October 2024

i. Rumen
We come because there is a war in the old country. We come because there is a drought that becomes a famine or because we woke up one day and suddenly our money was worthless, or because we have always practiced the wrong religion but recently, since the last election, our neighbors look askance at us and sometimes on our walk home from work at night we are asked to show identification.

We know two things about the island. One, if we work there through the season, we will get visas not only for ourselves but for our whole families. Two, the work that we do on the island will not be different or worse than the work we have done anywhere else, not in any way that matters. We know because our cousin thinks his friend’s brother worked there and now his friend’s brother is rich; we know because the recruiters that find us at border-crossings or refugee camps don’t seem hungry for us to say yes when they give their pitch, like there will be someone else if we refuse them; we know because there has to be some escape from the noose cinching tighter and tighter around each of our necks, there has to be, things cannot really be as bleak as they look from where we stand.

We disembark from small vessels in the middle of the night. For days we come, one boat after another, none bearing more than two or three men at a time. We do not know what country we are in. No customs officers appear, no search of our persons is conducted, no one asks to see our papers. The beach is rocky and dark and strewn with tentacles of kelp. Those of us who come on clear nights can see the grasses stir on the cliffs above, but most of us step down into a wall of mist.

If we could view the island from above, we would see the twelve bunkhouses arranged like the spokes of a wheel with the flat grey cylinder of the mess hall in the center. Surrounding the bunkhouses, the pens that hold the ruminants. But on the ground, we see none of it until we climb down from the slit-windowed livestock trailer that carries us from the shore to the worksite. We stumble out and the foreman presses a thermometer to our foreheads, examines our tonsils with a flashlight, then sends us to one of the bunkhouses. Everything is newly constructed with the hasty efficiency of a refugee camp. For some of us, there is an unhomely familiarity to those doors that we cannot open with too much force, those steel bedframes stacked to the height of the low ceiling, even those corrugated tin chutes made to streamline the processing of many bodies.

Our first night, we see the ruminants only as silhouettes laying or standing in the pens with their backs to us. We do not look closely. Later, we wonder if we were scheduled to arrive at night so we would not see the ruminants while there were still boats at the dock that might be hijacked and made to carry us away.

The ruminants are not cows but they are something like cows. They have nine hundred or so pounds of bulk, four legs, cloven feet. They spend most of their waking hours masticating the dune grasses that grow in patches on the cliffs. Every hour they lift their tails and drop mounds of earth-colored shit behind them. They do not wander far alone, yet they seem unsociable, almost insensate, interested neither in us nor in each other. We can tell them apart only by the ear tags that identify them with two-digit numbers.

But livestock are supposed to be walking dead. Their bodies only pumped full of life long enough for them to make meat, to make milk, to make more cows. The something wrong with the ruminants is something else.

It is true: the ruminants are all female, but they have no udders. The something wrong with them is deeper than having no udders and yet not, we feel, entirely unrelated to no udders.

In the first weeks of the season, we have little to do with them. We turn them out, we muck the pens, we turn them back in. We feed and water them. This is our routine until the foreman comes to the front of the mess hall at breakfast one day and says that the ruminants have contracted a fungal infection. We must treat them twice a day, every day, for two weeks.

“Every man to one ruminant,” he says. “To avoid cross-contamination.” He repeats the orders in all our languages, reading haltingly from a wrinkled print-out. He does not explain in any language what he means by cross-contamination. The animals are not being quarantined from each other. He comes around and hands each of us a number. Sixty-seven. Forty-eight.

In the pens, we find our ruminants and get halters around their faces so we can hold their heads still enough to shoot a syringe of foul-smelling paste into their mouths. Close to them for the first time, we are startled not by their wrongness but their particularity: the freckles on their black nostrils, the dark or pale curl of their eyelashes, the whorls and scabs and bald patches on the roan coats that from a distance appear to be a flat uniform red. We are more startled by how frantically they resist us, these dumb torpid animals that we thought didn’t even know we were there. They swing their heads and dance on their heavy cloven feet so close to our delicate human ones that we could swear they are trying to intimidate us. Almost an hour passes before all the syringes are emptied into the ruminants’ mouths, though even then some of the paste ends up dribbling down lips or spat back in the faces of we who administer it.

