Husbandry by LJ Pemberton

Winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of Short Fiction.

Final Judge: Doug Lawson

One morning I awoke as a woman. I knew I was a woman because I had seen women before. It was cold and my new body was shivering and so I stretched my new arms above my head and then walked on my new legs to the farmer’s house. He was already in the far pasture, tending the sheep. I opened his door with my new fingers and enjoyed their bending grip, coiling around the knob. My bare feet tread without clicking and I went from room to room. In his bedroom, I found his clothes. I put on a shirt and sweater and pants, then found socks and a pair of brown leather boots for my feet. The boots were too big, but the other items fit snugly.

A door in the bedroom led to another small room with hard basins and soft cloth. There I saw myself in the mirror and I was glad that even though I was a woman, I could still recognize my face. My horns were gone, although my eyes were that self-same dark, and my forehead broad. My body, too, had its own girth, round in the middle as I had always been, but now with breasts up top and a padded ass behind. I practiced sitting on the small basin in the room, and the seam of my pants rubbed between my legs. It felt sharp and good. I stood again and observed the pulling inward as I clenched the muscles in my new cunt. It was new, this drawing together, and I caught myself grinning as I clenched and released. My old swinging dick was gone, and in its place was this new instrument and its attendant pleasures.

I left the house and stepped in heavy thuds with my new shoes. It was warmer than when I awoke, although the early spring day still had a hint of morning chill. At the road, I used my right hand to open the gate, and marveled at the ease with which I stepped over the cattle grid. The trees were in their early budding, and daffodils sprung new from the hard ground. In places the grass was beginning to green, but the field where I had stood and stared at the sky was black with trampled earth.

Half my life had been spent in that yard—nearly seven years of waking and eating, thinking, and dreaming. The siring had been intermittent and brief. The farmer always looked pleased when cows arrived to mate with me, and he seemed to enjoy talking with the other people who came with them. Of the cows: most had defeat in their eyes before I mounted them, and so our fucking embarrassed me, even as I loved it and wanted them. We were all resigned to our fates—the gates closed, the fences high. It is no good to be a bull in a pen; the sloping hills and quiet forest are always beyond the railing.

A car passed, and then a truck. Both slowed as I walked, but neither stopped to ask where I was going. I did not know, and so it was better this way. I walked past other farmhouses, so near that I was surprised the farmer had not had more visitors, and as the sun rose in the sky, I marveled at the changing light. The treeshade of the road was my shelter. My boots clapped, and I was alone. Before noon I was hungry, but I did not know what to eat or where to find it, and so I continued walking. In the early afternoon, I came to a stream and drank. The water was cold and fresh. Here the rustling trees, here the jumping frog, here the rushing water. I desired the earth like I had once desired the cows and I plunged my fingers into the soft mud and grasped at the river rocks beneath. I rolled the pebbles in my hand and felt their hardness, as new to me as my hairless skin.

After an hour, I walked on. Hunger emboldened my blood, and I approached and knocked when I saw a house off the road. A strong, wind-touched woman opened the door and squinted at me as she surveyed my face. What is it, she said. Are you selling something? she asked. I told her in slow speech that I was hungry and she asked me my name. Taura?, I said, and she said I could come in.

Her house was warmer than the farmer’s, as she had a fire in the kitchen and rugs on the floors. She sat me at a table and gave me bread and milk. I ate and then drank, and the milk was like my mother’s, though thin. She did not speak. On the wall hung pictures of her with other humans: children, a man, some elderly. Where are your people? I asked her, and she said they had either died or moved away, and she did not think they wanted to live near the farm anymore. Do you keep cows? I asked her and she laughed. Only goats and chickens, she said. I imagined she laughed because she did not have enough land for cows, but later I learned she had a fear of large animals, and I did not know how to tell her I was once so large and so animal.

That was the first afternoon. As it passed into evening, she invited me to stay the night. The next day, finding ourselves awake before dawn, she enlisted my help in making breakfast, and although she thought it strange that I did not know how to make eggs, she taught me, and we ate in silence. It began like this, my staying there, with an hour passed and another planned, until it was a year, and she was Lydia to me and I was home. Some days I saw the farmer in town, thumping cantaloupes at the supermarket or buying stamps to post mail. With my woman eyes I understood that he was the sort of man other women wanted to know, and with my bull heart, I knew he was afraid of success and enjoyed the failures that come from wrestling poor ground. Once, I tried to get his attention to see if he recognized me, and he looked at my dark eyes for a moment and moved on. I was the woman that Lydia had taken up with, and the farmer, like the town, accepted my presence the way that one neighbor notices that another has painted the front door red.

The first time I kissed Lydia we were both covered in dirt and chicken shit. She had been fixing the coop and I had been handing her the hammer and holding the boards. It was a damp summer day where the earth and air were heavy with the recently passed rain. Her lips were tense when I kissed her, and I enjoyed their taste and the new use of my own. She put her hands to her face and touched her lips with her fingertips. You kissed me, she said. And I said that I had, and she said it had been a long time since anyone had done that. We picked up our tools and put them away. She went upstairs to shower and I waited on the back porch. The once-cream paint was peeling off the wood and I noted to myself that we would have to strip and repaint it before the end of fall. When she was done showering, I went up and showered too, alone, and thought of our kiss and what might come.

