Author's note:
As absurd as the concepts of hucows and ponygirls are, I tried to take them quite seriously, to delve in the psychology of a hucow or a ponygirl and her owner, in search of what these admittedly strange fetishes mean, at least to me. Therefore, beside the tropes of the genre (kinky sex, humiliation and de-humanization), you will find the musings of a young girl who chooses to become a cow in a quest for true love and a place in the world.
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20. Savior complex
The beauty of being a cow, is that only the present matters. Why worry about the future? The farmer will take care of that. So, even though our future worried both me and Cupcake, we mostly lived in the present. We had at least a couple of years to find a solution, right? So, that summer went by. We went to three more fairs, meeting her family every time. In one of those occasions, Wren reassured us that Cupcake's new solution for sending money to her folks had worked.
Even though the fairs all looked pretty much more of the same, at least from the limited point of view of a cow, it was fun to be Fudge's cheerleaders and see her take home a few prizes. I and Fergie became a rodeo sensation, to the point that Cupcake tried it too with Ava, swearing afterwards that you had to be bat-shit crazy like me to enjoy it. Ava, on the contrary, had a lot of fun and was disappointed that none of her cows would challenge her anymore.
Another big reason for me to be enthusiastic about our trips was that I became Aidan's prize cow for my production of milk. He paraded me wherever he went. Moreover, those were not the only trips I made that summer. My man also organized a lot of escapes in the country, just me and him. My love for him was stronger than ever, as was the one I felt for Cupcake, but instead of letting this tear me in two parts, I was determined to enjoy all of it.
I learned how to juggle my man and my woman with the consummate experience of a serial cheater and did not feel an ounce of guilt for it: I was finding a way to give to both just as much as one to receive from both. As for Aaron and Cream Pie, they did not leave each other after all. On the contrary, the more he knew about her, the more he needed to share things about himself too. It turned out that Aaron was a much more complex soul than we had given him credit for.
So autumn came again, allowing me to get a glimpse of what a life as a hucow meant. Now I could say that I knew what the future had in store for me for the next couple of decades at least. The cycle of seasons, perfectly predictable, was now the main driving force of the events surrounding me. The peace of mind that this gave to me is hard to describe. I guessed that many people would have found my life boring, but that was just because they never stopped to savor the moment, the glory of the instant, always in a run, like there was something whipping their asses, blinders to prevent them to see where they were, their eyes focused only on the path forward. I was no pony, though, I really was a cow. Those critics were just hypocrites: was not the majority of people believing in an afterlife, in a paradise? And what was heaven, if not an eternity of constant bliss, perfectly predictable? Would they call it dull? No, and they were all wishing to rest there after their death. I just happened to have found mine on earth.
So another year passed and life taught me that, no matter how you wish for time to freeze or at least repeat in loops, it just stubbornly goes forward. The farm was like an island in a river, a sanctuary from the weary flux of events, sure, but not immune to them, for it was still set in an ever-changing stream.
It all started with Aaron. Thanks to Ava, he had started to taste the Reagan underneath the cow and had found her even more delicious than the Cream Pie he had been used to until then. That made him greedy. We noticed that something had changed between the two in the first months of that summer. At first, we worried, because it seemed that the cow wanted to avoid Aaron and in general she looked uneasy with him around. When we asked her if he had done something to her, though, the answer was the last we could expect: he had asked her to resign from the farm together with him, run away to some city where nobody knew either of them, and finally be a couple. We all mooed or neighed in awe, but Cream Pie did not seem so happy.
While Fudge hugged her from behind and softly kissed her neck (ironically, they had become quite close), she explained to us that she was thrilled, of course, at the idea, but she was also terrified by it. It was true that she was not in danger anymore, because she had paid her debt to the people she had gotten involved with, but the outside world scared her nonetheless. She bluntly admitted that she was not sure it was a good idea to entrust her with freedom: the last time she had been free to do whatever she wanted with her life and body, she had risked overdosing herself. In the farm she was safe and she was in love. Why go away?
