thermos, his heart was in his throat. He thought to himself, “This is stupid. Why am I doing this? This is a great job. I’m going to blow it!” The security guard happily waved Morris in, just as he had every night before. It was the guard’s last duty of the night, and once Morris was locked inside the guard could go home. Thus the brief thrill of possibly getting caught faded, but the vodka buzz made the night go just a little bit faster, and he realized that he was getting paid to drink, which increased his job satisfaction.
He also appreciated that he could smoke. Technically forbidden, Morris started out smoking on the terrace near the break room, where he could flick his filterless butts into the parking lot next door. But as he became more and more comfortable, and drunk, he brought his habit indoors.
At first the cows reacted to the smoke with surprise, mooing their alarm, some shifting nervously in their pens. In their hermetically sealed world they never experienced dirt, wind, sunshine nor anything else other than the fluorescent glow from above, the white walls and the floors with metal drains to quickly wash away any bonus offal for later analysis. In time they accepted the smoke as just another constant in their tightly controlled world. They returned to staring blankly at Morris as they slowly chewed the cud refluxed from their rumen.
His work in the lab was supposed to be temporary until he got his goat farm up and running. To Morris, the goat was the perfect animal. They ate anything, and you could sell their milk or meat, raise more of them as needed, and rake in the profits. He thought cows a wasteful animal, so finicky about their food, such a lumbering beast and so overbred that they were barely animals at all; just hooved meat vessels that researchers tried to grow a little faster or fatter or cheaper. Morris saw the goats as his future, and valued their adaptability and willingness to eat all his garbage. Unfortunately Morris was had been drawn into an underground sacrificial goat voodoo enterprise that supplied animals for ritual killing and dismemberment. Morris made the mistake of happily selling some goats and kids to an undercover animal welfare officer. All of his animals were confiscated and he was banned from raising any food animals for the next eight years.
In time, Morris no longer enjoyed the vodka buzz but found he wasn’t able to get through the night without his thermos of spirits. He paid less and less attention to the clipboard and simply added to or removed the cows stomach contents at will. He also started to resent the inconvenient disposal of his cigarette butts. He had taken to stuffing them in his pocket, then tossing the smelly lot of them over the terrace railing in one go. But as he drank and smoked, it occurred to him that the cows were perfect for cigarette disposal. He thought of his beloved goats and their ability to eat anything and thought perhaps the cows were being underestimated. Maybe they too could digest garbage but nobody had ever thought to try it. It could be a major breakthrough, and would likely get him promoted.
He began by opening a random cow window and tossing a butt in from five paces, then from ten paces. Morris began to fill his nights with smoking and butt tossing, and started to enjoy his work again. One night he tried to see how many consecutive butts he could toss into a single cow. It was good fun until the cow started to sweat and then tried to break out of its pen. There were rumors of mad cow disease. The cow was tested but everything came back normal. Luckily they didn’t test for nicotine. Morris felt bad for the cow because now when it smelled cigarette smoke it moaned. Morris continued his butt tossing habit but had forgotten the original theory he hoped to prove.
One night, while Morris was fighting a cold, his thermos packed an extra wallop due to a heavy dose of Nyquil. Morris wiped his nose on the sleeve of his clean suit, put a fresh cigarette between his lips, but his lighter failed to make a flame. He shook it, but it would only spark. He considered tossing it into a nearby cow, but figured it could get stuck somewhere. He looked around for a possible flame and remembered there was a lab down the hall from the bathroom. He shuffled off toward the lab like a tipsy Easter Bunny.
He entered the lab and flipped the light switch. There was a large lab table with sinks in the middle and several outlets for a gas flame. Morris turned the valve on the nozzle and it made a hissing sound as the smell of rotten eggs filled his nose. Morris turned it off, waving his hands around to clear the air. He then looked for a way to light the flame. He remembered that he had the lighter, and turning the gas back on and sparked it near the tip of the nozzle. No luck. He kept trying until his thumb was sore.
“Fuck this,” he said, looking around the room. He started clumsily going through drawers and finally found a box of matches.
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Although he could have simply used the match to light his cigarette, Morris was on a mission. He teetered back to the nozzle and struck the match.
The explosion cracked the walls all around the lab and blew the door off its hinges. In the morning, some graduate students found Morris on the floor; his eyebrows gone and his bunny suit singed. They shook him as his eyes slowly opened and struggled to focus. He sat up, and noticed the twenty-somethings huddled around him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Morris asked.
