Ceit wiped the sweat trickling down her face with the back of her plaid sleeve. She had been up since the small hours of the morning, tending to the cows. They were milked, fed, and bedded now, and her stomach grumbled for her own breakfast. It was exhausting work, made even more so by her missing leg.
She finished double checking that the water troughs were clean and headed into her family’s ranch house through the mud room. The house was home for several generations of her family, a sprawling ranch style abode with several additions, all encompassed by an extensive wrap-around porch and covered wooden pathways. Several rocking chairs swayed in the mid-morning breeze and a dog lifted its head as she passed, its tail thumping heavily on the wood in greeting.
Her cousins’ thick rubber boots were already scattered in the room. They had come in much earlier, after finishing their own chores.
She sat on the rough wooden bench, discarding her wrap-around sunglasses and removing her own boots with some difficulty, before washing her hands in the muddy wash bin and heading to join the rest of the family in the bustling kitchen. Their happy laughter echoed down the hall, the rich smells of coffee and bacon greeting her as she slowly made her way.
‘Ceiti baby!’ Her great aunt Keris boomed, recognizing her by her gait before she made the final turn. A wall of heat from the stove in the kitchen met her, warming her from the brisk weather outdoors. ‘Sausage or bacon, my love!’ Tongs clacked in her hand as she manned a set of burners at one of the stoves. ‘Sausage please, aunty.’ While the bacon was good, smoked by a neighboring farm and cured with sugar maple, Keris made their sausage from scratch, the perfect blend of salty, savory, and sweet, with spicy pink peppercorn.
Her mother Eistra made her way over, hovering as she pulled a chair out for herself at the huge round table that took up most of the free space in the open walled room adjacent to the kitchen. ‘I’m fine mama, I can pull out a chair by myself.’ She said with a huff, trying not to be too annoyed, while sitting down only a little heavily. ‘Of course you can, sweet heart,’ she fussed. She bustled off to assist elsewhere.
Cousins squabbled happily over several piping hot breakfast dishes, pulling them off the lazy susan as they rotated past, while dogs wandered underneath, scrounging for dropped scraps and being generally underfoot. Ceit sighed contentedly.
Her older cousin Xia to the left reached across the table to pull a clean plate from the stack, piling it with food before placing it in front of her with a wide grin. He knew she didn’t like the peppers mixed in with the seasoned potatoes but there was a large helping next to her eggs. She glared at him half heartedly as she took a large bite of honeydew melon. ‘I can make up my own plate, I don’t need you messing it up with gross stuff.’ He playfully ruffled her curly hair in response before going back to his own food and the animated discussion he was having with her older sister Luth, her own long shiny hair a swaying sheet behind her as she gesticulated. Ceit eyed it. She had gotten her curls from her Eistra, whereas Luth’s straight hair had come from their father.
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As if called by her thoughts, her father appeared from the far hall, her baby brother drowsy on his hip and several smaller cousins in tow, rubbing sleep out of their eyes and yawning. He plopped them down at a smaller children sized table, helping them to assemble their own plates. Once situated, he made his way over to Eistra to give her a kiss before heading to the kitchen to help mitigate the massive pile of dishes and cookware that had built up in the massive sink next to Keris, who smiled at him cheerily in thanks.
‘They called up, going to be a little late with milk pick up today, got some engine trouble.’ An uncle spoke up to the assembled looking up from his plate. One of the many cousins groused, ‘they said that last week too, I told them to take it to the tinkerers, they’re the only ones that can really get the ancients’ machinery to work again if it’s acting up that bad.’ Ceit hummed in agreement.
The tinkerers specialized in ancients’ machinery. At one time it hadn’t been so ancient, so unfamiliar, but Oongx’s wrath had rained down, causing mass destruction across the city and the surrounding countryside. Much previously held knowledge had been lost. Ceit’s family had only in the past several generations been able to incorporate ancient farm machinery with the tinkerers’ help. But despite the calamity, they were grateful to Oongx. It was her benevolence that had spared them complete destruction, despite their transgressions, that gave them another chance to right their wrongs.
It was the reason for her family’s dedication to their herd. Lore held that generations ago, Oongx was a calf in their fold, her mother fed feed contaminated with god seed by their unscrupulous care. Oongx drank her mother’s contaminated milk, rife with her mother’s decaying flesh. While Oongx survived the transformation into a god, her mother, like all the others in the herd, had not, and Oongx required penance for the sin.
She now governed over them from her constellation in the sky, circling their skies in the summer to watch over the herd and accepting the worship of cow and human alike. The cows celebrated Oongx on stormy nights, while her family’s rituals took place every new moon.
During stormy summer nights, the cows would be put in their holy pasture, where they would stand, faces to the sky, encircling their holy tree, waiting for the lightning to strike it, move through leaving lichtenberg-like marks across their hides, and take up residence in their bodies. The sentient lightning carried messages and blessings from Oongx in the sky, she rarely came down herself. The electric charge of the lightning changed the composition of their milk, which would be collected the next morning during milking and be fermented for their human symbiote’s own religious rites.
The nights would be late ones for Ceit’s family, waiting outside the field in case any cow needed support after their communion. Sometimes the intensity of Oongx’s message was too much and a cow would faint.
Ceit finished her plate, bringing it over to her father at the sink with a thanks and a quick but tight hug, then heading back out with the rest of her cousins to get the calves their breakfast before the milk truck arrived.
The giant storage tanks stood tall outside the milking parlor, quick-cooling the collected milk and keeping it chilled before its transfer to the milk tanker truck. Their trucks were one of the few vehicles that still used wheels, rather than the ancients hover technology, presumably because of the shear weight it carried. Which was running late. Again, Ceit thought, uncharitably. It wasn’t that they were irresponsible - their trucks were always perfectly temperature and humidity controlled, but it was still frustrating.
The truck finally peaked over the hills in the distance, lurching to a stop in front of the building, Hapas, the driver hopping out to greet them exuberantly as his partner began unwinding the tubing in the rear of the truck with the help of Xia.
‘Hiya! Sorry about the hold up! Finally called a tinkerer and they managed to fix her up in a jiff! Shouldn’t be a problem again!’ He was usually a happy person, but it seemed the repair of the tanker put him in even better spirits than usual, the breadth of his smile making the apples of his cheeks more pronounced.
Ceit rolled her eyes behind his back not without some amusement, and seeing the pumping well in hand, headed out to check the cows’ pedometers before the nutritionist arrived.