Asterion

The mud was thicker than molasses under my boots. I generally hate cliches, but it fits. It rained last night, and honestly, I despise feeding the fucking bull. He was always staring at me, always working something out. He was rarely aggressive; he just seemed like he was thinking more than any bull should be. An intelligence more of man than of bovine.

I didn’t want the mud to be thick, in case today was the day he decided to chase me. If he wanted out of his barnyard, and he decided I was in his way, I couldn’t outrun him in this. My feet would stick. Or they would slip. Either way, I’d be bullied by the bull.

On top of that, I was very tired. The kind of tired where I had to drink so much damned rocket-fuel coffee I could almost see sounds as colors. Next time, I won't stay out so late on a worknight for a job that requires you to be up an hour before the sun.

Trudging through the mud and shaking off my drowsiness, through the labyrinthine layout of white, crossbuck wooden fencing that created dozens of twisting pathways from the outer fence towards the center of his bullpen, I thought about the silliness of the whole thing. “Why would he want to hurt me?” I said to absolutely no one. The only creature anywhere near me was the bull, Asterion.

Asterion was a stud. He served no other purpose than for my boss to lend him out to every local beef farmer who wanted the biggest, strongest heifers. Their only purpose would be to become the best marbled steaks in all of East Texas. It’s a bold claim, but it worked: Asterion’s studding paid the bills, and then some. What a life, huh? Just sit around, eat, sleep, fart up enough to rip your own personal hole in the Ozone layer, and then you get to…well, it’s a much better life than I have. In fact, that’s the best life of anyone I know. Truly a god amongst cattle.

I wound my way through the pathways that led to his water first. I felt him staring me down, like he wanted to fight me. Not charge me. That would be too bull-like for him. No, Asterion wanted to stand up and do fisticuffs. He wanted to punch me in the mouth just for being there. I looked up, over the top of the fencing towards the center of the pen, just to be sure that was all he was doing.

There he was, in the center of his pen, staring at me; staring into me. His white fur, juxtaposed against the foreground of whitewashed fencing, almost gave him camouflage; the only distinct feature someone quickly peeking in would notice would be his horns, which were that dark fingernail color. He even had a nose ring, like he was in some fucking cartoon. And he stood as still as a statue, chewing away whatever bits he had gotten from the bottom of his feed trough. He just chewed and chewed.

I poured the bucket of fresh water into his water trough. It was bigger than the single animal needed, but it was my job to clean it and fill it every single day. That’s what Mr. Kritikominos paid me for, so that’s what I did. Day after day, day after day.

It helped that I had been in love with his daughter, Adrienne, since the moment I saw her. Mr. Kritikominos doted on her, but she was also another worker. She often came with me to change the water and feed Asterion, but she didn’t worry about him the way I did.

When his water was filled, I picked my head up to confirm that he was still in the middle of his pen, hating on me. He was.

“He doesn’t hate you,” I said, once again assuring myself that the whole thing was absurd.

The most lovely voice I ever heard chimed in from the gate, “Who doesn’t hate you, Theo?”

It was Adrienne. I don’t know how she came up without me noticing, but there she was, in all her glorious beauty. A tan cowboy hat topped her long, golden farmgirl brown-blonde hair, and she had dirt-caked denim overalls. From here, she smelled like a mixture of lilacs and animal feed. Those green eyes and full lips could make a sucker out of any man. Her beauty was something that would make men do stupid things. Stupid things like romp in the hay with your boss’s daughter. Yeah, OK, I guess I should have led with that. She and I were, well, we were something. Something more than her father would have liked.

He would never approve of her running off with a farmhand, especially one like me who wasn’t from anywhere near Beaumont. I came from a small town farther up in the north end of Texas, Argo. Not much there, and not much for me to offer Adrienne. As an immigrant, he wanted his daughter to marry someone local who already had a farm of their own. Something like a dowry, I guess. I had nothing. I had no name, no family to speak of. My mother raised me, claiming my father came in from the sea like a whirlwind (whatever that meant) and left when I was only a baby. I was a nobody.

Somehow, I caught her eye on my first day. Considering that I was one of fourteen farmhands he took on every summer, I was surprised that I made any impact at all. But last year, she took a fancy to me, and I to her, and the next thing I knew, she convinced her dad to keep me on in the winter. And then the spring. And he was none the wiser, even though she gave me all sorts of tokens of her affection, sometimes right in front of him.

