Henrik was skinny to the point of discomfort, all elbow and rib. He was Jewy and intellectual; round glasses, putrid sweaters. When I sucked his dick I had to work to avoid the feminine jut of his hip bones. I liked this about him.

“Are you coming to dinner?” he asked when he finished.

I wiped the cum from my mouth and considered. “Is this an official invitation?” When I batted my eyes, my mascara held my lashes together a millisecond too long.

“It’s a question.” He didn’t get it or pretended not to. “But the answer is, you should come.”

I said okay and got dressed. Women are like children. Or dogs. We need to be told what to do.

I wore a pleated miniskirt with sheer tights and Doc Martens and a gold-plated necklace depicting The Virgin on her throne, thin as a pressed penny. I collected my headband from Henrik’s nightstand and smoothed my hair in the front-facing camera of my phone. When Henrik emerged from the shower he complimented my outfit.

“Thanks,” I said. “You look good, too. More people should be anorexic like you.”

He pulled his damp towel from around his waist and swatted me with it. “I’m not anorexic.”

“Well, whatever you are,” I said. “Obesity is a serious problem in this shithole country.”

On the train we listened to our respective podcasts and held hands in the pocket of Henrik’s jacket. I stared at a small Asian boy with a sleek puffy coat. Asian babies are so cute.

▲

Dinner was in Henrik’s hometown of Park Slope. He was the first person I’d ever met who was actually “from” Park Slope; I hadn’t really known it was a place you could grow up. The toddlers there seemed to be in a perpetual state of toddlerhood—once they reached Kindergarten they shipped off to L.A.

At the Italian restaurant Henrik’s parents picked, the tables were set with cheap battery-powered candles that seemed to mismatch the aesthetic of the place, which was old and established and actually quite nice. While we waited for the hostess, I whispered to Henrik, “Reject modernity, embrace tradition,” and gestured at the fake candles.

“What?” he said.

“I said, ‘Reject modernity, embrace tradition.’”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Don’t say that to my parents, though, Sonia. They won’t get the reference and then they’ll go off on a tangent.”

“Of course I won’t,” I said, “I’m not that autistic.” But in truth I was glad for the reminder. I had never met Henrik’s parents before, and I didn’t think his sister, an earnest Ridgewood lesbian named M.B., liked me very much. When we met up for drinks last month, she seemed to pity me for my beauty and stupidity, but also to envy me because I was poor—a difficult combination. I would have to be charming.

The hostess returned to her iPad and smiled at us, and when I saw the dopey, glazed-over look in Henrik’s eyes I felt embarrassed for everyone involved. She led us through the restaurant, her awful black ankle boots clack clacking against the tiled floor, until we reached the table where Henrik’s family was waiting for us. His mother was the first to stand.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said. She hugged Henrik and gave him a wet kiss on the cheek. Then she turned to me. “And you must be Sonia,” she said, her tone bouncing up and down as if she were singing. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, honey.”

I smiled and reached out to shake her hand. “You, too, Mrs. Bilgin. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“I typically go by Dr. Rubin,” she said. The crows’ feet around her eyes tightened just slightly, even though she kept smiling. “Didn’t Henrik tell you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “He didn’t mention it. Pretty sexist if you ask me.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, don’t worry about it—I’m just a stickler with my students, so I try to be consistent.”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s a pleasure, Dr. Rubin.” Give me a break, I thought. She was a white woman with salt and pepper hair. She wore a tasseled shawl that made her look like an art teacher and a chunky necklace with wooden beads, surely pilfered from some colonized people. I had expected her to be skinny like Henrik, but she was all puffed up; a skinny person with too much air inside. I shook hands with Henrik’s dad, a Turkish man with thick eyebrows, and we all sat down at the round table with M.B.

“So, Ms. Sonia,” said Henrik’s dad. “Tell us about yourself.”

I shifted in my seat. I was about to begin stringing words together when M.B., to her credit, saved the day.

