Another Young Bull
After Andrew Wyeth
Another Young Bull
after Andrew Wyeth
They were all standing around the hole, warning up a secret: one of their own had slipped or pirouetted down into the well, dark as ice or something colder, and when my brother and father showed up for morning chores, just carrying coffee and arguing surely, all they could see was a yellow ear tag floating down in there.
In the time it took for the vet to appear from Pawnee, a plan had frozen together and they broke the tractor from its silence, coughing rich winter smoke because the bull had to come out, live or dead. My brother told the vet to tranq him, which she’d never done, but she still shot him and my brother got a chain around its hips while my father coached them all, the tractor dragging it up while she took out her phone and recorded it.
It wasn’t dead somehow, and after a few hours in the November sun, started to move again.
Come dusk, they returned to find a trail of snapped electric fences headed north towards the highway. My brother followed on horseback first with lasso in hand. Then, this not being another modern western opera, he dropped the rope, got it tangled in the horse’s feet, then lost it wholly.
The steer, feeling some new strength, ran on in the night through Sangamon County, all the way up through this telephone, around this quiet room and down the stairs before stopping, pausing before the open garden gate, its one eye still wet and watering some from the wind.
I am grateful to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative:
And here they say Iowa writers can't write lol. This is really good, the untoward change at the end. Thanks.
This is really cool good job