A few weeks ago, she had sewn me a black-and-red plaid shirt to keep me warm out in the field. I wore it for all of two days before Asterion decided he didn’t like it. It was the first time he ever charged me. His horn caught me just as I hopped the fence, tearing it. I tried wearing it still, but the tear kept getting caught on chicken wire, nails, or whatever else, and it tore enough that it had to be resewn. I meant to bring it back to Adrienne, but before I got a chance, it got caught again on a fence in Asterion’s pen, and he charged me a second time. I had to toss off the shirt to escape him. I never saw it again. For all I know, he picked it up and burned it when no one was looking. I guess that’s why matadors use a red cloth for bullfighting. He hasn’t charged me since.

I was caught so off guard that I almost told her exactly what I was thinking, like an idiot. “Oh, uh, just thinking about your dad,” was the best my dumbass brain could come up with.

“No,” she laughed, “he don’t hate you. One day we’ll tell him.”

I smirked and turned back to Asterion. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking at Adrienne. He didn’t look at her the way he looked at me; he looked at her like he loved her. Like, if he were a person, he would whisk her off her feet and shove my face into the water, just to show her he was a real man and I was nothing but an animal. Maybe that’s why he hated me.

“You wanna help with his feed?” I asked.

“Wish I could, hun, but daddy’s got me fixin’ the chickens. Asterion is all yours!” Her smile got me. It always got me.

I watched her run off, waiting until she was out of sight before turning my attention back on the creature I should have been paying attention to. I spun around to see if he was still staring at her, but he was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Non-existent.

I felt a chill in my spine that wasn’t what you’d expect to feel in April in East Texas when it’s already 80 degrees on a cold day. He couldn’t have left, could he? What did he do? Grow a pair of man-legs and arms and hop over the fence? Did he manage to open the gate and slip out without me hearing it or Adrienne seeing it? No, this was different. Everything about this seemed…off.

I scanned over the tops of the fences, looking for a little movement, a little flash of light off his horn, or any sign of him. Nothing. I listened for the sound of hooves clamoring against the wet ground. Still nothing. The silence was unnatural. There were no birds chirping, no chickens clucking in the distance, no wind rustling through the hay fields. I didn’t like it one bit. I glanced towards my left, then my right, making sure that the pathways I was on were clear of an angry, jealous bull. They were.

Then I felt it.

The pathways between the fences were just narrow enough for Asterion to squeeze through, if he so chose to leave his bullpen. So, if he were barreling through them, the fencing on both sides would shake as his shoulders scraped along them. If he ran, the shaking was intense. And although I couldn’t see him, the fence on both sides of me was shaking something nasty. I had to run. But which way? Still no sight of him. If his head was down, and he was charging, his horns wouldn’t be peaking out over the top. On a dry day, dust would be kicking up, and I’d know exactly where he was. But on a muddy day like today, that wasn’t happening. I tried looking down below, since there were no rails along the bottom, to see if there were any hooves. Still nothing. And like I said, his fur was almost the exact match of the paint on the fence.

I put my hands on each top rail to see if I could feel which direction he was charging from. It felt like it was coming from my right, though I couldn’t be certain. I decided to take a gamble and ran, as fast as I could, to the path to my left.

The path itself twisted and wound, as if it were following a concentric circle towards the center pen. The rumbling grew heavier, and I could hear hoof beats somewhere in the maze getting closer. No, not hoof beats. Footsteps. Like heavy boots trampling through the mud. I didn’t turn around, as doing so might cost me precious time I didn’t have. I ran as fast as I could, but that fucking mud made it difficult.

The circular path straightened out, and I found myself with three options: Straight, left, or a diagonal path to the right. The right would lead me straight into his pen, the only place that I knew he wasn’t. I decided to go there, draw him into the open, then try to run out through one of the pathways leading to the exit.

The biggest problem I had now, as I rushed through the fifteen-yard straight path, was trying to remember which of those pathways actually led to the gate. Twelve pathways connected directly to the pen, with some of them being straightforward, like the one I was on now, and others that twisted in every direction. Some even led to dead ends. Odd setup, I know, but I didn’t build it. This design was the brainchild of Mr. Kritikiminos. When I asked him why, he said: "It's better for everyone." Whatever that means.