“Dad, come on,” she said. “This isn’t a job interview. Sonia’s in school, she’s from Wisconsin, and she and Henrik met—on a dating app, right?”

I nodded and swished a bite of bread around in my cheeks. I wasn’t technically in school anymore, and Henrik and I had met on an image-posting forum for fans of Lolita, not a dating app. But these details didn’t seem important. Henrik looked at me and shrugged.

“That’s wonderful, sweetheart,” said Henrik’s mom. She was still smiling. “Just wonderful. What are you studying?”

“Well, I started out in political science,” I said. “And now I’m sort of reevaluating. You know, weighing my options.”

“And what do you think of the city so far?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s fine. I like it fine.”

Everyone was quiet. The waiter brought out a bottle of wine, a nice red. He poured a spill for Henrik’s dad, who took the rim under his nose, closed his eyes, and inhaled. It reminded me of fine dining, MasterChef, Gordon Ramsay; brand me with a hot spatula, daddy.

“Wow, this is so trad,” I said. Dr. Bilgin swallowed the wine, nodded at the waiter, and looked at me. His Adam’s apple swiveled in its perch.

“Trad?” he said. “What is trad?”

“Traditional, dad,” said Henrik. “It’s like, slang for when something is old-school.”

Henrik’s parents looked at each other and did a sort of sad giggle.

“So, if I’m trad,” said Dr. Bilgin. “Does that mean I’m old?”

“No, not old, really,” I said. “I more mean the whole situation. The man of the house tasting the wine. The two of you still being together. All of us meeting over family dinner. That kind of thing.”

“Sometimes I taste the wine,” said Dr. Rubin. She raised her eyebrows and took a sip from her glass. She and her clear-coated nails were beginning to disgust me.

“Cheers, mom,” said M.B. “You’re braver than Gloria Steinem.”

“Oh, I just love her,” said Dr. Rubin, and clinked her glass to M.B.’s. I raised mine in their direction from across the table. Maybe M.B. wasn’t so bad.

“Speaking of Gloria Steinem, M.B. was telling us the most fascinating thing before you two arrived.”

“Enlighten us,” said Henrik, not unkindly.

“What was it, M.B.?” said Dr. Rubin. “The ‘own your fans’?”

“OnlyFans, mom,” said M.B. “OnlyFans.”

“Right, the OnlyFans.”

“Anyway,” said M.B. “I was just telling mom and dad about the new OnlyFans policy that allows FBI agents to surveil paid accounts without a subscription. So fucked.”

I felt the urge to roll my eyes. Henrik put his hand on my leg, as if to stop me before I started.

“Interesting,” I said.

“It’s really brutal,” said M.B. “Between that and SESTA-FOSTA, sex workers have essentially no options left.”

“I mean, have you ever done sex work?” I asked.

Dr. Bilgin’s wine and bread caught together in his throat. He covered his wet mouth with his white napkin as he coughed. The body, the blood.

“I just don’t get what’s so noble about whoring yourself out,” I continued. “Like, why are people so obsessed with it when they’ve never done it themselves?”

“She’s joking,” said Henrik.

M.B. ignored him. “I think,” she said, “as workers, we all have an obligation to be in solidarity with the most marginalized among us. Sex workers’ labor is both exploited and criminalized, and if we can protect their right to agency over their own bodies, we can do the same for all working people.”

As she spoke, her bangs flopped around and her glasses fogged up. I tuned her out and considered her skin, the porey, makeup-less swiss cheese of her face, the flub of her neck, the sweat creeping down her collar. Frump as a politic. I could see the way a woman like her mom could create a girl like her, though she had rebelled against even the chunky jewelry and clear nails; she was ugly on purpose, so she could get ahead of being accused of it. As if cottage-cheese cellulite and toe-knuckle hair and kombucha breath comprised some grand ascetic morality.

“But maybe I’m oversimplifying,” she said finally. “Have you done sex work before?”

