The White-Faced Bull

Thunder roils in the distance, low in the dark sky. Quicksilver strands of lightning split the low-hanging clouds, throwing the distant mountain ridge into brief, stark relief.

Soon, Agatha knows, the storm will reach her.

She struggles to her feet, finds herself standing in a small clearing. A forest surrounds her on all sides—thick, gnarled trunks curving inward overhead, streaked with silver and brown, propping up thick blankets of blue-green leaves. At the edge of the clearing stands a bull with a white face, his broad hooves sinking into the fertile forest floor, his head lowered, his horns pointed directly at her. He stands so deathly still, unblinking, that she thinks he’s a statue, or perhaps a corpse.

Agatha draws near him, and sees the slight expansion and contraction of his flanks, the tracking of his expressionless brown eyes as he watches her approach.

“Please, help me,” she whispers into the humid air. “Something terrible’s happened, and I don’t know what to do.”

His tail flicks, and he turns away and plods into the inky shadows of the forest. Agatha hurries to keep up, picking her way around patches of mud, plunging unthinkingly into the thicket. Another rumble of thunder, still far in the distance; rain on the air, heavy, unsettling.

As the bull walks, placing each hoof with a curiously regal gravitas, Agatha follows close behind, and remembers distant childhood days spent on her father's ranch, deep in the timeless, spiny-ridged mountainscape of Montana. She remembers waking before sunrise to the smell of bacon and the sound of her father's brisk knock on her bedroom door; scrambling up and down hillsides on tired legs, under the watchful eye of the omnipresent sun; draping herself over a fence and ogling with jealousy as her father's hired hands cut a cow from the herd with impossible ease.

She remembers hearing an unusual racket late one evening, and sneaking out her bedroom window to investigate. She remembers crouching by a fence post and watching a group of ranch hands wrangle an aging bull out of the barn. She remembers the way the bull kicked and pulled and screamed, its tangible fear, its uncanny awareness of impending death.

She remembers seeing her father lift his gun in the dying sunlight.

And she remembers ducking behind the fence post as her father fired.

Her father had seen her swollen red eyes the next morning, and he'd known. Contrary to her fears, he didn't become angry.

"They're just animals, sweetie," he'd said gently as he set a plate of breakfast on the table before her. "You can't get attached to them."

That hadn't been what upset Agatha; she'd known not to get attached to things that were meant to be transient, had known it since her parents' divorce.

"I swear," she remembers telling her father tearily, "I swear the bull was crying."

Maybe it had been a trick of the light, as her father'd insisted. Maybe she'd only seen what she wanted to see, in some twisted, melodramatic way. But, to this day, she still remembers seeing, for a split second, a watery shine in the bull's eyes as it fought for its life.

Thunder rumbles, closer now; the trees sway placidly in the rising wind, an age-old warning. She looks up now, at the swishing tail of the white-faced bull leading the way before her.

"Where are you taking me?" Agatha asks. The bull, predictably, does not answer.

"Something's happened," Agatha murmurs. "I...I can't remember what."

The bull pays her no attention.

"I've lost something." Agatha feels tears welling up unexpectedly. "Can you help me get it back?"

They emerge abruptly from the woods at the edge of a highway, and Agatha is momentarily taken aback by the sudden appearance of concrete and asphalt, and the rows of cars and trucks speeding by, intent on their mundane destinations. Overhead, a startlingly-loud clap of thunder follows a flash of lightning. Behind her, a gust of wind rakes its fingers through the upper branches of trees, carelessly dislodging leaves.

"This…" She backs away a step. "This is where it happened."

The bull twists its ponderous neck to stare at her.

"I didn't want to come here," Agatha says. "Why did you bring me back?"

The bull turns slowly, taking care not to step into the highway, and walks past Agatha, back into the forest.

Agatha starts after the bull, but a sudden, deafening impact shatters the air behind her. She whirls around, and watches, horrified, as a car—Bob's car—skids a few yards after its collision with a concrete divider, before rocking to a halt.

Thunder cracks like a whip, directly overhead, and the sky splits open. Agatha drops to her knees. She doesn't need to look into the car to know the identity of the passengers; she doesn't need to watch paramedics force the doors open to know what the fates of the passengers are.

“I'm not ready for you to leave,” she murmurs.

The rainwater pours relentlessly, drumming down on her skull, her shoulders, pooling around her knees. She looks up at the sky as a firetruck shields Bob’s car from prying eyes, as paramedics lift two people out of the car and place them on gurneys, as passing cars slow down slightly before rushing on with the rest of their lives.

As Agatha waits, the rainwater quickly submerges everything in murky blue-brown suffocating light. Agatha leans her head back as lightning illuminates the stormy sky, as icy cold water creeps up her legs, her arms, closes in on her ears.

She knows that when she wakes up, it will only be to pain and loss. She knows that waking up is inevitable.

She closes her eyes as the water closes its deathly-cold fingers over her cheeks, her nose, her lips.

Goodbye.

When she blinks her eyes open, she’s wrapped in several blankets, dry, staring at a white ceiling. She takes a deep breath, tastes disinfectant and hospital cotton.

She remembers a white-faced bull, a distant flash of lightning. She remembers paramedics prying her fingers open and arms apart, remembers watching helplessly as Bob's lifeless body was rushed into an ambulance.

She feels tears welling up, hot and terrifying.

She looks out the window, at the cloudless blue sky.

"Goodbye," she whispers.