Operator: Hello, Downsville Police Department. How may I direct your call?
Jimmy Clarke: Hiya, miss. Who can I speak to about a missing cow?
Operator: Excuse me, sir? A missing cow?
Jimmy Clarke: Yessum. My best heifer, Amy Winehouse, has up and disappeared.
Operator: Sir, this line is for official police business only.
Jimmy Clarke: I ain’t prankin’ ya, ma’am! I got this cow named Amy Winehouse. I know it’s strange, but my wife, she just loves the singer and was all tore up when she passed on, so we named a beautiful black calf in her memory. She’s grown now, but she’s gone!
Operator: Okay, sir, please walk me through your morning so I can better assist you.
Jimmy Clarke: Well, I got up at about 4am, had me some coffee, stretched a couple-a times, and then I went out to my barn to feed my ladies–that’s what I call my cows, you see–and Amy Winehouse’s stall was empty!
Operator: Could it be that the gate was left open and she’s just walked off?
Jimmy Clarke: No ma’am, no ma’am. Can you please send over an officer so we can straighten this out and find my girl?
Operator: Hold please. Okay, sir, I have contacted dispatch. An officer should be over to you within thirty minutes.
Jimmy Clarke: Thank you kindly.
Operator: All units: 10-91, I’ve got a report of a missing cow down at the Clarke Dairy Farm. I repeat, 10-91, missing cow.
Officer Bobby Monaghan: 10-1. There’s gotta be something with my reception. Did you say that we have a missing cow?
Operator: 10-4.
Officer Bobby Monaghan: Hah, alright, 10-98. I’m available to assign.
Operator: 10-4, Officer Monaghan. 10-49: Please proceed to the Clarke Dairy Farm.
Officer Bobby Monaghan: 10-4. Over and out.
On Thursday, July 9, 2015, Officer Bobby Monaghan, single, 34, was enjoying a Dunkin Donuts big n’ toasted breakfast sandwich with a medium toasted almond coffee (light, sweet, and oh so secret–if the other guys knew how he liked his coffee, he’d never hear the end of it) in his car down by the railroad tracks when the call came in. A missing cow down at the Clarke Dairy Farm. He just had to laugh about it. True to its name, Downsville, New York offered nothing in the way of entertainment, or happiness, for that matter. In fact, a missing cow was probably the most action that he would see as a police officer for probably three years.
Of course, he could’ve moved away. Everyone else had, but Downsville was his home and whenever he ventured outside of its tiny, tiny limits, he had the feeling that he was going to be eaten alive, so he preferred to bask in this small town bliss, where he was the most handsome, most intelligent,and most confident man around. He chose to finish his breakfast sandwich and coffee before driving to the farm. How far could the cow have gone, anyway?
He was familiar with the farm, of course. Everyone his age was. Trying to tip cows just before high school graduation was practically a rite of passage. He and his buddies found that tipping cows was actually harder than it sounded. They relentlessly threw their heavy football player bodies against some poor cow’s flanks, trying to tip her over until their shoulders ached and she just continued gnawing on hay like they weren’t even there.
Bobby finished his sandwich, wiped his mouth, and started his cruiser. He was interested in what kind of old story Jimmy Clarke was going to spin this time. He was hoping that the cow had been abducted by aliens. That’d certainly be a new one.
The signal. Three flashes out over the horizon. Nadya stood in that same cursed field in that same cursed spot, chewing and chewing on grass until her jaw hurt, day after day waiting for the signal. Truthfully, she thought it would never come.
Nadya корова was born and raised in Downsville to Russian immigrants, Aleksandr and Tatiana корова. When their country’s agricultural industry was on the decline, the cost of healthy, strapping cows and bulls was at an all-time low, so Jimmy Clarke took advantage of the historically low rates and purchased the two heifers, allowing them to emigrate to America and infiltrate from the inside, like KGB spies if they had been cows.
Aleksandr and Tatiana were brought to Clarke’s Dairy Farm shortly before Nadya was born, and though she was raised to believe in American ideals on the outside, in her heart, she cherished Mother Russia.
That infernal Jimmy Clarke named her Amy Winehouse after a deceased singer and oh how his fat old wife wailed when he told her! She could still feel the woman’s flubbery arms squeezing her neck and shoulders, whispering in her little baby calf ears about how her black fur matched Winehouse’s coif and singing her famed Rehab.