Dr. Bilgin gripped the table.

“Ew, no,” I laughed. “But I have been a hostess, and that’s, like, basically the same thing.”

▲

After dinner, Henrik and I went to a party downtown at Tijmen’s. Tijmen was a friend of Henrik’s from graduate school. He had naturally platinum hair and a vaguely Soviet style of dressing. When we got to his apartment he handed us beers and kissed us each on the cheek.

“Hey, you brought Sonia, there’s my favorite girl. I was hoping you’d make it.”

“Hey, Tijmen. It smells like cabbage in here.”

“Always so polite, always so happy to see me,” he said. “How about, ‘Oh, Tijmen, thanks for having me at your place and sharing all your alcohol. As a small token of my gratitude, I would like to introduce you to my beautiful little friends so you can finally have some companionship, maybe even love.’ How about that next time.”

“I didn’t mean it like a bad thing.”

“Nobody else has commented on any type of smell. So maybe it’s just your nose.”

We sat down in the living room at a folding table with a few lawn chairs set beside it. A couple other dudes, Tijmen’s roommates or acquaintances, projected YouTube videos onto the wall. Henrik and Tijmen rolled a joint.

“Want some?” Henrik said, gesturing the joint in my direction. I declined, marijuana being the disgusting fuel of vagrants, and the rest of them set about getting high.

“Did you hear they’re selling real estate in the metaverse now? A bunch of beta investors spent millions on these virtual playgrounds,” said Tijmen.

“Oh, that’s insane, dude,” said Henrik. “Did you hear they added the word ‘meatspace’ to Merriam Webster’s? Fucking praxis.” This is what they typically did at parties: launched obscure and banal facts into orbit, ad nauseum, barely pausing to pretend they’d listened.

What did I think about in those moments? I couldn’t quite say. A new song, an old cartoon, the Wii Sports theme music, the bulimic and vaguely Slavic bitch on the podcast I liked; whether or not she had gotten plastic surgery; the time I fucked Tijmen and made Henrik cry. I stared into the distance, trying hard to look coquettish.

I checked my phone. On a forum thread called, “Unconventional Male Attractions #13,” someone had posted a photo of a guy who looked just like Henrik. “This is my cousin,” said the caption. “I think he’s this psychotic version of hideous that’s actually hot?” I screenshotted it and sent it to Henrik. He was sitting right next to me, but I knew it would be less funny if I took the artifact out of its own world and put it into ours. The next post was a photo of Kangaroo Jack, his humanoid, sunglassed face hovering over the camera.

I hope he gets pancreatic cancer and rots from the inside out, I commented, giggling. I had forgotten about Kangaroo Jack but loved the idea of hating him. My brain got itchy and I decided I needed a cigarette.

“Does anyone have a cigarette?” I asked. Henrik reached into his pocket and pulled out a slim teal vape.

“Doesn’t anyone have the analog version anymore? What is wrong with you people? Tijmen?”

“Sorry, Sonia, I just finished my pack. Why don’t you go pick us up a few? And get some snacks?”

Finally, someone who’d boss me around. I reminded myself of how dirty his fingernails were. I flushed. “With what money?” I asked.

Henrik handed me his credit card and kissed me on the cheek. “Can you grab us some barbecue kettle chips?”

“Ew,” I said. “But whatever, waste your money.”

“And a box of Pocky!” said Tijmen.

“Now that’s a good snack.”

I put Henrik’s card in my pocket, threw on my coat, and walked to the bodega. I picked out Oreo Pocky, the nasty barbecue chips for Henrik, a pack of American Spirits, and a little box of mints for myself.

“Eighteen dollars for a pack of cigarettes?” I said as the teenage boy behind the counter rung me up.

“Not my fault,” he said. “It’s the taxes.”

