Phil's Cow Tail

During some time off, Phil grows udders at a farm thanks to a rivalry! Story written by and illustrated by
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Phil's Cow Tail

Phil had hoped that taking some time off to work on the Hobbling J Farm would help him re-energize, reconnect with nature and his roots, get some exercise...and most importantly, make some money. Stories abounded in town that the Hobbling J was wealthy as all get-out, and offering premium wages for work thanks to an investigation by Immigration and Naturalization that had put a major dent in the usual labor pool. The advertisement had promised "light organic fieldwork," "green energy training," and a "politics of agribusiness seminar."

Phil showed up to the Hobbling J wearing the best and only pair of overalls and farm boots he had, inherited from Great-Grandpa Phineas Adler. Phineas had always insisted that they alone were responsible for the farm's mysterious prosperity, and that blowing out their seat in '37 (now repaired by an expert seamstress) had been the sole cause of losing the farm. Phil's spirits were high, but they fell as soon as he saw who was waiting for him and the other workers at the gate.

"Well, well, well, it's been a long time," said Cleo Artap, as wan and tan as ever, whom Phil had sadly known for many years. "Not since you cut the fuel lines in my engine, wasn't it?"

Phil reddened. "They never proved that," he said.

"Of course not. They couldn't find any fingerprints to compare," smirked Cleo. "Very smart."

"I think I was punished enough for that, don't you?" replied Phil. "Especially since I didn't get a speck of the prize."

"We'll see about that, who's been punished enough and who hasn't," Cleo laughed mockingly. "But if you want a speck of my prize, by which I mean deluxe farmhand pay from the Hobbling J farm, you're going to do exactly as I say."

"Okay, okay," said Phil, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. "I just want to reconnect with the soil and earn an honest day's wage. Simple as that." Privately, he suspected that Cleo was more in the market for a dishonest day's wage, but he held his tongue. The Hobbling J was, after all, the only local farm not under investigation for the type of prions they liked to feature on The Shuffling Dead. And the ad had promised a heady combination of the old-fashioned and the new green age that was a-dawning across the nation's breadbasket.

"We'll see about that," sneered Cleo. “You ready for some light organic fieldwork?"

"Boy, am I ever!" Phil gushed excitedly.

Three hours later, Cleo walked up to him with her spurs jangling ostentatiously. Why she needed spurs when there wasn't a horse visible from horizon to horizon was beyond Phil, but so much sweat was running through the brown locks plastered to his forehead that he could barely even see through the stinging salt. She was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses beneath the wide brim of a cowboy hat that seemed about ten gallons too large for her, one that only generous bobby-pinnage could have ever held in place.

"How's the fieldwork coming?"

Phil sighed, exasperated. "How exactly is this light and organic work?" he asked, brandishing the tool he'd been issued: a pair of tweezers. He'd spent the intervening time laboriously plucking aphids, scale insects, boll weevils, Rocky Mountain Locusts, and the dreaded Sucking Dragonflies one at a time. He'd gotten about three stalks into the Hobbling J's cornfield, and had a creeping sensation that the critters were recolonizing the plants as he moved from one to the other.

"Looks like there's plenty of light to me!" Cleo cackled, looking skyward. The light from her mirrored shades dazzled Phil's eyes, proving for a moment that, yes, some things did sting more than three hours' worth of toil and sweat. "And do you see any harsh chemicals or pesticides in use here? I think not. Completely organic."

"The tweezers are steel," Phil grunted.

"Good point!" Cleo snatched the implement from between Phil's gloved fingers. "I'm glad you caught that! How about you just keep on going with your fingers?"

"No," groused Phil. "You're just trying to torture me out here. I'll do real work for you, but if you're just going to trump stuff up, I'll take my leave."

Cleo glanced over her shades. "What we have here," she grinned, "is a failure to communicate. On to the green energy training, perhaps?"

"Yes, please," Phil said, looking at a locust on one overall leg and a Sucking Dragonfly on the other with a shudder. "Whatever it really is, green energy training couldn't possibly be worse than this."

Another two hours had passed in a winking. At the end of his new toil, Phil could only sigh.

"It's worse than light organic fieldwork."

