big boob cowgirl vol. 22

things to live for + part 4 of hannah's story!

Dear readers! Our next post will be our Spring Edition and the theme is SOON TO BLOOM. If you feel inspired to write something please email us at bigboobcowgirlpr@gmail.com by March 25.

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Butter by ashlon

things to live for part 2, click here for part 1

When older women say “that’s so [insert European country here] of you”

Bread w butter

Cleaning your glasses off and being able to see clearly again

Bread and butter pickles (those are the sweet ones)

Wearing socks to bed

Clean sheets

When colors are named after food (i.e. butter yellow, asparagus green)

When there’s a pigeon on the subway (she has places to be)

A fun flavored lemonade

Coming up with a perfect routine that’s going to change your life for the better, but then you only do it for two days, but that’s actually perfect because you get to make a whole new perfect routine

The first day of spring when everyone comes out of hibernation and the city comes alive

When your feet are cold and you put them underneath the butt of someone you love

Falling asleep to a movie you’ve seen before

Making a baked good for your friends and they eat it and they all tell you they like it

‎✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡𖧧・ 𓂃˖₊⊹・‎✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡𖧧・ 𓂃˖₊⊹・‎✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡𖧧・ 𓂃˖₊⊹・

False Light: Part 4 by Hannah

The days and weeks passed by us, and those eventually became years, and myself and Katarzyna and Aniela grew up. I grew particularly tall and broad-shouldered, Nell and Kasia slight and small, and we stayed at the house. When I became strong enough, I assumed the duties of fishing and chopping the firewood and tending the animals, and Nell prepared all of our meals as her mother’s fingers curled with arthritis. Nell and I married after a good many years, and we had four children, beautiful like her and strong like me, and Kasia watched after them as we tended the property.

Our oldest, Franciszek, grew like a tree and began taking our pork to market and trading for sheep and goats, and then trading bundles of pure fleece for blocks of fine stone, and I taught him how to make a sundial and read the sky.

Yulia, ever the middle child, and the twins, Daria and Danuta, began taking the sheep to pasture, and Nell taught the girls how to sew and weave the wool, and dye it with pigments of crushed flowers and soils, and Kasia taught them how to tend the garden.

All of our children had Nell’s eyes, like onyx stones, and their hair flowed long and dark out of their scalps. Of all of them, only Yulia truly held on to my features. Her aquiline nose and dimpled cheeks, her smile, her ears: I felt a mild satisfaction that at least one of my progeny would pass on my features.

The children slept with Katarzyna in Nell’s old bedroom, and we shared Lucja and Edmund’s room. They had grown old and, despite their excellent health, it eased Nell’s fears when we slept close by incase of an accident in the night. Nell and I had long outgrown our midnight jaunts in the snow, and I slept deeply each night feeling that ever-present rush of cold river over me. At first strange, it had stayed with me my entire life and now I imagined it would feel foreign without that sensation.

Tonight, however, sleep evaded me. Nell snored softly beside me, and her parents rested peacefully in their bed. No matter how long I shut my eyes and tried joining them, it was a useless effort and I eventually gave up.

I coaxed a small fire to life in the hearth, and sitting before it helped soothe the chill of night. It was autumn, and although the freeze of the winter season hadn’t yet set in, the night air still had a crisp bite. Not wanting to wake up Lucja or the children, I crept as stealthily as I could to our linen closet. Hung in the small room next to our cleaned and folded bed sheets and clothes were the winter coats, lightly dusty from disuse during the warm months.

Running my hands through the coats, I found my hand resting on my long-forgotten raccoon coat. The waxed fur was soft in my fingers, and without thinking I put it on. I remembered suddenly, like waking up from a frightening dream, how large it had once fit me. Yes…all those years ago, when I was only a boy, and my sister and I were lost in the snow, the driving snow that never seemed to stop, and the hunger…

Startled, I felt a small hand on my arm. It was Yulia, rubbing her eyes sleepily.

“Why are you awake?” I asked, and picked her up.

“I had a dream,” she said. I brought her over to the hearth and we sat in front of the warm fire. Yulia touched the arm of my coat, politely curious. “What is this?”

“A coat made of raccoon pelt,” I replied, slightly amused.

“Did you make it?” she asked, feeling the soft pelt between her fingers.

I paused, and I felt a peculiar sensation. “No. My brother…it was his.”

“Where is your brother? When will I meet him?” she asked, her brow furrowed.

I found myself searching for words, any words, but nothing came. A simple sentence, a proclamation, a question, nothing. I tried thinking of just one word, my brother’s name, and it still escaped me. My brother. My parents. Nothing.

Yulia crawled into my lap and embraced me tightly, and I realized that I was weeping. Large tears welled from my eyes and dripped onto the coat, and I wondered why. I hugged my beloved daughter close. I couldn’t shake the odd sensation that came over me; as if I was that child again, lost and cold and scared, but also myself now, with my children and my wife safe and warm and fed, my daughter in my arms and she’s the spitting image of me. I wasn’t quite sure how to reconcile that child’s existence, the child I was, drowning in snow, drowning in my brother’s coat…

I realized I was shivering, so I put out the fire and waved away the smoke that curled into the house. It was dark, and silent, and I still felt very far away from my body. Wrapping the raccoon coat tighter, I walked Yulia back to her bedroom.

Franciszek slept peacefully, and the twins curled around each other in their quilt. Careful not to disturb them, I tucked Yulia into her bed and made sure she was warm under her quilt. She fell asleep in a matter of moments, and I grinned at my perfect, unblemished children and the innocence they held in their sleep.

Quietly, I turned and saw Kasia in her bed on the opposite wall. Relief spread in my chest when I saw her there, dreaming and wrapped in her wool blanket. Careful not to wake her, I squeezed her leg and found, to my delight, that she did still sleep with her shoes on. Ever since our days in the snow, the cold had never truly left her, and she preferred sleeping with her shoes on even in the dead of summer.

I smiled, relieved, that I was here and she was here with me. It was real. I was real. As slowly and carefully as possible, I lifted the blanket to reveal Kasia’s feet, which were still clad in her gardening shoes. I began unlacing them, reminded that she and Daria had harvested a fruitful bounty of squash and snow peas earlier that day. Nell was planning to cook with them for supper today–maybe stuffed in cabbage rolls, or spiced and roasted, or–

I froze in my thoughts as Kasia’s right shoe came off. Her leg, just as I had always known it, ended not in a matching ankle and foot with toes, but instead with a scaly chicken’s foot, with scaly skin and sharp, white talons. My arms felt like stones as I pulled off her other shoe. Also a chicken’s foot. I didn’t understand. I must have been dreaming. I looked at Katarzyna’s sleeping face, and found she was smiling at me.

“Eliaw, why did you look?”

I couldn’t find the words, nor move my mouth to form them. She shook her head ruefully.

“It is a shame it has to end now. You are so succulent,” she said, still smiling.