One of my demons from childhood was a carnivorous cow. Sort of.
When spring ripened to summer, and night brought the only relief from the steam-iron sun, the following recurring dream would haunt me:
A featureless man-form smeared in cow dung crouches on my front porch and moos like a cow. A forlorn chant, this moaning is meant to lure the unsuspecting child outside to help the cow that has wandered onto my porch, lost. In suburbia.
I tiptoe over and stand behind the front door, more curious than frightened. Too small to reach the peephole, I rest a hand on it to feel the vibrations in the wood.
Then, silence. I drift back to my room, relieved.
Until a slow whoosh of the slider door around back makes my stomach drop. The cow monster has snuck inside the house. Its man-legs prowl from room to room searching for me.
I scramble under the bed, heart racing, wondering if the creature can smell me. A reek of manure stains the humid air. So, probably not.
It lets loose booming, guttural moos. Growing louder, laced with primeval threat, the menacing moos draw closer. I know the bawling is really the cow monster and that if it catches me, it will eat me.
I wonder if it would cook me first, recalling with regret our convenient grill on the patio.
Beneath the bed, toeless feet shuffle slowly past my eyes, dragging a fecal smear along the floorboards. I hold my breath, clamp down my lungs to keep them from betraying me.
At the corner of my bed, the feet turn, take two steps toward the door, then stop. The excrement-smeared feet pivot toward me and stop. The bedsheet inches from my eyes creeps upward.
The next moo is so loud and close that it shocks me into action. I shoot from beneath the bed and across the floor like a hockey puck. My feet jump under me in the doorway.
I grab the doorframe by fingertips, swing a hard left off it and launch myself at the back door. Still gaping open, it leads to a blackness so total I hope for a split second to see my reflection in it, that this is all just a computer game I’m too wrapped up in.
But, no. Cool, damp air brushes my hot cheeks.
I leap through the open door. Giddy with the feel of open space, I fly over the patio.
The cow monster races out the slider after me, mooing. I catch a glimpse of it and falter, grasping for anything within reach I can use as a weapon.
With the monster nearly upon me, I tumble, clenching a long plastic tube. I roll to my feet, fumbling to hold onto the thing, no idea what it is. My finger hits a button.
A noise like a tornado erupts and my eardrums shudder. The cow monster squeals like a hog. It turns away, covers its head and runs into the Carras’s yard next door, then the Pinetta’s. It leaps over fences and runs on and on, out of sight.
I switch off my deafening weapon and look down to find a leaf blower in my arms. I drag myself into the house, cradling it like a baby. I name the leaf blower Harry and slide it under my bed.
The strange thing is, whenever I had this dream, I would wake in the morning to find Harry lying beneath the bed, just like in the dream.
Maybe as a child, I sleepwalked.
I do not somnambulate now. So far as I know, anyway.
This recurring drama may at least partially explain my lifelong vegetarianism.