“They are not even sick,” the one who has #82 complains later, as we wash in the communal showers.

“There is pus in their ears,” the one who has #14 answers. “Didn’t you see?”

Twice a day, every day, for two weeks we treat them. The work gets easier. We learn to halter efficiently. Some of us can even get the ruminants to put their heads down willingly into the nosebands. We figure out how to administer the paste with a precise and unhesitating shot between the lips and learn to hold the mouth closed for five, ten, fifteen seconds afterwards so hardly any gets spilled.

The day we administer the last dose, the foreman comes out with latex gloves and asks us to send the ruminants down the chute. He stands at the end and examines the ruminants’ ears, their eyes, their lips. He sends most of them on without incident, but on one he lingers.

We exchange glances. Everyone knows #82 has been lax, almost negligent, in the care of his ruminant. He doesn’t hold its mouth closed after he administers the medicine because he doesn’t like touching it. He has even been getting someone else to put on the halter.

We have all worked for enough petty tyrants that we expect the foreman to punish #82 with humiliation, extra work, reduced privileges, but he only says, “Keep this one apart from the herd. Not well yet. We don’t want any reinfections. Take it to the medical barn. You can feed it on grain.”

#82’s lips twist, not in contempt but in anguish, as if he is holding back tears. “Make someone else do it,” he says.

“She is yours,” the foreman says. He is unsure of himself in #82’s language. “One man to each ruminant.” He echoes this directive from the print-out he read.

“No,” says #82. He repeats it in another language in case the foreman doesn’t understand.

The foreman looks towards the cliffs, seeming to deliberate. We can see that he does not want to assert himself in front of everyone. “Take her,” he says, finally. “Then we will talk.”

We are not there for the conversation that happens later, in the privacy of the foreman’s office. But #19 is asked to come and translate, so everyone knows before the end of the day: #82 insisted he could not be alone with the ruminant. The foreman said it was his charge and no one else could be responsible for it. #82 asked why, and the foreman gave him no real answer. Then #82 asked to quit. The foreman reminded him of the penalty: there would be no compensation, no visa, if he did not last the whole season. #82 said he didn’t care. He only wanted to go home. This next part we dispute, we doubt, but #19 does not waver: the foreman said, “You can’t. You have to stay through the season.”

#82 does not confirm whether this is true. We do not see him. We hear that he is sleeping in the medical barn with his ruminant; possibly that he is even confined there. The kitchen staff are seen packaging meals in Styrofoam boxes and taking them out somewhere.

A few days later, #34 is sitting out on the cliffs smoking a cigarette when he sees far below a small figure crossing the beach. Recognizable, by his dark hair and teal jumpsuit, only as one of us. #34 stubs out his cigarette and gets to his feet, but he cannot think of what to do other than call out, though he doesn’t know what name to shout. The wind takes his voice away. He watches as the figure crosses the beach and walks into the sea. Waist-deep, neck-deep, deep enough to disappear.

Ruminant #82 is found in the medical barn, hungry and caked in manure and deep in the throes of an untreated fungal infection. Almost dead, then dead. No one wants to touch her.

ii. Reticulum
We are shaken by what happened to #82, but most of us already knew that we were not really free to leave the island or the job, not when leaving would only mean an empty-handed return to some place we cannot go back to. No matter how we went, if we did not last the season first, we would be drowning ourselves. At night, in our bunkhouses, we retell the story of what happened to #82 until we can tolerate that it happened; until we are no longer threatened personally by it.

“He never had worked hard before. Wasn’t used to it. You could see, he had soft hands.”

“There’s nothing to it, what he said about the ruminants. He saw something that wasn’t there. They’re only animals.”

Only a few of us refuse to be comforted, panicked by the idea that we are being held against our will. Those few stare out at the ocean, straining their eyes for land they cannot see. They dream, at night, of swimming towards a distant shore and making no progress, the horizon retreating as they exhaust their strength. “No matter whether we should leave or not,” they mutter as they rake manure, “they shouldn’t be able to stop us. It’s slavery.”