Of course, I agreed with her, hoping that Cupcake would too, but she just said that this kind of decisions could never be right if they were motivated only by fear. If Cream Pie wanted to be a cow, she had to own it. Fudge whinnied her approval. I spent the rest of the night in Cupcake's forelegs, trying to decide what her opinion meant for us. Within little more than a year she would be free to resume being a human again, so was she just saying that she would remain a cow because it was her free choice? Or was she warning me that I had decided to be a cow for good just because I was scared of the world? I turned my head to meet her gaze and a cryptic smile. I replied with a "damn you, devil!" look, making her moo-laugh. As her girlfriend, I had learned that she really could be "a dick", to quote her sister. She unnervingly enjoyed playing that kind of tricks with my mind.
A week later, Aaron decided to act. During the night he came in the barn and forced Cream Pie to face him:
"I understand that you are scared, believe me, I do." he whispered.
I imagined that Cream Pie, hidden by the hay, did not seem to think he could, because he added.
"Yes, I do, I am scared too. I keep thinking: what if it does not go well, what if she goes back into the tunnel of drugs and this time she does not make it out alive? It would all be my fault and, well, it would kill me too, Reagan." he admitted.
"The thing is, though, that this strategy of yours, to remain cooped up here, does not make sense. Do you seriously think that if you wanted to get it over with life and kill yourself, being here would stop you?"
Her moo said that she thought so.
"Ok, fine, so tell me, why do you want to be alive? To enjoy life, I presume, not to lose all the things that make it good. Well then: you are already killing yourself, at least partially. By being here, you deny yourself the very things you are afraid to lose! Like a life, with me! What we have here is amazing, sure, but it is just a bite of the cake!" he provoked her and then added, a little awkwardly "Pardon the pun."
She did not answer to that, prompting the man to go further.
"Reagan, there is only one way to keep yourself alive and it is to find a good reason to. I hope with all myself that our love is a good one, but even if it is not, you need to keep searching, because it's out there! If you stay here, you remain in a limbo: unable to kill yourself and yet not living either!"
Cupcake rose and so did the frequency of my heart beat.
"Come with me, Reagan. Choose life!"
I sat down too, just in time to see her moo yes and throw herself into his arms. I was happy for them, I really was, but I also knew that a storm was brewing as a consequence of that act of love.
I recommended to the two lovebirds that they presented the story to Aidan backwards: I remembered that he could be very vindictive and very effective in doing so too, when he felt betrayed. I did not want him to think that Aaron had conspired against him to steal his cow, so I suggested to Cream Pie that she notified him in advance and to Aaron that he staged fights with her, pretending that he wanted her to stay, that his job was great and he did not want to leave it. Cream Pie had also the brilliant idea of fighting with one of her regulars, which gave her a motive to leave the job.
Fortunately it all worked out. Cream Pie had not yet gone and somehow I, Cupcake and Fudge were already missing her. One night she revealed to us that the hardest part of leaving the farm was leaving us. We all teared up after that. She assured us that she would visit from time to time, to tell us how she was doing and would leave her number with Aidan, so that Fudge and Cupcake could find her when they went back to being human. This decision gave me a painful pang to my stomach. How many times would that happen? How many friends would I have to say goodbye to, because they would leave the farm and I could not?
"Yeah, I know it's a hard blow." said once Aidan, trying to console me, "However it is not different from what happens to humans all the time. They move, they change jobs... Life is made of goodbyes, for cows, humans and ponies alike."
He was right and so I got up from his lap, where he was gently stroking my hair and I kissed him. I would never have to say goodbye to my Aidan.
A month before Cream Pie was scheduled to bid us goodbye, her replacement came to the farm.
"So, why all the hush-hush on the new cow?" asked Kam to Ava, looking curiously to the barn front entrance, its doors wide open to welcome the livestock transport van coming slowly in, while the annoying beep that signaled its maneuvering in reverse tortured our ears.
