The Bear And The Cow – JB Mulligan

She was mashing the potatoes when he walked into the kitchen nad proclaimed,
“Hey babe, I saw your ex at the bar again.”
“Ted.”
“The man himself. And he had a stranger day than I did.

He’s driving along in his patrol car, end of his shift, and he saw a cow lumber by him, running like crazy, on the grass on the opposite side of the road. This is about a mile from the farmer’s market, going away from town. And what do you suppose is chasing the cow?”
“I have no idea,” she confesses. Another dollop of milk for the potatoes.
“A bear. Yeah, a goddamn bear. Well, he starts after them, not really sure what he can do, and the bear runs the cow down, jumps on the cow’s hindquarters and starts savaging the thing. Can you picture that?”
Yes, she could.

“So, he stops the car, gets his rifle out of the trunk, and he has to kill the bear. Poor thing was just hungry.”
Just a small splash more milk.
“He had to shoot the damn cow too. Too tore up to save.”
She put the potatoes on the kitchen table, next to the steak, and went to the stove to drain the broccoli.
“Potatoes are a bit runny babe. But good. Good.”

About the contributor: JB Mulligan has had more than 1000 poems and stories in various magazines over the past 40 years, and has had two chapbooks published: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, as well as 2 e-books, The City of Now and Then, and A Book of Psalms (a loose translation). He has appeared in several anthologies, among them: Inside/Out: A Gathering Of Poets; The Irreal Reader; and multiple volumes of Reflections on a Blue Planet.