What Cleo had meant by green energy training was emptying out the Hobbling J's overflowing dumpster, into which refuse had been flung willy-nilly without anything so dignified as a trash bag, and feeding anything that looked edible to Cleo's swarm of hogs in the farm's festering, overflowing pen. It had putrefied in the oven where the metal and summer heat formed together, and every last bit of food was swarming with critters so vile that they made the Rocky Mountain Locusts and Sucking Dragonflies look positively cuddly by comparison. The hogs ate the proffered slop greedily, without even the luxury of a trough, and seemed to take special delight in spattering Phil with unspeakable juices or flecks of their unimaginable wallow as they chased down the delectable blowflies, corpseflies, and Spanish flies that had managed to pupate despite all hardships.

"How can you eat all of this crap and stay so thin?" Phil groaned, removing a handful of half-eaten McSweenyBurgers and flinging them and their attendant ecosystems to the pigs. "Look how fat it makes your pigs!"

Cleo, who was lying prone a safe distance away, working on her tan, shrugged in her hammock. "You make me puke," she said offhandedly. "And you're not the only one."

Phil looked at the swarming lifeforms on his gloves and the swarming lifeforms in the pen, one trying to get away and the other indolently oinking for more. They were both pale and tube-shaped and writhing in filth, at least, to give the whole process a sort of symmetry. He flung the greasy fast-food leavings on the packed earth. "Enough!" he cried. "Your green energy training is just as misleadingly named as the other thing!"

"I'll not have you impugning my honor, boy!" Cleo cried without moving a muscle. Even her lips barely twitched, for fear of upsetting her ongoing bronzing. "It's green energy training through and through. Why, what is that slop but energy for the bugs and hogs? What is that making the sun wobble in the sky but methane fumes, a greenhouse gas? And what are you but a trained set of meat moving meat? Again, don't blame me for your warped expectations."

"Look," Phil said. "Either give me some real farm work or let's get to the politics of agribusiness seminar at least." He actually was keenly interested in the latter, having often toyed with the notion of taking up the plow like Great-Grandpa Phineas.

"Fine, fine," Cleo said dismissively. "We'll get you set up with that seminar. And this time, I promise that it's exactly what it says on the tin. Trust me."

It didn't take long for those words to ring completely hollow. Just long enough to reach the dairy barn, in point of fact, and roll aside the great red door keeping the ungulates inside.

"This isn't a 'politics of agribusiness' seminar," Phil said dejectedly, surveying the great mass of cows and the great mess from cows below them.

"It most certainly is," Cleo snapped. "It's all about flinging bullshit until the money comes. Shovel's over there; get digging!"

"It's worse than the Augean Stables, and that was one of the Twelve Labors of Hercules! And he had an assistant and river to help him!" Phil cried, holding back his gag reflex at the smell. "You want me to clean out the entire place?"

"Yes, and make it snappy," said Cleo. "I am bringing my Renaissance Faire compatriots over for a saddle and tack judging contest—as you know, I am quite active on that circuit under the nom-de-guerre Lady Galahag—and I want to have the entire area spotless enough to eat off of. Because we intend to!"

"You can't be serious," Phil said, looking at the mounds and mounds of bull.

"I am deadly serious," said Cleo, bucking on a sword and putting on a chainmail coif as if to drive the point home. "Now snap to it, or your employment contract is null and void and you won't see a cent of your good honest pay. All that hard work for nothing!"

Phil gritted his teeth. "Fine," he said. "But no more tricks."

"There's always another trick!" Cleo declared in a singsong voice as she shuttered the barn. "Ta-ta!"

Reluctantly, Phil took up the shovel and waded into the first pen. The cow—"Tessie" from her collar—obligingly stood motionless while Phil stuck his spade in her mound of reeking leavings, hoisting it up and over the pen wall to be gathered up from the aisle later. It wasn't long before Great-Grandpa Phineas’ overalls were caked with manure from the crotch down, Phil's leather gloves and work boots gathering an impressive collection of similar stains. But the worst thing, by far, was the stench: the overpowering aroma an essence of bovines, filling Phil's nostrils anew with each breath whether he wanted it to or not. Unlike most stenches he'd had to endure in his life—and there had been plenty from the locker room on down—this one never seemed to dull, and his nostrils never seemed to lose their sensitivity to it. It was a never-ending parade of foul odors.

