When I was in second grade, my teenaged brother took “the girls,” as we were called back then, to a friend’s house with a cow behind a wooden fence. The cow licked my sister’s face. She was disgusted, and I just felt left out. Where was my bovine kiss? A few months later, there was a cow tongue on sale at Publix. My sister slapped the cold flesh encased in shrink wrap against my cheek, and I hit her until an adult yelled at us to stop. I’m not sure what she was expecting from me, but violence made the most sense.

Decades later, I took a road trip with my girlfriend and her brother. They were raised in the farm country of upstate New York. When we started dating, she always said she wanted to show me the family farm someday, like a major milestone in our relationship. We rolled through hills and miles of green in Geneseo, punctuated only by the occasional dilapidated barn. The smell of manure always inescapable in towns like this, where the cow to human ratio is skewed. We stopped at the farm her family used to own, and the new owner allowed us to look at his young cows. They were in crates and kept separate from one another. Their legs and bellies were covered in feces, mud, and the muck of farm life.

One calf was more vocal than the rest. Her ribs stuck out too much to a non-farm girl like me. My girlfriend said it was normal – the crates, the separation, the cries. Big brown eyes stared up at me, and an inkling of longing lit up inside my chest. I put my hand out to touch the calf, and she mistook my fingers for a bottle. She was trying to nurse on my bare fingers. The suction enveloped my fingers as they traced the ridges of the roof of the calf’s mouth, and I understood that kind of hunger. I wondered where her mother was and if she felt the same loneliness.  She continued sucking fingers I couldn’t bring myself to take away from her, and her eyes questioned me. Where’s my mother? Why are your hands so empty? I hadn’t spoken to my own mother in eight years. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her any more than I could make milk flow from my fingers for this motherless calf in front of me.

When I pulled my fingers away, they were covered in slime and made a stream of spit from my hand to her mouth. The moment had been cut short by the putrid stink on my hand. My girlfriend laughed at the contorted face I made and tried to take a picture. I was afraid the picture would show more than the momentary disgust. It would reveal the holes in me in photographic proof, the holes my mother carved, the ones I had been trying ever since to fill. Luckily, my girlfriend fumbled with the camera. The picture only shows remnants of the moment I pulled my fingers out and what I imagined my face was instead of the real moment. There was no visible fear or anxiety in the picture.  It was just me with my hands covered in saliva and a fake face, pretending everything was fine enough. The calf wagged her tail as I was leaving, and I wanted to pretend she was happy. My girlfriend said it was just to swat the flies off her ass.

Maggie Wolff is a queer writer with work appearing or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, The Lascaux Review, and others. She is working on her first poetry collection, which follows three generations of women as they navigate depression, addiction, and suicide. She is a poetry candidate in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Central Florida.