Once Upon the girl with the Cow and the Magic Seeds

Once upon the girl with the Cow and the Magic Seeds 

        The girl whose legs were the shape of an exclamation mark, did not want the seminal seeds the old man was offering to be planted in her. There were no cows in her family, but the men marketed one anyway, flogging off her mother to an old man who was the highest bidder. Everybody told the girl how lucky she was. From the man’s seminal seeds emerged a house; there grew a slated roof, and ivy that rose like a beanstalk, clinging to clefts in the stucco for life, and curving over the door like an old womans hunched back. The man chopped this progeny down of course; complaining of the Verdigris which left a shadow of green on his freshly emblazoned white stucco. There was even a door, and two double glazed windows. The girl had never seen so many things come out of a man.  

        Still, the girl said a firm no to the magical seeds he promised to plant inside of her. She had read the market men's parable of Jack and the Bean Stalk; she did not want to see the giant. The months continued their perennial cycle, they did not have to go down to the market to trade what the men flogged off as cows as often. The girl and the cow were not rich, because the cow's milk was defunct- they never had enough to eat or drink, so they must trade regularly at market. But they were not poor, because the girl and the cow had each other. That was until they made the fortuitous exchange of a magical man who could grow things with his bare hands from special seeds. This, the cow circumspectly mooed, was a providential bargain, and every cow in the frugal town in which the girl and the cow lived, envied the girl and the cow their good fortune. 

       In the ageing summer, the man's magic was beginning to wear off. There was no more ivy filigreeing the doorway, and the door was becoming neglectful of its duties; refusing to close the cold pockets of air it stored like ice against the vacant swell the man's considerably less fortune bearing hands had slammed into it. He would mimic the exclamation mark of the girl's legs, and make her exclaim herself, “No! I don’t want that!” whenever he threatened her with promises pertaining to the magical resurrection of his inseminating seeds.   

        “They could restore everything,” he proclaimed passionately, “this land is arid and infertile, I need new, fecund soil for my seeds to be prosperous, they will make us fortunate, I promise.” 

        The man’s prolepsis was tempting. The stucco walls were crumbling like a jaw loosening its smile, and the facade of white rendering was bruised with dirt. The roof too, was becoming detached from its tiles, when on particularly acrimonious nights, many expressed their proclivity for gravity, slanting increasingly towards infidelity; some even explicated their preference, sleeping on the ground for a night, or several. The only reliable structure in the house was the girl's mouth, its roof firmly fitted, unless pressed to perform a polite “no.” But the girl was too afraid of the giants that might migrate to the sky, given the beanstalks genesis. The man laughed at her, declared there were no such thing as giants, and as that was her only viable protest of reluctance, he inserted the seeds into her low hanging mouth. The lips pierced like a scream- silent as Munch’s painting, and the sheets, soiled white with fear, released a faint smell of petrichor as they were watered. 

        The man had not been disingenuous. Things did in fact grow from the seeds he had planted. In the first place, the water the girl had submerged the seeds in had been diluted, in accordance with colour theory, dyeing the white cotton sheets the sanguinary pink of a girl. A bedroom door had been restored to function too, and the light had been neatly folded into the curtains, so the day would not disrupt the progress of the seed's growth. But there was something else: to the girl's astonishment, it was not a verdure, green beanstalk that grew out of and silhouetted her pubis- a ladder providing her with direct access to the ogre in the sky- but the ventricose ogre itself, protuberant from her labia. Her double pulsed breaths shrank the room, and all the girl could feel was his hugeness inside of her. The exclamations of the girl's legs were as puny as a ten year olds. The ogre ignored the dilated black periods inking her eyes; the still undeveloped pink ones indelibly dotted on her chest.  

        The ogre’s shadow loomed colossal above the girl; distanced by miles from her body, prostrate on the sheets, but still too close- enough that her flesh spoke the goosebumps her mouth could not. She did not want to lose the roof in her head. The sheer size of the ogre, the velocity at which it stuttered out of her, guaranteed the roof of her house would surely tremble into debris. But to the girl's disconcertion, nothing crumbled atop her head. When she reassimilated her courage enough to open the rufescent sky of her eyelids, the ogre had vanished, it was just the man and his magical seeds; her face in the black mirror of his pupils, strangely microscoped in their componential size.   

         “See”, the man said, moving no closer, but continuing to stand his shadow over her; pressing her darkly against the bed, “I told you nothing terrible would happen”.  

        He slippered down to the kitchen and came back bearing a carton of orange juice and a long, pellucid glass. He poured the mixture slowly out of his right hand; the result appeared to the girl a colliquated sunset in a test tube- the man's experiment at lightness. Orange juice was a rare and guilty pleasure for the girl, though if she overindulged in it, it brought her out in rashes, not dissimilar to the goosebumps now swelling her skin.  

        “Drink it,” he said in a voice as soothing as the anticipated fictious sunset trickling down her throat would feel, “it will refresh you.” 

        When the day was undrawn by the curtains and the girl was forced by the man and the cow in stoic unison to ‘go outside and play like a healthy child,’ now enough progeny had finally come of the man's seeds for the cow not to worry about reverting back to the market, and the girl was subsequently unburdened of her task in accompanying the cow. The little girl went, and her suspicions were confirmed. She had indeed swallowed the sun. Her blood ran cold as callous hands over her small body, as she looked helplessly at the clouds pervading the sky. She could see her blue eyes through their distended mists; the blue manufacturing the entire sky. But there was no sun to be seen. The girl tried shutting her eyes like a computer, scrunching them into slits; she winked using both eyes, but not a single golden tendril emerged from the skies high tower. Finally, she lay her back on the earths floor in despair, her eyes continuing to rummage in the clouds, though she had given up hope. There, in the cluster of stratocumulus clouds where she had planted her gaze, an ogre assembled itself; the shape of a head resurrecting in the sky. 

Notes: This is an allegory regarding childhood sexual abuse which might be disturbing/triggering to some, I'm not sure this is something you would want to publish, but thought i would try anyway.