Ithaca was within sight. Though the grouch still had misgivings concerning his reunion with his family, he felt, in spite of his sins, he was ready to be admitted into a pacific life.
But before they could set sail directly to his home, they stopped at Thrinacia. This was the island where Andy and Gary preserved human DNA through cows.
As it turned out, because cow lifespans were a fifth of a human’s, cow society moved five hundred times as quickly.
The crew was amazed by cow civilization, created by gifting their bovine counterparts with man’s intelligence. Indeed, the cows were so smart, their brains were pushing their horns to the side. They had already built pyramids, and they had already built signs and fencing that guided the tourists to the pyramids, and warnings that the cow tourists could not take pictures of the pyramids with their Polaroids.
All of this would have impressed the crew were the cow luminaries not women.
This came to be because the females were twice as large as the males, due to the giantess’s DNA. This was demonstrated in a horrifying scenario soon thereafter they landed on the island.
There was an ox, chewing grass, minding his own business. Suddenly, the ox picked his head up and looked left and right, listening to some inaudible threat. As the ground beneath his feet trembled, he wore an expression of pained fear; he softly cried (moo...moo...moo...). Something cast an immense shadow over him: a heifer, big as a hill, standing over him in her arrogant strength and pride (moo! moo! moo!). With one shove of her powerful head she tipped him over on his side; he cried, and kicked his legs helplessly in the air; indeed, he looked like a beetle, so furiously and so helplessly his legs kicked; the heifer then threw her legs over him and, in one powerful squat, beat his udders with her underbelly (for, with this species, the males have udders); he shouted (moooo! moooo! moooo!), she smiled in the act (moo! moo! moo!); she then squat over and over, sometimes rapidly and angrily, such that the earth trembled (moo! moo! moo! moo! moo!) and sometimes slowly like a piston, so that he would not be acclimated to the rhythms of pain; in the climax his udders released, in torrents, a viscous white fluid, which covered the heifer’s underbelly, while he shrieked with tears streaming down his eyes (moo...moo...moo). She smirked, then, with her hind legs, kicked the ox upright, who was shaking and mewling after surviving the ordeal. Then a herd of heifers walked past him and, waving their long luscious locks – for they inherited hair from Helen of Troy – laughed at him as he cried himself away.
The crew were horrified at this grave injustice. The machines thought nothing of this, for male and female were but distinctions in the animal kingdom.
Because the men of the crew were just – and indeed the crew, coincidentally, only consisted of men – except for Paula – they sought to help the bullocks. The machines warned them not to interfere in cow-ciety, for these cows were sacred; however, they were ignored, as Andy and Gary were Hamazonians.
The men exhorted the cows to stand up for themselves; to fight for their manhood, and therefore their destinies; to lie down and allow women to dictate their fates, was the same as defying God’s order that men were over women; for they were projecting upon the cows.
They tied spears and swords upon the cows’ sides; they ordered them to slash at their ankles; then, when they keeled over, to slash at their knees; then to keep slashing until their muzzles, eyes, all were painted in red; they told them to stand firm, they were stronger together, and the enemy would fall. Are we mice, or are we men? the men roared. We are neither, we are cows, but we get the point, the cows roared back, for they were willing to fight the cruelties of the world that biology had determined for them.
And so, the cows – the female cows – were minding their business, reading magazines, doing science, until they heard, from the distance, the pressing of dainty male feet. They raised their eyebrows, and brought their large bulks up to meet the rabblerousers. To their horror, there were not just hundreds of oxen, but thousands, even millions of them.
Had the cows stood as a group, they would have won and secured their own lives – but, because they had long been powerful, they approached the threat as individuals, and fell as individuals. Some reasoned all-out war was in order; some reasoned only a bloodying was needed; some reasoned a distraction or an impediment was required; some reasoned diplomacy was possible. Thus, all fell.
And so the cows, the male cows, stood over their slain counterparts; their eyes were bloodshot, they roared (MOO! MOO! MOO!), they grunted, they shook their heads rapidly, shaking the spears and swords on their sides, their tongues were wet with sweat, froth spilled from the corners of their mouths, they were frenzied, they were hoarse, they cried with all the anger and envy accumulated over the cow years, they were blind, drove their spears and their horns deeper and deeper into cow flesh, they wanted to be one with the carnage, they wanted their victims’ writhing to match their own, in warlike shouts they squatted rapidly up and down over the females’ carcasses, exploding large baths of white over their bodies in their maddened furor.
In reality, Andy and Gary were not mad; they were actually interested to see how this event would affect the survival of the species. For the machines were but watchers.
The oxen rounded up the living females, bloodied, quivering, tied around their mouths and their feet, and stabbed occasionally in the ankles lest they resist, to breed their glorious male future.
The grouch was horrified. That night, he had a dream that his wife was a towering giant, and yet he was able to pierce his hand into that giant and eat the stillborn throbbing inside of her. He woke up in a sweat, and swore it was but a dream, but the blood of the dream would not wash.
© 2025 Jay Lee