Free Can't and Won't: Stories by Lydia Davis

behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos again in a high falsetto. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.
    Today, they are positioned exactly one behind the next in a line, head to tail, head to tail, as though coupled like the cars of a railway train, the first looking straight forward like the headlight of the locomotive.
    The shape of a black cow, seen directly head-on: a smooth black oval, larger at the top and tapering at the bottom to a very narrow extension, like a teardrop.
    Standing with their back ends close together now, they face three of the four cardinal points of the compass.
    Sometimes one takes the position for defecating, her tail, raised at the base, in the curved shape of a pump handle.
    They seem expectant this morning, but it is a combination of two things: the strange yellow light before a storm and their alert expressions as they listen to a loud woodpecker.
    Spaced out evenly over the pale yellow-green grass of late November, one, two, and three, they are so still, and their legs so thin, in comparison to their bodies, that when they stand sideways to us, sometimes their legs seem like prongs, and they seem stuck to the earth.
    How flexible, and how precise, she is: she can reach one of her back hooves all the way forward, to scratch a particular spot inside her ear.
    It is the lowered head that makes her seem less noble than, say, a horse, or a deer surprised in the woods. More exactly, it is her lowered head and neck. As she stands still, the top of her head is level with her back, or even a little lower, and so she seems to be hanging her head in discouragement, embarrassment, or shame. There is at least a suggestion of humility and dullness about her. But all these suggestions are false.
    He says to us: They don’t really do anything.
    Then he adds: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.
    Their grace: as they walk, they are more graceful when seen from the side than when seen from the front. Seen from the front, as they walk, they tip just a little from side to side.
    When they are walking, their forelegs are more graceful than their back legs, which appear stiffer.
    The forelegs are more graceful than the back legs because they lift in a curve, whereas the back legs lift in a jagged line like a bolt of lightning.
    But perhaps the back legs, while less graceful than the forelegs, are more elegant.
    It is because of the way the joints in the legs work: Whereas the two lower joints of the front leg bend the same way, so that the front leg as it is raised forms a curve, the two lower joints of the back leg bend in opposite directions, so that the leg, when raised, forms two opposite angles, the lower one gentle, pointing forward, the upper one sharp, pointing back.
    Now, because it is winter, they are not grazing but only standing still and staring, or, now and then, walking here and there.
    It is a very cold winter morning, just above zero degrees, but sunny. Two of them stand still, head to tail, for a very long time, oriented roughly east-west. They are probably presenting their broad sides to the sun, for warmth.
    If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?
    They are sometimes a mass of black, a lumpy black clump, against the snow, with a head at either end and many legs below.
    Or the three of them, seen from the side, when they are all facing the same way, three deep, make one thick cow with three heads, two up and one lowered.
    Sometimes, what we see against the snow is their bumps—bumps of ears and nose, bumps of bony hips, or the sharp bone on the top of their heads, or their shoulders.
    If it snows, it snows on them the same way it snows on the trees and the field. Sometimes they are just as still as the trees or the field. The snow piles up on their backs and heads.
    It has been snowing heavily for some time, and it is still snowing. When we go up to them, where they stand by the fence, we see