A week later it was she who touched my hand in the kitchen as I was mixing the day’s dough and she was shaping the morning’s biscuits. We were both dusted with flour, and I remember pausing my kneading to notice the blue-brown veins of her hand. You surprised me, she said. I have loved you a long time, I said, and it was as true as if I had said, I was not human until I met you. She squeezed my hand in her own and the dusty flour was still as we stood there. This is new to me, she said, and let go. We are new, I said, and set the dough by the window to rise.

We did not eat together that day, passing instead into the kitchen at different times and in quiet hunger, alone. I ate her biscuits from a plate she set out for me. She ate my bread from the board on which I left it. Two weeks we were ghosts to each other, seeing only the evidence of our passing. Late that Friday I stood in my bedroom and watched her in the garden below. Her body, round and stout like my own, bent over the strawberry patch as she pulled weeds. I said nothing. I hid in my silence and waited for her words.

Her words came second. On a hot night in the darkness of my room, she slipped into my bed and kissed my woman lips with her own. I have loved you, she whispered. But I was afraid, she said. I held her hand. We cried and we slept and made love in the morning.

§

One morning I awoke as a bull. The slats broke in the night, but I did not notice because I have always been a heavy dreamer. Lydia rolled to me and clung to my back. Her early eyes did not yet have the day’s understanding and so there was a pause between her touch and her startling. I wanted to roll to her as I have done so many other mornings. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. But my bull tongue was thick and round and had lost my woman words. I stood and bowed beside the bed and she stared and then ran from the room.

I took my bull-self downstairs and rammed the back door with my head until it came free of its hinges. The day was hot as I left the house. I passed the chicken yard and followed the road I had walked so many times with my woman legs. Again, my nose was laden. Again, my bull’s cock swung with my trotting. Cars honked at me as I went towards the farmer’s house, and I wept for the life I knew I no longer had.

The farmer’s yard was changed. It had been some time, a number of years, but my bull mind could not quite count them now. My bull knees were old and my joints ached as I turned into the driveway, now paved and with no cattle grid to impede my step. To the right, in the fenced yard where I had once bred with cows, a portico and table stood surrounded by flowers. My old shed was unpainted and uninhabitable, although lights hung from the roof to the portico. I walked past where I had lived and snatched at weeds with my teeth, knowing again my bullish anger. Music could be heard from the house. It was not the farmer’s music—him with his swing taste and country ear. This was something else. I could not tell you, except that it was unfamiliar and sad.

With no fences to stop me, I walked to the far pasture, but there were no sheep. The land itself was divided into yards with houses and driveways where the dogs once nipped at woolen ewes. I stood in the street and stared until a car interrupted my staring. It appeared to me like a shiny headless other-animal, unfeeling and yet determined. I stamped the road. The car waited. I bowed my head. The car waited. I turned and ran into a yard and the car moved on. I knew then that I had to go back to Lydia’s. The place I had learned to be a bull could not take me, and so the place I had learned to be a woman would have to. It was not that I believed Lydia owed me her love, but I hoped she at least might let me stay.

By evening, I was again in her yard. Hammering could be heard, and I assumed it was Lydia fixing the back door. I attempted one of the front stairs, but it could not hold me and my hooves broke through. Lydia came to the front porch and stood, hammer in hand, staring at my back. I was afraid and bucked to free my front ankles. She waited. I moved finally to the grass and bent my knees and laid on the ground and hoped that I had made myself small.

Lydia waited on the porch and stared. The last light came bright through the trees and then darkened while we watched each other. She was as beautiful and strong as the day I had first kissed her. Gray, but vital. We watched each other’s eyes. I snorted and stretched a hind leg to the side. My tail twitched at the flies settling on my haunches. I laid my head down. I closed my eyes. I awoke to her touch between my eyes. She traced my flat forehead and then grasped a horn. You are a bull? she asked. It was just as well that I could not speak. I did not know what to say. She walked slowly to the side of me and knelt in the grass. She reached and pet my belly. I turned to her and she scratched the short hair behind my left ear. I knew, she said. I do not know how I knew, but I knew.

She leaned, then, into the side of me, and I shifted to make a pillow of my girth for her. Katydids ground the silence into humming. I turned my head and nudged her draped arm with my snout. She touched my nose and I saw her see her hand beside my fur. The stillness came alive with night creatures. I settled my head on the ground. She did not stir and soon, there was a slow breathing. We slept, warm and huddled beneath the stars.

LJ Pemberton is a writer / artist / futurist currently living in Los Angeles, California. Her stories, poetry, and essays have been featured in [PANK], the Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature, Hobart, VICE, the Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Columbia University and is formerly an assistant editor at NOON. Her (yet unpublished) novel, STARBOI, is a queer tale of obsession and heartbreak set in the recent past. Find out more at ljpemberton.com.