Scissors - Chapter Ten

The cow had spent a long time on the stairwell and yet the bowls of grass and water were never empty. She found this quite curious but decided it in her best interest not to question it too much, and besides, she was too dim-witted to recognise the answer to this quandary even if it were to punch her square in her face.  Instead she allowed herself to feel safely content in the knowledge that her bowls were as infinite as the staircase on which they were arranged.

She looked around and took in her surroundings as she slowly chewed the cud in her mouth. The stairwell was a lovely colour. It was the colour of a tree. ‘brown’, she thought to herself, ‘I’ll call that colour brown.’

The rest of the area seemed to be nothingness. There was no grass where the bottom of the staircase might be nor a sky where the top of the staircase could theoretically be located. It was very dark, like the inside of her eyes were when the sun went away and she closed her eyes. She had always described that colour as ‘black’, and that was the colour she could see now, except when she closed her eyes she could still see something bright, like the sun was still out.

‘What was the meaning of all this?’ she had caught herself thinking, ‘the meaning of any of this, in fact?’

'Is being a cow on an infinite staircase in the darkness that is bright, with infinite grass and water, truly enough, or was there more meaning to life? Do cows not have a purpose to fulfil?'

She looked down between her legs.

‘And what on Earth am I supposed to do with those?’ she thought.

This thinking was all getting a bit much for her, so she had a little lie down, despite no rain being on the horizon. But just as she did so the uncomfortable smelly box appeared at the top, or bottom, of the staircase.  She mooed in disapproval as the door opened and a man in flip flops stepped out, a clump of hay in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

The cow tilted her head and swallowed the cud.

‘Hay. Water. Bowls. Hay… Water…’ 

Nope. She still didn’t understand.