“Sure, whatever.” I handed him the credit card. It made no difference to me. It was just the principle. Greedy libs shaming poor people for smoking normal, old-fashioned nicotine while they gorged themselves on porn and 2C-B and Epstein’s little girls. I pulled out my phone on the walk back, dangling the plastic bag from my pinky; the Pocky rattled pleasantly in its plastic vessel as I went.

“I got goodies,” I said when I returned. I dropped the bag on the folding table.

“Where’s my card?” said Henrik.

I reached into my pockets. “Oh, I must have left it there,” I said, pouting. Inside my coat, I gripped the plastic in the fingers of my right hand.

“You left it there?”

I pulled it out of my pocket and put it between my teeth. “Just kidding,” I said through the card, which distorted the words like a kazoo. Tijmen reached over and flicked it, the plastic reverberating against my canines. I leaned down to Henrik, hoping he’d take it from my mouth with his own, but he used his hands to grab it out and wiped it on his sleeve before sliding it back into his wallet.

I lit my cigarette and smoked it on the fire escape. By the time I got to the end, it was cold outside and I wanted to leave. I collected Henrik, whose red eyes and goofy grin made him easy to convince of anything.

▲

When I woke up the next morning my udders were sore. I reached down and found that they were swollen and bloated. Milk leaked onto Henrik’s gray sheets. I’d never made milk before. I’d never had udders either.

It’s a dream, I thought. I turned my heavy snout and my long nose jutted out in front of me as I examined Henrik, who lay sound asleep to my right. He was hazy in the dark, but I could see the outline of his body, his head on a pillow. He slept with his hand under his chin. Vulnerable.

I closed my eyes and tried to drift girlishly back to sleep. But it was no use. I stretched my arms out above my chest and saw hooves at the other end of long, skinny beige legs. I tried to accordion my neck to look down at the rest of my body, but I couldn’t reach over my stomach—even if I could have, my vision was panoramic. The space in front of my nose was a mystery.

My udders twinged again and I rolled onto my side, away from Henrik. I heard liquid slosh around my massive belly and suddenly I was sliding off the side of the mattress. I hit the wide wooden slats of Henrik’s floor with a violent thud. He shot up in bed.

“What was that?” I turned my ears in the direction of the bed and heard him feel around my side of the mattress and notice my absence. “Sonia?”

I tried to speak, but all that came out was a low, deep groan. It rattled around in my windpipe.

“What the fuck?” he rasped. “Where are you?”

Hello, I said. It’s me, I said. It’s me. But even as the words left my mouth, I knew it was no use. My tongue was long and heavy and limp, my jaw constrained. I couldn’t make words, only moans.

Henrik crawled to the edge of the bed and looked over. There wasn’t much space in his bedroom to begin with, and now the floor was covered with me.

“A cow?! Holy shit? A cow? How did this cow get in my room? Sonia?” he called. His yelling hurt my ears. It was like snorting the sound of his voice.

I’m right here, I yelled. I’m the cow!

He leapt from the bed and out of the room. I could hear him pacing, tapping on his phone. My own—inches from my front leg, still sucking juice from its charger—started to buzz.

Henrik crept back into the room and came toward me, his arms raised to shield his face—as if I would leap up at him and attack. I let a hot stream of air out of my nostrils, the closest I could get to a giggle. I wasn’t sure I could lift myself to stand, much less leap. But I liked the idea of smashing into him, crushing him with my giant body.

He reached out quickly to snatch the vibrating phone. He stood there, watching the screen light up with a photo of his own memeoji. “Is this… Is it you?” he asked, slowly.

I nodded my long face.

He let out a string of expletives and went back to pacing. My gut throbbed. I tried to massage it against the ground, squishing my udders into pulps, but the squeezing pain was coming from an unfamiliar place inside. Sooner or later I would need to be milked. And there was only one set of thumbs in the vicinity. I moaned, this time forcefully, and mashed my pelvis up and down. It didn’t take him long to understand.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, Jesus. What the fuck. That’s not,” he said, “That’s not something I can do.”

