The Cows of Guernsey County
The cows found Guernsey County an easy mark. With the county already named after them, it seemed like a sign. A welcome sign. A Please Start Here sign. The revolution will begin here, something like poetic justice that the cows began their takeover in the rolling hills of their namesake. The cows found the humans pliable, gullible even. Not anywhere near as smart as the humans thought themselves. The cows planned their launch event for the County Fair out in Old Washington. The cows, as should be explained, did not appreciate the sanctity of the human universe. Nothing against you, homo sapiens, other than you eat my cousins and brothers and sisters, and besides you've had your time on this planet. And let's look around, how's that going so far? Yeah, we thought so. And how, one might wonder, would the cows take over Guernsey County? That was the elegant part. No hostage situations, no strychnine, no stampedes. Nope, they would use the eloquence of their tongues. They spoke and the humans listened. Is that a cow up there at the mic? It's really well-spoken. The cows were persuasive: "We won’t take your guns, keep your fucking guns, we're going to turn everything back to pasture." And that was their genius – the cows harkened back to the good ol' days when hills rolled, nothing had been fracked yet, grass smelled sweet, and the hay up in the hayloft would be ready when we needed it and there would be plenty to go around. The cows had a vision. Endorsements started coming in from NCR and Kennedy's Bakery, Orme Hardware, the Daily Jeffersonian, Dunning Ford, and the cows got voted in all across the county, but when Pluto won the Mayor of the county seat of Cambridge, beating out the incumbent former hairdresser/basketball referee, they knew their takeover of Guernsey County was complete.
But that was just the beginning. The cows had some other ideas. A larger agenda. They decided, once they were in power, that they hated everything. They hated how marriage worked, and holidays, and how humans always wanted to "up their game" and they hated how much humans loved spreadsheets and who cares about religion or diapers. Give me a break. And they hated men, all of them, and records of all kinds. But they could save most of that for later. The cows started to act on their agendas. People got a little nervous. There were a few things the cows liked, but they really were very few: conservation trusts, bubble gum, and pop up tents. So they started a factory for bubble gum in Byesville (cud flavor), and one for tents in Lore City (they really liked manufacturing shade), and then they did the biggest thing yet. If they'd somehow managed to avoid national attention, their next thing caught the world's attention. The cows put the entirety of Guernsey County into conservation, all 528 square miles, the whole damn county basically became a wildlife preserve in the course of two weeks.
Everybody wondered what would happen with this experiment in conservation. Short term: not much. Status quo. But after a year or so, some people started to notice something – the towns were falling apart, no new building permits, no renovations, no nothing doing in the building sphere. Businesses started to leave, so did people. But people also moved in, people who wanted dilapidation, cheap rent, who wanted green and weeds, people who said, we want something different. And it wasn't just people, animals are no dummies. Reports of mountain lions coming back. Coyotes sighted sauntering down Southgate Parkway. And I did something I never thought I'd do: I decided to come back too. Returning home never felt better, and in fact, for the first time ever, I decided to stick around for a while. And say what you like, after everything went down with them, all the controversy and even the standoff, even after the tragedy that was and wasn't their fault, I wouldn't be here if not for the cows. Even though they might be gone now, I remember them and I'll continue to do so. I'll tell the story of the Cows of Guernsey County. And I'm proud to say, I'm not going anywhere.
Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a finalist for The Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, which won the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He works as the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection and lives in rural midcoast Maine. His stories, "Archive" and "Trains to the Provinces," appeared in Issue #29 of The Cafe Irreal and "Me and Borges" in Issue #50.