Free What Comes After by Steve Watkins

the goats, I scratched them under their chins, and hugged them, and let them out in their field.
    Aunt Sue had already laid out the strainer and thermometer and timer in the kitchen. I pulled out the big pots and set them on the stove to pasteurize the new milk and start the cheese process all over again. After that, I went back out to the barn to collect the eggs, feed the chickens, and look for anything else to do to keep me distracted. When I finally emerged from the barn, Book and Tiny were staggering toward the house. Their faces had been chewed raw by mosquitoes. The next time I saw them, their skin was entirely pink, as though they’d poured a whole bottle of calamine lotion on their heads.
    I spent the day in the barn cleaning everything I could find to clean that I hadn’t gotten to before. The goats all crowded around to watch me, or more likely to see if I’d brought them anything to eat. Once it was clear that I hadn’t, they wandered back off into the field. They needed their hooves trimmed, but I figured it would be a battle with Tammy, and maybe all of them, so I’d wait awhile before taking that on. I’d helped Dad trim the hooves of plenty of horses and cows over the years, but they were usually docile, especially compared to goats. Plus Dad was Dad — he could handle any animal, no matter how frightened or hostile. He always knew how to talk to them, how to calm them, how to get them to cooperate. I was just the helper. The sidekick. The daughter who everybody thought was so cute to be tagging along with her dad on his vet rounds. I wished I was still that girl.
    Aunt Sue went into town that afternoon — it was Sunday — and she was in a good mood when she came home.
    She’d bought a new flat-screen TV. I watched her as she carried it in from the truck.
    “They had one of those employee discount sales at the Walmart,” she said, though I hadn’t asked.
    She and Book spent the rest of the afternoon hooking it up, while I stayed outside with the goats and Gnarly.
    That evening Aunt Sue cooked greens. Someone had given them to her at the farmers’ market the day before. She also heated leftover chicken potpie for herself and Book. It was the second night in a row we didn’t have sandwiches, but she hadn’t forgotten about my being a vegetarian, because after I ate all my greens, she said, “Ha! I cooked them with fatback. That’s what you get for not eating what you’re served. And for leaving your cousin out there in the truck like you did last night to get chewed up by mosquitoes.”
    I pushed myself away from the table and walked quickly to the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth for ten minutes before I felt like I got the taste out.
    Aunt Sue kept at it the next couple of nights, too. She made canned vegetable soup to go with our sandwiches. She said it was vegetarian, but I didn’t believe her. I tasted it, then put down my spoon.
    Aunt Sue cackled.
    “Oh, wait. I didn’t mention there was chicken broth in there?”
    Then she served some nasty gray stuff. “That’s called wheat gluten,” she said. “It’s for vegetarians. It’s like a meat substitute. Honest. I got it at the health store. They got one in town.”
    Book grinned, and I knew something was up.
    I poked at it with my fork and smelled it. I shoved my plate away and stood up from the table. It was fried liver.
    So I stopped sitting down to dinner with Aunt Sue and Book altogether after that and pretty much lived on peanut-butter sandwiches, which I fixed when Aunt Sue wasn’t around, and on whatever canned vegetables and fruit they served at school.
    Meanwhile Aunt Sue kept buying stuff. She bought a new CD player, and a microwave oven, and had a satellite dish installed for the big-screen TV.
    “How’d we get all this?” Book asked as they pored over the operation manual.
    Aunt Sue shrugged. “Raise at work.”
    I fumed about the tricks Aunt Sue had played on me with the food, and I fumed about the purchases. I