But I kept moaning and moaning until he knew it would wake his neighbors. He ran out of the room and returned with a large, orange mixing bowl.

“Okay. Okay!” he said. “Just, um. Just stand up.” Henrik held onto my neck, steadying my ascent, and we were both ashamed to see that a puddle of gray milk had already formed on the floor beneath me. Henrick placed the orange bowl gently below my teats. He sat on the bed and began to tug.

How can I describe the intimacy of being milked? Henrik had once pulled a dirty tampon out of me with his bare teeth. But this was so much worse, more vulgar. He squeezed each teat slowly with his thumb and middle finger. The pressure burned then dissipated into a turgid relief. It was like shedding a skin, releasing a deadweight. Like watching a blood clot fall heavy into the toilet and knowing, thank God, it wasn’t a baby. Knowing that you could live.

▲

In my vast tradwife fantasies, mommy milkers had never played a big role. I preferred being flat-chested because it meant I could be skinny, and skinny subsumed even the biological compulsion for heavy tits. But now I needed to be milked all the time. I felt enormous—the size of a monster truck. Before I’d barely had one stomach; now I had four. Milk swelled up in me and made my udders sag from the weight. If Henrik waited too long to attend to it, it crusted over in a flaming mastitis.

Moving me out to the living room took considerable effort from us both. Henrik watched an online video called “Moving Cattle on Foot” by the Cattleman’s Bible and I heard it playing through the wall. Only Henrik could manage to make dairy stockmanship soy.

“It’s real important not to make loud noises and surprise the cattle,” I heard the man in the video say. “She’s got sensitive ears, so you wanna speak in a soft, gentle tone to earn her trust.”

Henrik came back into the bedroom and approached me. He flipped his mattress and frame onto their sides and balanced them against the wall to make more floorspace.

“Hey Sonia, it’s okay,” he whispered. He hovered his hand over my hindquarters. I flinched at his touch. “Come this way, come on.”

He walked me closer into the corner of the room, which forced me to turn to the right toward the door. Hearing his footsteps from behind, and feeling his hand steer me ahead, I took one jittery step after another in the direction of the living room. I placed my front hoof down and heard the floor creak under my weight; the noise made me jump and withdraw.

“Go on, take your time.”

We made it through the door and into the living room, which was just as small as the bedroom but at least had no real furniture besides a futon and a lamp. Once the last inch of my tail was in the next room, he cheered and came to the side of me, hugged my neck. I had never seen him so earnestly proud, and it made me cringe with a disgust that was itself a kind of love.

“When you take a heifer through a gate,” said the man in the video, with his cowboy hat and drawl, “you’re not simply getting her from point A to point B; you’re training her to be comfortable following your lead.”

▲

A few days into it, Henrik called Tijmen and told him to come over. Tijmen and Henrik liked to get high and play Super Smash Brothers Melee while lazily discussing theory or something. They spent more time together than I would ever spend with a female friend—more time, I thought, than I had spent with anyone besides Henrik.

“So there she is,” said Tijmen.

“I told you. It’s fucking weird.”

“She smells like shit.”

I flicked my tail hard and accidentally knocked over a floor lamp. Henrik went to pick it up and rubbed my shoulder as he slid by me.

“I know,” said Henrik. “And she eats like a trucker. Like, I looked up how much cows need to eat per day. It’s something insane, like two percent of their body weight. I started bulk ordering feed from the Tractor Supply Company.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, dude. Did you know that dolphins are the only other animal besides humans that recreationally gets high?”

“Nah, that can’t be right,” said Henrik. He looked at me for a while. “I’m pretty sure cats get high.”

Strangely, Tijmen did not seem concerned. They did not discuss me any further; instead, they sat down to play their game. They spoke only intermittently, mostly to scream. Fuck! they said. Fuck off! GGs homie. It was odd to watch Henrik do something mundane again, after all the time he’d spent the last few days wrapping piles of my shit in newspaper and shoveling them into a garbage bag to discretely place in the building’s dumpster. I tried to follow the game and even hoped he’d win.