“Oh God, he reeks,” said a grad student, “he’s drunk.”
“No,” said Morris. “I was drunk. What I am now is hung-over.” He surveyed his bunny suit and its blackened fringe. “And lightly braised.”
***
After he was fired, Morris had a range of emotions but boredom, regret, and anger were the most prominent.
“I make one mistake, and they fire me. Those ungrateful bastards!” He thought to himself.
“Why does daytime TV suck so bad?” Morris pondered.
“That’s the best job I’ll ever have, what was I thinking? Idiot!” He said aloud.
As his very small cash reserves ran low, regret is what he felt the most. He wished he could go back in time and just start over, not drinking or smoking on the job, and not filling the cows with cigarettes. Just be a great, boring, grateful employee. It was in the throes of regret that he remembered his voodoo connection.
“I want to go back in time,” Morris said.
He was in the apartment of Daniel Fingernail, who was supposedly a voodoo priest. All the curtains were drawn and the walls were covered with shelves filled with little boxes, bottles and jars filled with a variety of voodoo ingredients. Heavy incense clouded the air and on the TV the Shopping Network was running without sound.
“You and everyone else,” said Daniel, as he rolled a chicken bone between his fingers.
“So how do we do it?”
“We don’t. Traveling through time is very dangerous. You’ve seen ‘Back To The Future,’ it never goes as one would expect.”
“But I only want to go back a little bit. Just a few years, before I screwed up.”
“What if everyone who ever made a mistake or regretted something went back and fixed it? Then where would we be?” Daniel said, reaching for a bottle of toad skin.
“A better world. People would be better people, and there would be less pain and suffering.”
“No. People are stupid. They only learn because there is pain and suffering. If you play a video game and die, and then come back all you is do is kill the other players better. You don’t come back as Jesus or something. No, time travel will not help you.”
“Then what will help me? I can’t find a job and I’m almost out of money!” Morris pleaded.
“You need a trade. Maybe go to community college, learn to fix computers or something like that.” Daniel pointed the remote at the TV, flipping through channels.
“What if I win the lottery? Can you do that for me?”
“Time travel and the lottery. Do you have any idea how many times a day people come to me wanting those things? If I granted them all, the lottery would be worth five dollars but nobody could ever win because they are to busy traveling through time!” Daniel turned off the TV and turned to Morris. “I want you to really think. Think about what it is that you truly want. Take your time.”
Morris was despondent. Daniel looked at him patiently as he stroked his stubbly beard.
“I don’t want to have any more regrets, and I don’t want to make any more mistakes. And I don’t want to worry about money anymore. I want to be happy.”
Daniel looked at Morris a long time. “I can help you.”
Daniel reached for a wooden box with a brass latch on it. Inside were some black tea leaves streaked with bright orange highlights. “This tea will help you.”
Daniel brewed the tea for Morris, who took the cup and sniffed it. “Smells like cinnamon.”
“Drink the tea Morris. It will solve your problems.”
Morris sipped a bit of the tea, and was surprised to find it delicious. He drank it down quickly and handed the cup back to Daniel. “What now?”
“We wait,” Daniel said.
“I don’t feel any different,” Morris said. But as he finished speaking, he noticed that his tongue felt stiff. Then he was no longer able to blink. Alarmed, he tried to move but felt like he was made of wood. He was frozen, unable to twitch or breath or even move his eyes.
“Now you have what you wanted, well at least three out of four.” Daniel pushed Morris to the floor and began straightening his arms and legs. He then dragged him to the kitchen, into the pantry and propped him against the wall.
“People do not understand the undead. In movies the zombies run around and eat people, but how can this be? Only living things need food. Only living things can move. The undead are just that—dead, but not dead also. You, Morris, are now undead. You will not have any more regrets, because you cannot feel. You will not make any more mistakes because you are mostly dead. And you don’t have to worry about money because you will be in my pantry until I give you to someone else. I’m sorry that you won’t be happy, but you won’t be unhappy either, which is pretty close.”
Daniel took a knife from his belt, cut a hole under Morris’ rib and removed his gall bladder.
“You will be a great help to me with my recipes. And the best thing is that I can use every part of you!” He put the gall bladder in bottle, stoppered it with a cork and put it on a shelf. Daniel closed the pantry door and returned to watching the Shopping Channel as he scanned his iPhone for new messages.