There are rumors that these few were draft-dodgers in their shared home country. The island was their sanctuary from obligation, and now that obligation has found them here, they want another escape. That’s all; that’s it.

By unspoken agreement, the rest of us quarantine ourselves from their fears and suspicions. We sit beside them in the mess hall and work beside them in the pens and sleep beside them in the bunkhouses, but when the four of them disappear on the same night as the supply boat comes, we can honestly say that we knew nothing of their intentions, although it is easy enough for us to surmise what happened. The supply boat comes twice monthly, always late at night and always on the same day of the week. We don’t know where it comes from or how far it travels to reach us, but it looks capable of sailing a long distance. In the week after the four dissenters disappear, we eat freezer-burnt ground beef with canned tomatoes, then bean stews thickened by cornstarch, then creamed corn and powdered mashed potatoes. The foreman rations our cigarettes, then says we must do without.

The foreman tries to seem unperturbed, but we can see that he is afraid of what we might do. There are so many of us and only one of him. We are hungry and we need to smoke and, fleetingly, when we are drifting between sleep and wakefulness, we all yearn to hijack a supply boat and cross the unknowable depths of the sea with two-hundred pounds of chuck to bolster us. Where would we go? Anywhere. Certainly not back to where we came from. We would be orphans and widowers and we would most of all be childless. We would eat down our reserves and then we would throw ourselves into the ocean and feed ourselves to the many-tendrilled things that live in the deep.

But in our waking hours, we acknowledge none of this—not to each other and not even to ourselves. The closest we come is that #17, on our second day of eating powdered eggs and only powdered eggs for breakfast, asks aloud why we don’t butcher one of the ruminants.

The foreman is out of earshot, but the question goes unanswered, the answers too obvious and too shattering. Because they are not ours. Because they are reserved for some purpose still unknown to us. Because there is some wrongness in them that might somehow be transmitted to us if we were to consume them. We have observed, by now, more things besides no udders that we cannot explain. The ruminants stare at the full moon with blank and utter concentration for hours; saltwater comes out of the spigots we use to fill their troughs and they drink it; they have no interest in each other and yet they are beginning slowly to warm towards us.

Three days after the supply boat is hijacked and the dissenters leave us, four of the ruminants get sick. High fevers, galloping heartrates, trembling weakness.

A look of terror crosses the foreman’s face when we inform him of the outbreak. Then he retreats, becomes impassive. “All right,” he says. “Separate them from the rest. The medical barn. Treat their symptoms.”

“Do you know what they have?” asks #57, an obstetrician before he came here.

#57 cobbles together a treatment with #30, whose family kept cattle when he was a child. We dose the sick ruminants with calcium and banamine, feed them mashed grain sweetened with honey, drape towels soaked in cold seawater across their backs. They don’t resist us, but they don’t want to eat. They stare glassy-eyed into our faces. Occasionally they make weak, plaintive sounds that are not like the sounds of any cows we have ever heard.

Their fevers climb. Their eyes crust closed. When they die, #57 kneels at their sides and gently palpates each of their swollen bellies. The unborn calves inside them are dead too.

We all notice the correspondence between the number of vanished men and the number of dead ruminants. Another thing we cannot explain.

On the island, the seasons change; the ruminants’ coats darken from summer red to a dull mouse-like color. The grasses on the cliffs go yellow and then go tawny and then collapse from the weight of frost. Night spills into morning and intrudes on afternoon. The sun has always shone faintly through the mist, but now it seems not to come at all. Everything happens in a bruise-colored light like the beginning of dawn or the end of dusk.

Beneath the sullen close horizon, all is mud and only mud. In the pens, it freezes and congeals, then thaws out and puddles before refreezing in thin, treacherous layers. The ruminants shuffle listlessly through it, moving with the labored motions of bad swimmers. We hack at their frozen shit with our plastic rakes until the rakes splinter, step delicately in our rubber waders with our gloved hands tracing the steel fence for balance.