“Do you think she understands us?” said Tijmen, when they got back from their dollar pizza break.

“Yeah, I think so,” said Henrik. “Right, Sonia?”

I groaned in agreement.

“I think she’s still her in there, which makes it even weirder. It’s like there’s a tiny chance that one day, I’ll wake up, and she’ll be back in her girl body, bitching at me.”

He didn’t sound excited by the prospect. Deep down, in one of my stomachs or some other far corner of my body, I wondered if he liked me better this way. I certainly did.

“Dude, this might sound dumb,” said Tijmen. “But have you tried praying for her?”

“Praying?” said Henrik. “Are you serious?”

“I mean, dude,” said Tijmen. “She’s Catholic, you know? I could get my priest to come over, or give some advice or something.”

“Dude, she’s not a real Catholic. She’s never even gone to church.” Henrik laughed. “She’s, like, as Catholic as I am Jewish—I mean, less even. What does it mean to convert to Catholicism? They just let any random fuck do that?”

He was being unfair. I had meant to get around to Mass, and I had even followed a TikTok account that shared parables—the lost sheep, the prodigal son and all that. But then I deleted TikTok because I worried I was getting too redpilled.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” said Tijmen. “It was just a suggestion.”

“A Catholic,” said Henrik. “You’re killing me, man.”

Tijmen rubbed his forearms with his palms. He was a bona fide Catholic and had once asked Henrik to turn to Christ when they were alone together. He told me about it while he fingered me in his bathroom, the weekend Henrik went out of town for a wedding. I felt the fur on the back of my spine raise slightly, like tiny spider legs lifted in salute.

“So,” said Tijmen. “Is her milk any good?”

Now Henrik looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t actually tried it.”

“No way,” said Tijmen. “But you’ve been—you know?”

Henrik nodded.

“Aren’t you curious? Even a little bit?”

“Raw milk carries salmonella, dude,” said Henrik.

“Oh, come on,” said Tijmen. “Here, I’ll do it.”

He came over to my corner atop a rug of stale newspapers. Henrik looked away. Tijmen took a teat in each fist. His hands were sandpaper, a fine mesh sieve, grating. I remembered a forum post where some broads claimed they got sad when their nipples were touched.

“Do you need a glass?” Henrik asked, his back still turned to us. “I’m not tasting it, bro. I don’t want fucking diarrhea.”

“Nah, I’m good,” said Tijmen. He lowered his head to my udders and sprayed some hot milk in his own mouth.

“Pretty good,” he said. He drank some more. “It has a funk to it. Like a sour beer.”

He stood up and slapped my hindquarters, whistling and grinning at Henrik. They went back to their game. Cud bubbled up along the back of my tongue.

▲

One day I woke up from a standing nap and thought I was dying. All the blood inside me pulsed rhythmically from one throbbing hole, so furiously that it seemed like it would explode out of me and spatter across Henrik’s cabinets, futon, walls, and floors. My kneecaps shook in their sockets. I backed into the wall and rubbed myself against the hard surface, which placated me for a moment and then just made it worse. When I stepped forward, I felt a string of mucus stretch between me and the wall. It splotched heavily to the floor between my legs. I was sure I would collapse.

Henrik returned from teaching and I smelled him before he walked in. He wore a thick construction worker’s coat and his lips were chapped from the cold. He smelled like frozen sweat, like the inside of a worn beanie. It was all I could do not to charge the door.

“Hey, Sonia,” he said. I came toward him right away and moaned, to let him know I was in distress. But as I got closer I was drawn like a moth to light toward his crotch. I stuck my snout in it and inhaled the scent of his jeans, caught the gleaming metal head of his zipper in my nostril.

