A Morning for Munch

Once upon a Munch time there was a cow called Munch. On a certain sunny morning Munch yawned, stretched, rubbed his Munch cow eyes with his Munch cow hooves, climbed out of his stall and into the farm field, to discover that the world was upside down.

The trees were standing on their leaves, their roots stretching to the clouds. The grass he munched for breakfast that usually rested so firmly beneath his legs hung suspended above, just out of reach of his large pink Munch cow nose. And though he wasn’t quite sure how this was possible, Munch the cow found himself standing on the sky.

He paused to consider his situation. “This seems to be an unusual day. I wonder how it will turn out? Perhaps I should see my farm animal friends and find out what’s going on.” Munch set off slowly, gingerly, towards the farmyard. He did not want to make any sudden moves, in case it caused him to fall up from the ground and land in the grassy sky with a thud.

Strangely, it seemed that the closer he got to the yard, the further it appeared, until just as Munch was about to turn back, he arrived at the white wooden fence. Our cow peered inside, and was startled. “Well!” He thought, “This day continues to unfold in a most peculiar fashion.”

Munch’s friends were indeed behaving oddly. The sheep were sitting cross-legged knitting scarves and jumpers and mittens. One of them was making a bobble hat.

The chickens had pecked out a checker board and were using grasshoppers as checker men. They poked them with their beaks and the grasshoppers would jump to the exact correct square to await the next move. Two of the hoppers were wearing little grasshopper crowns.

And the pigs, well, the pigs were lined up by the water nozzle, wrapped in beach towels and wearing shower caps, taking turns hosing each other down. They lathered up with lavender & tea tree oil shampoo, and afterwards trotted to the trough to rinse and floss their teeth.

Munch shook his head – his ears waggling back and forth – and a bee zubbed into view. Munch had never heard a bee “zubbing” before. Sure enough, the bee was flying backwards. This was getting to be a little too much for our cow, and he started to feel a headache coming on.

“I’m going back to the barn,” Munch thought, “and work out exactly what’s happening.” As he walked through the big doors, he saw a blurry cloud moving in the air. It was a mass of miniature starlings, soaring around the hayloft in a beautiful murmuration just above his stall.

Munch watched them with awe as he walked through his gate, and his Munch cow body began to turn over. “Hold on,” he thought, “I don’t know if I like this!” Then his left front leg buckled, and he lurched sideways. His right rear leg began to jerk in a spasm, kicking and kicking and kicking again. The cloud of tiny birds suddenly filled the air, coming down upon him in a swarming black blur, and with one loud zub-ZUB, our Munch cow lost his vision. In that moment, the ache in his head grew in intensity a hundredfold, a thousandfold, and Munch had time for one final, fearful thought: “Oh my. This isn’t going to be a good day, after all.” His body shuddered uncontrollably to a heap on the floor.

A glancing bolt-blow to the brain, sloppily administered by a tired abattoir worker, left our Munch cow wildly flailing around at the bottom of his stall. It took a fraction less than 3.5 seconds for the slaughter man to reposition the gun onto Munch’s skull and pull the trigger again, relieving him of his agony. But in that 3.5 seconds the disturbed imagination of our stunned cow created one last fantasy jaunt around his farmyard home. And though to Munch it felt like a long, lazy if unusual wander, in reality it lasted only until the second bolt zub-zubbed in and out of his frontal cortex and completed its job, rendering Munch the cow unconscious and insensitive to the knife that subsequently slit his throat. Our Munch did not feel the blood run out his jugular vein in the minute and 26 seconds it took to empty down the abattoir drain. Nor did he feel his leather skin peeled from his carcass a half hour later, nor his four haunches wrenched from their sockets that afternoon. Nor would our Munch feel the flame of the grill, the pat of the spatula, nor the teeth of the child biting into the burger that would eventually be made from his ground up, reconstituted flesh.