"This is bullshit," Phil said, not even managing a half-smile at his pun.

Phil’s nostrils filled anew with the odor, flaring out. But then, for whatever reason—he would later blame whatever residual juju Great-Grandpa Phineas’ overalls had left in them—Phil's nostrils stayed flared. In fact, they grew larger and further apart with each breath. He didn't notice at first, being more preoccupied with the sudden and intense headache gnawing at his temples—forming a pair of bumps on his temples, in point of fact. Tessie mooed in a blasé tone, and the sound seemed to perk up Phil's ears. He chalked it up to his ancestor's farming instincts coming to the fore, and with no mirror, he couldn't see the lumpy pointed nubs at the tip of each lobe, wriggling to life much as the dumpster-bugs had.

"You said it, Tessie," Phil grunted, hefting a fresh load of campaign promises. He felt a tightness in his groin, the overalls suddenly fitting far more snugly than they had moments ago. This perplexed him.—how could he have gained weight after such a backbreaking day of misleadingly described labor?

Phil flung the bullshit over the wall and went to dig the shovel back in. This time, though, his fingers refused to cooperate—they'd grown quite stiff. Looking down, expecting to see the beginnings of a lawsuit's worth of arthritis, Phil instead gaped at his gloves. The leather was swollen—and swelling!—with each of the fingers far past its carrying capacity, and the digits within painfully stiff. The thick, rough stitches on Phil's left pinkie strained, exposing bits of…flesh?

"T-that can't be right," Phil muttered. Swelling was to be expected, inconvenient as it was…but brown and matted? Nothing but his hair should have met that description.

And yet, it was confirmed a moment later when the pinky's tip burst like a leather balloon, causing the rest of it to peel away banana-style. Phil's aching, trembling digit was hardening by the moment, and swelling from tip to base, to boot. The other fingers each squeezed painfully in turn before snapping at their breaking points. The newly freed and newly changing digits didn't stop being sore for even a second. Instead, they hungrily drew together, pressing apart and tearing the remaining bits of leather in their quest to be closer together. Two on Phil's left hand managed to sweep aside the leathery opposition and entered into a union, softening and blending into a larger appendage that continued the trend of growing and hardening.

Outside, Phil could hear hooves and the sound of revelry. He tried to call for help, but all that came out was a strangled—and inadvertent—"Moooo!" Indeed, his spreading nostrils had been busy and now occupied a vast swath of his face. They were now pushing out to colonize lands beyond the confines of his face, and as Phil crossed his eyes to get a better look, he felt his own bones and teeth beginning to grind in the throes of aggressive Manifest Destiny. Pinkening at the tip and sprouting tiny white hairs around the periphery, there was no mistaking what was happening to his face: a muzzling.

"Uhrrgg!" Phil cried, his teeth gritting partly from the pain and partly from their ongoing rearrangement into herbivore chompers inside a growing muzzle. His headache had manifested itself into the physical world in the form of a pair of thick, ivory-white horns sliding quietly out of the sides of his head, giving his mess of brown hair the temporary appearance of a Viking war helmet (which Cleo would have disqualified from the Renaissance Faire for historical inaccuracy and because thanks to Phil the rules very clearly stated that competitors had to be human at the time of judging).

But even as Great-Grandpa Phineas Adler's overalls began to disintegrate into a mass of tears around Phil's expanding hips, his eyes widened at another feature that was becoming visible: a set of four protruding nubs on an expanding base. They looked suspiciously, and unmistakably, like udders.

In fact, this mass had been responsible for the sum total of damage to Great-Grandpa Phineas’ prized garment. But Phil could feel the rest of his body beginning to get in on the act. His chest began to barrel out, and the much flimsier fabric of his plaid work shirt was unable to handle it, tearing around the more resilient buttons with a plaid work shrrrrp. Phil could feel his hips widening and reshaping around the udders that were bubbling up out of his torso, an irresistible tide of flesh that the weakened denim was unable to ignore. It parted in great runs like those in an old set of nylons, revealing flesh already speckled with white and black hairs.