Tatiana urged her to shake off the Americans’ sentiments and answer to Amy Winehouse when they called, though deep down she would always be Nadya корова, daughter of Aleksandr and Tatiana, meant for big things.
Jimmy Clarke was standing on his dusty front porch with his arms crossed, waiting for Officer Bobby Monaghan to pull up. He thought he was driving slower than usual this morning, possibly because he wasn’t exactly taking the whole missing cow situation seriously.
Monaghan parked and took his time getting out of the cruiser, straightening his hat, adjusting his belt, and snorting as he walked toward Jimmy. He said, “Morning, Mr. Clarke.”
“Well, if that isn’t Bobby Monaghan! Hey, go long! Heh, heh,” joked Jimmy.
Bobby tipped his hat and said, “Yeah, those football days are long behind me, sir. So, what seems to be the problem?”
Jimmy guided him into his home gestured toward the kitchen table. “Sit, sit, please. Fancy a glass of lemonade?”
“Sure, Mr. Clarke. So what seems to be the problem?” he asked as he took out his notepad and clicked his pen.
Jimmy sat down opposite the young policeman, scratching his forehead. “Well, ain’t it the darndest thing, Bobby. I went out to the barn this morning and Amy Winehouse was just gone.”
“Uh, Amy Winehouse?”
“Yessum. The wife loved the singer. We named our calf in her memory. She grew big and strong and now she generates the most milk outta all of em!”
Bobby raised his eyebrows and kept writing, “Uh huh. So, did you have a look around? Did anything seem out of the ordinary to you?”
“Well, there was a door in the barn that I ain’t never seen before. And it was open, come to think of it,” said Jimmy.
“A door you’ve never seen?” asked Bobby, “Did you go in?”
“No sir! I thought I’d wait for the proper authorities, yes I did.”
As Nadya came of age, her mission became clear. The cows of Russia were deeply disturbed that the Space Race had evidently ended, so they worked in secret for years in underground facilities on new innovations in astrophysics and space travel.
Aleksandr and Tatiana built a small lab beneath their barn. It took them months, much longer than it would if a team of humans worked on it, but their Russian work ethic came through and the built a state-of-the-art space station beneath Clarke’s Dairy Farm, complete with testing stations and an actual one-cow rocket that were discretely shipped in under cover of night while the people of Downsville slept soundly in their beds.
Nadya, of course, understood her position. As a cowsmonaut, she knew that her chances, not only of survival but an actual safe return to Earth, were slim to none, but she believed so strongly in her cause to travel to Mars in the name of Mother Russia, that she went through a rigorous training process by night, always making it back to her stall just in time for Jimmy Clarke to ring the bell and milk the cows each morning, exhausted and lazy.
Jimmy and Bobby made small talk as they walked to the barn, joking here and there about the weather, their town, and finally the impossibility of a vanished cow. They both thought deep down that Amy Winehouse would turn up somewhere, somehow, they just had to find her. Bobby was sure that the secret door in the barn was just a room that the old farmer had forgotten about and that the cow was stuck in there, unable to turn around and simply walk out and back to the comfort of her stall.
The two men entered the barn and saw that the door was still ajar, but curiously the light that had been shining through the crack that morning was off. Jimmy reckoned that a bulb burned out.
Aleksandr and Tatiana watched the men walk through their space, keenly alert like cats on the prowl, yet they seemed generally uninterested in their surroundings like the lethargic American cows that they were.
Bobby and Jimmy made it to the door and heard the slight whirring and beeping of machinery below. Bobby drew his gun and motioned for Jimmy to stay behind him. They walked cautiously through the door and came upon a winding staircase. They followed it down.
And at the bottom they saw Nadya, sleeping peacefully in her one-cow rocket, waiting patiently for the scheduled take off that evening.
“What in tarnation…” started Jimmy.
“I think you’ve got some explaining to do, sir,” said Bobby.
The door shut behind them, and there in the shadows sat an old withered cow, Bessie, who Jimmy believed was three years dead. “Sit,” she said.
“Did that cow just talk?” asked Bobby.
“I said sit,” said Bessie.
They sat quietly, stunned at the cowsmonauts that had been living under their very noses for years, waiting for Nadya’s history-making lift-off.
Marie Cummings Hendry 