In the cold, the ruminants need more from us. We fill woven nets with hay to make up for the absence of forage, smash the ice in their troughs of saltwater, massage their pasterns to loosen the clods of icy mud that cling and threaten infection. Without discussing it, we all conclude that everyone should care for the same ruminant he tended in the early days of the season. We know, by now, if our particular ruminant is liable to open a hay net with her dexterous lips unless the net is stitched up tight, or prone to trample her hay underfoot if it is loose, or so fussy an eater that a net will only discourage her from getting enough.

We know, too, that if we tend our own ruminant, we can stay close to her for long enough to get warm. The foreman says he has sent for winter coats, but coats do not come. We wear every layer we have, even to sleep, but we are only ever warm when we are close to the ruminants. Heat radiates from their skin, escapes in flumes from their nostrils.

“Because of their stomachs,” says #30. “Because they are always digesting. Like engines, my father used to tell me.” As long as the ruminants do not get hungry, they do not get cold.

We are not made so sturdily. But we borrow from them in small forgivable portions, laying our bare hands on their bellies or leaning our shoulders against the broad ridge of their withers or—when we think no one can see—pressing our faces into their necks. The ruminants do not seem to begrudge us this closeness. They seem at times even to desire it—leaning closer, resting the delicate bulk of their heads against our ribcages.

We believe they are invulnerable until the frigid morning #48 finds his ruminant frozen to death. Her ears stiff, her eyes open and clouded. When #48 sees her, he goes quiet for a long moment. Then he turns, jabbing an accusatory finger at #17. “Yours was always pushing her away. She couldn’t get her fair share. This is your fault!”

We all know #17’s ruminant is especially food-sour and conniving, but we also know that the stout ruminant with the ear tag reading #17 is far from the only one to have pilfered from shy, contemplative #48, who has always deliberated over her hay as though something better might be coming.

#17 knows too little of #48’s language to answer his accusation, but #48 curses him anyway until the foreman comes out. The foreman looks at the body on the ground for a while, then orders us to bury the ruminant.

The foreman hesitates. He looks through the mist towards the sea as if hoping an answer will come from across the waves.

We collect sticks and driftwood for a bonfire. As we ring around it, the foreman stands at the door to his office with his arms crossed, observing. #48 is not there; #48 cannot bear to see his ruminant burn. From their pen, the ruminants eye the flames uneasily, and we wonder whether it is only animal instinct that makes them fear the flames or if they understand that one of them is burning.

The ruminant takes all night to become ashes. In the morning, #48 is feverish and weak. He rises from his bunk in a cold sweat and then collapses. His bunkmates refuse to share air with him, afraid of what he might spread. #57, the obstetrician, sets his thumb in the hollow of #48’s wrist and nods with a physician’s pleasureless satisfaction, then gets #48 into a cool shower, doses him with acetaminophen tablets.

By nightfall, #48 is worse, his delirium shattered only by terrible moments of lucidity in which he cries not for his husband or his homeland or his mother but the ruminant that predeceased him. #57 goes into the foreman’s office and comes out a few minutes later with his jaw clenched. “The foreman has said that no one can be evacuated,” he tells us.

We begin to monitor our ruminants, counting the flakes of hay they consume, cupping our ears to their bellies to listen for the churning rumble of digestion. At night, we are woken every few minutes by the sounds of our bunkmates getting out of bed and slipping into their waders, going out to lay eyes on the ruminants so they can know for certain that theirs is alive. Few of us, lying in the dark, can fall back asleep without going to see for ourselves. No comfort can be gotten from the ruminants that lasts longer than we have eyes on them. We do not raise the possibility of watches or shifts because no one trusts that someone else will notice if something is wrong with an animal that is not their own.

We exhaust our supply of instant coffee, once sufficient for a month, in a week. The day the kitchen staff have to say no more, the foreman stands beside them with a taser hanging from his belt, handing out single cigarettes as consolation. If there are murmurs of disapproval, they are subdued until #17 throws his cigarette on the floor and stomps on it. “You think we’re going to take it,” he says loudly. “You think that we won’t—!” He doesn’t finish his sentence. He looks back through the line into our faces, his eyes wild, and then gets out of line and shuffles back to his table, his plastic tray.

Someone else retrieves his cigarette and pockets it. The sound of rhythmic chewing recommences. No one wants to be away from their ruminants for any longer than they have to.