There was only one gate, which meant you had to get onto the right pathway or you'd be running in circles, and the outer fence had razor wire along the top rail, so you couldn’t hop it. On a normal day, it would take me a few minutes to get out if I selected the wrong path. But now, I wasn't thinking clearly. Now, I had the feeling that something was gaining on me. And it didn’t quite feel like a bull.

I found myself in the middle of his giant, football-field-sized pen. Not sure why he needed all that room, but again, I didn’t build it. I tried to map out the best path to take once Asterion was in the pen.

“Fuck,” I muttered, realizing that my brain was of no use. That’s when I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life: I looked back.

That extra caffeine must have really fried my brain, because what emerged into the pen wasn’t Asterion—at least not as I knew him. His head was low, with his horns laser-pointed right at me, but right in the middle of the charge, he slowed down and stood up! Sure, Asterion’s head was there, but it was atop the body of a man who dwarfed me. Muscles like a god, wearing cutoff jeans with black work boots that, unlike mine, weren’t sticking in the mud. And the most horrifying thing about it all: the big fucker spoke.

“Leave her alone!” it shouted at me in a dark voice that cut through the barnyard like cold thunder. Its angry bull-eyes pierced my soul while its nostrils flared and its nose ring rattled.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to question everything I’ve ever known. But most importantly, I wanted to get out. My heart quickened as it drew closer. It was thirty yards away. Twenty-five. Twenty.

Run! My inner voice was the only rational thing about it all. But which way? I only had a few seconds to think about it when something caught my eye: there, in the mud, trampled to all hell and tattered, was the remnants of my plaid shirt. The rain must have loosened it from its muddy grave. Bits of it were scattered everywhere, and there was even a long thread off the arm that led to one of the pathways out of the pen.

I don’t know if it was divine intervention, but it clicked in my head that that particular pathway was the most direct route to the gate. I ran faster than I had ever run before.

“Leave her!” The voice reverberated off the fencing as I rushed into the pathway. About a dozen yards in, I could feel the fence rumbling; I could feel the footsteps shaking the ground. I could sense hot breath against the nape of my neck as I turned left, then right, then straight, then into another circular path that went straight again.

“No! You can’t! She’s mine!” the voice was closer, the footsteps louder, the shaking more violent, and then…Then I slipped.

I tumbled forward, and the muddy ground punched me hard in the face, loosening a tooth. The running footsteps had slowed until it wasn’t running: It was walking. Slowly. Very slowly. Step. Step. The sound of mud squelching under boots big enough for Andre the Giant, the weight of the beast shaking the mud puddles like I was in a dinosaur movie…all of it meant my time was over.

I did the second stupidest thing I ever could have done and turned to look up. The face of the bull-man was only a few feet away, the heavily muscled arms tightening as he balled both hands into massive fists. He raised them above his head, ready to rain down death onto my skull, when a golden voice broke the tension.

“Theo?” Adrienne’s voice was distant. “Can you help with the chickens when you’re done?”

Asterion turned his head for but a moment, which was all the time I needed. I rolled to my right under the crossbuck and into the next path. I shimmied to my feet and dug in my heels, sprinting off the ground towards the next turn in the path.

Asterion let out an angry roar, and once again his fury and strength pulsated against the fence. This time, I didn’t do the stupid thing, and I kept my eyes forward. I made a sharp right and quick left to get back onto the correct pathway. Twenty yards away was the gate to freedom.

Another roar, and the footsteps were right on me. I could feel his hot breath again, and I could sense his hate. It was close, and my caffeine high was starting to slow. You have one shot, I thought. I let out one last burst of speed, slammed the gate open, turned around, and shoved it closed in one fluid motion. My breath was tired and shallow when I finally looked back into the barnyard, expecting to see the monster at the gate.

But he wasn’t standing there on two legs. He was there on all four hooves, as calm as ever. He was just a fat bull, chewing away on his food, looking at me like he always did. Unnerving is the only word that comes to mind. Here I was, breathless, covered in mud and cow shit, and there he was, doing normal cow things.

Adrienne came up from behind me and said, “What the heck happened to you?”

What do you say to that? Your bull turned into a man and tried to kill me because he’s in love with you?

“I slipped,” I said. “The pen’s pretty muddy.”

She laughed, and I faked one as best I could before she motioned for me to come to the chickens. I turned back to Asterion, who was at the gate, watching her walk away. When she was far enough, his head turned to me, and he stared at me like he always did. He just chewed and chewed.