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began to cry, joy breaking her heart.
    “Be proud. As much as you can be. She was a fine baby.”
    Nora was.
     
    ***
     
    The morning sun tracks time, thought Tom. Scorches the ground softly. How many suns have touched me? Bathed in golden light. How many moons for that matter, have I seen in the sky? Or slept under.
    He sat at the edge of the cove, his feet in cold water. Lucy was in his arms.
     
    ***
     
    In the deep dark of a country night a black cow slept in a field. Curled up on spindly legs, warm piles of flesh in the middle. Slow puffs of air curled from her wet nostrils, with hot hairy wafts of steam rising up from her meatpacked body. Rising and falling, she slept peacefully.
    It's hard being a cow. You spend all day working for the farmer, chewing the cud, getting fat, keeping the grass down, from sunrise to sunset. And when you're not working, you're being milked, pulled by cold hands that are never gentle with delicate udders. Then you're packed off to eat more, and get fatter and fatter and work and work. Until you drop dead from tiredness, or are sent to the butcher to be put out of your misery and fed to hungry children. To be born a cow in rural Ireland - what rotten luck when you think of how they're treated in other countries. If I were a cow, I'd be as bad tempered as the rest of them. But then again, there's not much difference between us and the cows.
                  I don't know if all cows think like this, but I do know that this particular cow had other things on her mind when she was woken by the crack of a kick right in her belly. She felt the wind knocked from her, and trying to breathe, nearly fainted with the pain of splintering ribs that had burst her lungs. She looked around, panicked, and dazed, before feeling the pressure of hands at her bosom. With soft tension four long nipples were torn from her body.
    Bellowing, she fell, and ran blind from pain, over fences and into darkness, before she stopped at the edge of a bog. Unsure of where to turn, she studied the quiet black pool, mad with panic. But then another kick pushed her in.
    The sting of black peat and mud, of tarry ancient soil, mingled with the tear in her breast, entering her lungs through ribcracked protrusions in her side. She breathed in, blood and peat, the milk of a mother swirling in the soil. A black fleshy creature, buried in the earth, the pale light of the moon and the soft buzzing of a kitchen bulb (turned on in a nearby farmhouse with the commotion), the only witnesses.
    Standing at the window, trying to gaze through the darkness, Murphy, the farmer, could see nothing. But the faint sense that the world still turns, and things still live in the dark of the night couldn't leave him, even as he pulled the silverballed cord, and quenched the filament flame in his kitchen. He turned on his linoleum floor, and went upstairs to his bed to lie awake, knowing that once his gaze was gone, the night would return to its usual order.
    And sure enough, heavy feet tramped back across the field, away from the dead cow in the bog, and on with their journey, their only company the heavy silence of darkness.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Turn on, Tune in, Infiltrate, Disrupt
     
    K. H. Vaughn
     
     
                  Terry stared at the lamp. Globules of viscous blue oozed upward in a column within the milky white fluid, broke apart, and drifted languidly to the base again. The room was brick with a worn couch and a mattress resting on old shipping pallets. The ceiling was high, and pipes ran across the walls, asbestos wrapping coming apart in chunks. He picked up a piece of the insulation, and it crumbled between his fingers like a dried white honeycomb. The stuff was everywhere. Out on the main floor of the Mill, he could hear a smoky mélange of laughter and political debate over the sound of Iron Butterfly. Students and drop-outs, mostly. Pretending to be beats, hippies, and