In his bunkhouse at night, #17 is oratorial, though only two of his seven bunkmates speak his language. “I was born with a heart condition,” he says. “They told my mother I would not live past the age of three. And then I did. The age of seven, then, they said. And when I lived past seven, they said, we don’t know exactly when, but someday his heart will collapse. He is living with a gun to his head. My mother kept it there for them. Don’t run down the stairs, habibi, your heart; don’t play soccer; don’t make yourself too anxious; don’t lift that, it’s heavy, your heart will collapse. But, you know what, I am forty-one years old and I have fought in a war and I have buried my mother and my heart is still beating. I am not going to live like this and neither should any of you.”

#17 does not butcher his ruminant. But, a day later, there is a disturbance in the middle of the night. The glow of a lantern in the foreman’s office; crashes and bangs like a fight. #17 and a few others, it is whispered, have taken the foreman captive using the foreman’s own taser.

In the half-lit hour before dawn, #17 and the others drag the foreman out to the center of camp where we all can see him with his wrists tied behind his back and a taser prodding his temple. We gather between the mess hall and the bunkhouses, fear and anticipation and—almost—hunger spreading like a charge between us.

The foreman’s eyes dart in one direction and then the other. He has a halo of dark hair around a glowing white moon of a scalp. He is a small man, smaller than most of us, we notice. “To work the ruminants,” he answers unsteadily.

The foreman opens his mouth, then closes it. #17 pushes the taser against his temple. “I was told you couldn’t,” the foreman says. “Not until the season is over.”

The foreman licks his lips. He is animal and visceral like this, his face slick with perspiration even in the cold, his nostrils flaring. His eyes are wet but he is not crying yet. “The ruminants need you,” he says. “We can’t afford to lose any—more.”

The foreman cranes his neck to see if #17 wants him to answer. #17 nudges him demonstratively with the taser.

A murmur passes through us. We knew already, but we did not think he would say it.

The foreman is crying. “I don’t know,” he says. “They didn’t tell me. They only hired me. I thought it was going to be cattle.”

There is no reason to ask who they are. There is always a they that we will never see and that will never see us. Furious, impotent, #17 presses the trigger on the taser. The foreman thrashes, his head jerking forward, then goes limp and slumps down face first.

#57, the obstetrician, comes out of the crowd and heaves the foreman upright. He pulls on the man’s eyelids, feels his pulse, then cuts the cords around his wrists. #17 stands apart and lets it happen, holding the foreman’s taser at a distance. Daylight presses on the cloud cover. The crowd disperses. No one wants to be away too long from their ruminant.

Gathered within four walls, the ruminants are warm as an oven; in the last weeks of winter, we lay at their feet and gently bake. They are conscientious in their night movements. Through the whole back half of the season, only a few feet are crushed, one ribcage.

Bedding down with them, we come to know the ruminants’ bodies as intimately as our own. More intimately, even, for we are all more or less used to ignoring our bodies’ signals of pain, fatigue, fear but we know whether the ruminants are sleeping deeply, which hind foot they prop to rest when dozing, how low they hang their heads when deeply asleep. We learn the rhythms of their digestion, the particular odor of their urine. We know where they want to be touched and what makes them flinch away. And so we know, we sense, when something changes within them. It does not happen to the whole herd suddenly but in a slow cascade. We recognize it only when it reaches our own ruminant.

Only #57, the obstetrician, recognizes the disease beneath the symptoms—“They’re going into labor soon.”

It is a clear day, the bitterness almost wrung out of the cold, when #33 goes. All afternoon she stalks the fence line, striding purposefully and fast. At nightfall, she refuses to be herded inside the barn with the rest of the ruminants. Her head swings, her eyes rolling, and she utters cries like the cries of a woman. #33 walks beside her, his hand slung hesitantly around her neck and then withdrawn; back around her neck and then withdrawn.

The moon rises and #33’s pacing becomes effortful, slow. Her cries deepen to moans. We lay inside the barn listening to them, feeling the danger to ourselves in #33’s danger. #30 remembers a heifer on his family’s farm dying in labor with a breech calf, her body hemorrhaging such tides of blood that he thought the whole yard would be flooded.

