The curtains part: it is a summer’s day. There a cow on a grassy slope watches as a bull charges an old aeroplane in a meadow. The bull is punching holes with its horns in the aeroplane’s fabric...
Suddenly the aeroplane’s engine ignites; the meadow is dark blue smoke...
The aeroplane shifts round and faces the charging bull.
As the bull comes in the propeller takes off the end of its muzzle. The bloody nostrils, a ring through them, are flung to the grass with a shattered blossom of teeth.
The bull, blood oozing from the stump of its face, backs off, and charges again. This time the propeller catches the bull behind its lower jaw and flings the head into a tree.
The headless bull backs off once more, and then charges down again. The propeller beating at the headless bull, cutting the body away in a great halo of blood, until only the back legs are standing. These run widely away through the meadow in figure eights and zigzags, until at last they find the aeroplane again. And as they come running down the propeller whacks them apart.
The legs, one with the tail still attached to it, the other somehow retaining both rectum and testicles, scamper off in opposite directions.
The aeroplane turns away; the engine stops.
The shadows are suddenly seen in lengthened form.
The watching cow begins to low ...
The Fight in the Meadow
written byRussell Edson
© Russell Edson