“What the fuck,” he said. He pushed my head away and ran to the other side of the room. I lurched after him. I needed to smell his face, his neck, under his arms, the coarse hairs nestled between the cheeks of his ass.

“Sonia, what are you doing? You’re scaring me.” He put his hand on my back, more firmly this time, and gave me a deliberate shove. “Stop,” he said.

I could barely hear him through the sound of the blood pulsing in my ears. All the fur on my body turned toward the imprint of his hand where he’d touched me, an empty void that seemed like it could suck the whole world into itself and still never be satiated. He got through the bedroom door and shut it in my face. I pressed the side of my body into the door, closer to him.

“Yeah, hey,” I heard him say in the other room. Was there someone in there? Who was in there with him? I would kill her with my rough hooves. “Listen, could you come over? I’m having a situation and I think I need your help.”

It turned out M.B. knew a lot about animals from the two years she spent WWOOFing in Wyoming after college. She knocked on the door thirty minutes later in a hand-crocheted scarf and a coat nearly identical to Henrik’s. Just a step into the apartment, she started to glitch.

“Henrik, what the fuck is going on? Why didn’t you tell anyone you were living like this?”

“Calm down,” he said. “I was doing fine until this shit today. I don’t think I’m technically allowed to have her up here, so I didn’t want to make a big thing.”

“Not technically allowed? Henrik, this is a completely inhumane living situation—”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Not for you, for the cow! She should be out grazing, among a herd, moving around with other livestock! What were you thinking? How did you even get a cow up here?”

Henrik’s facial hair made a frown. “It’s… Sonia,” he said.

“It’s what?”

“Can you just tell me what’s wrong with her? I’m worried she’s sick or something.”

“Fine, Henrik. Fine.” She took a few steps toward me and made a kissing noise with her mouth. I knew it was meant to calm me down but instead it made me angry. I formed a loud moo. She came around to my rear and examined my vulva, removing her scarf and coat and draping them lazily across my back.

“Yep, she’s fine,” she said. “She’s just in heat.”

Of course, I thought. I should have known. Some great cavern inside of me dripped with need. Every depraved memory kept me from keeling over—a camp counselor’s hand closing around the base of my throat, my tiny tits pearling up visibly in a white top, sitting just so in stiff jeans while working the Starbucks drive-through and shifting around until I had to take off my headset. Henrik, pulling my wrists behind my back. I could have wept. Wanting something was so terrible.

“You need to find this animal a farm, where she’ll have space and capable dairy hands,” said M.B.

“I’m not gonna dump her on some bumfuck homestead. She’s my girlfriend; I can take care of her myself.”

“Henrik,” said M.B. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I know, but—”

“If you don’t arrange to take her to a dairy farm in the next forty-eight hours, I’m going to call your landlord and have mom and dad check you into a psych facility.”

With that, she took up her scarf and coat, patted me far too intimately on the head, and left.

▲

Most days begin before sunrise, just as the dark stretches of clouds start to glow a gray-blue. At dawn the first shreds of orange claw their way above the horizon and a smattering of fresh dew casts a thin sheen across my back. I swipe my tail along the tall stalks of grass, wringing the water out. It is important to have a routine.

I follow my friends in a single-file line. We slot into a shining metal carousel that has a snug cubby for each of us, and our buoyant udders are affixed to the nozzle of a smooth, many-mouthed machine. The first milking of the morning is always the best. I like the quiet whir of the equipment, the gauzy light building through the windows. Each new day surprises me in its pleasantness; time unfurls lovingly ahead like an open palm.

Henrik’s absence is my only remaining tragedy, and even that seems a small price to pay in exchange for the amenities on the farm. Sometimes I remember little things about him, like the slivers of yellowish toenails he’d leave drifting around in the toilet bowl. Or the first time he kissed me: the faded taste of whiskey sour inside his mouth, the way he pulled back and held my face and said, “Isn’t it nice? To have a little kiss, as a treat?”