The moans soften. Faintly, we hear #33 murmuring reassurance. Then, for a long while, there is nothing. #57, the obstetrician, rises and goes out. We hear him say:

In the depths of night, rousing us from the anxious half-dreaming state that is as close as any of us can get to sleeping, #57 opens the barn door. The whites of his eyes caught, for a second, by the moonglow from outside.

“They are all alive,” says #57, but his tone is hesitating, something held back.

In the morning, we find #33 with the newborn ruminant’s head in his lap, the mother ruminant solemnly licking them both. The calf is translucent-skinned, veins woven like purplish thread all through its trunk and limbs. It has black eyes, arrestingly large. Almost, it is beautiful. But it looks too raw for life, unfinished somehow.

The foreman comes to the door of his office only after four rounds of furious knocking. We have not seen him in weeks, not since the day of the taser. He speaks through an inch-wide crack in the door. He has no answer to the question of how to feed the newborn ruminant. Reluctantly, he agrees to radio the mainland for advice, but he comes back with nothing. “They won’t answer me,” he says. “They don’t take my calls anymore.”

#57 tries powdered cow’s milk, salt water soaked in hay; he even gets the kitchen staff to make a pot of bone broth. The calf listlessly half-suckles at each of these formulas but soon loses interest, withdrawing to lay its head in the cradle of #33’s lap.

“There’s nothing else,” says #57. “I don’t know what to do. What kind of animal can’t feed its own young?”

“I’ll die,” #33 pleads, speaking not to #57 now but to his ruminant. She looks emptily back at him, lowers her mouth to his arm and sweeps a wide wet path across the back of his wrist with her tongue.

There is no answer to his certainty. We count him as lost, though we have not yet accepted that we are lost too even though every one of our ruminants bulges with an unborn calf, the promise of its death and ours visible in their pendulous bellies. We take our ruminants out to graze on the cliffsides and stay with them all day, afraid to witness the moment of the calf’s death, wanting to hold ourselves apart as long as we possibly can.

The first of us to come back are the ones to see: #33 sitting at the mother ruminant’s feet with his body bent over the newborn calf, a look of great concentration—and almost, devotion—on his face as the calf suckles from a vein in his wrist.

Nursed on our blood, the calves darken to the color of liver. They become long-eyelashed and beautiful, staggering after their mothers on legs like spindles and returning to us every hour with their pleading mouths open. We do not refuse them; how could we? We know now what #33 knew as soon as he laid eyes on the newborn: it is the calves and not the mother ruminants whose lives are bound to ours. It always was. We eat marrow stews and organ meat in prodigious quantities, swallow the iron tablets that come in paper cups at breakfast and dinner, hurry back from the mess hall with a sense of fullness brimming in our veins.

We know, but do not acknowledge to each other and barely to ourselves, that they are getting hungrier as they grow. They are no longer sated by the amount of blood that we can spare without going light-headed. After #33 falls backwards and splits open his skull on the steel fence, we lie down for feedings. We sleep whenever we are not feeding or eating.

We look sometimes into the faces of our calves, yearning to see some glimmer of awareness of our weakness, our vulnerability to their need, but their gaze betrays nothing; in their eyes we see only fear or interest, and interest we see only when they want to eat.

We have nursed the eldest of them for almost a month, brought them out of the winter darkness and into the lengthening days of sweet young growth and dragonflies and burnt-off mist, when the ships dock. They come all at once, every one of them alike, visible from the cliffs above. We do not understand right away, even when we see stock trucks rolling up the hillside, what they are here for. When we last saw those trucks, they carried us.

The ruminants do not cry when their calves are loaded into the trucks, but the calves scream, open-mouthed and desperate, until the wind carries away their voices.

We think we hear them for days afterwards, their cries echoing through our last restless and wasted hours on the island. In our blood-drained waking dreams, they have not been carried across the sea to be butchered; they are still here, they get older and stronger and rosy-coated, and some of them come strangely to resemble us.

Kay Chronister is the author of the collection Thin Places (2020) and the forthcoming novel Desert Creatures (2022). Her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, and elsewhere, and her work has been nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Awards. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Ruminants