"Moo." Tessie, next to Phil, said very nonchalantly. She seemed singularly unconcerned about the bovine metamorphosis going on next to her.

"M…m…m'OH!" Phil gurgled in response. He'd intended it to come out as "help me," but his vocal cords were freshly rearranged. So too was his swelling snout, which was cracking and growing faster now, the fur thickening and spreading as it distorted Phil's face in an ever more bovine direction. The cranial pressure was so intense, like coming down from 30,000 feet without popping his ears, that he squeezed his eyes shut in discomfort. This had the unexpected result of jump-starting the growth of his ears and horns: the former shuddered out to a length rivaling that of Phil's developing muzzle, sprouting their own forests of fur even as the inside pinkened to an extent unseen on Phil's human skin, but rapidly becoming apparent on his newly-wet nostrils. The latter? They attained their full bony girth in seconds, rivaling even Tessie's. The cow snorted at this unexpected competition.

As if egged on by the bovine's contempt, the changes sweeping Phil's body seemed to accelerate. His chest, still populating with stiff cow hairs, pulled at the stubborn flannel buttons, applying inexorable pressure to the strained and torn fabric. A final shudder was all it took to turn them into projectiles, snapping the threads that bound them and zinging off the pen walls like .22 bullets. Phil's biceps had gotten in on the action, shredding his sleeves upward and outward, and as his shoulders made up the difference, one of the overalls' two straps failed as well, with such force that the steel button embedded itself in a nearby timber. But it was the growing udder that was the major engine in the ongoing desecration of Great-Grandpa Phineas’ overalls: it bulged and flopped uneasily within the fabric, tearing as it swelled, the four teats becoming more distinct the harder they pressed. Phil's musculature obligingly adjusted itself, which caused rampantly swelling and furring flesh to spill out of seams and runs as they proliferated up and down either side of his torso. The strongest piece of fabric remaining, the seat, could only stand a moment of this abuse, as Phil's spine waggled itself a new extension: a firm tail slid through a rough hole it had just made, with a tiny mop of brown hair at its tip and a fresh crop of monochrome along its shaft.

"A toast! A toast to Lady Galahag!" someone cried outside. There was the sound of mugs clopping together and the unmistakable sound of honeyed mead being slurped down.

All Phil could manage was a clop of his own as his leather shoes parted at the front. Brushing aside the feeble resistance of woolen socks, his feet were getting long at the back and hard at the front, so much so that Phil could hardly keep his balance under the onslaught. Not to be shown up, his fingers redoubled their own efforts, shedding what was left of the gloves to become not so much hands as hooves, with a vague suggestion of hands somewhere in the recent evolutionary past.

"MooooOOOOH!" Phil uttered, the air forced from his lungs by the constraints of his overalls. They had reached a critical point, constricting flesh that clawed at every opening like a landslide. It was the udder, fittingly enough, which broke the stalemate: engorging rapidly, it burst through the midriff of the overalls in a tsunami of bovine flesh amid a whirlwind of denim shrapnel. The weight forced Phil forward, his erect stature becoming more of a squat. This was enough to snap the final overall strap, which flung its button into low-Earth orbit. Deprived of its last bedrock, the overalls peeled off Phil's back as fur hungrily took over the real estate. The change in stature was the end of Phil's footwear, too: one split lengthwise like a chrysalis shed by the hoof metamorphosing inside, while the other was ripped in half across its middle, a leatherine Titanic heel riding up Phil's new digitigrade calf as what had once been his toes tore its front to shreds.

Phil, his face almost completely transformed into a bovine countenance fit to rival Tessie's but for the continued presence of his brown hair, looked back woefully at the last bits of pale skin as they were swallowed by fur. The last bits of leather and flannel and denim in ropey strands across him, snapping one at a time. He could feel a most curious sensation beneath the udder, as his wee gentleman withdrew itself into a fleshy sheath, out of harm's way and out of sight. It was as if two sets of ravenous hormones were at work within his changing form, and that was the best compromise they could agree on between udder and member.

But there were other biomechanics to worry about—it was the end of walking erect. A muscular keel jutted out of Phil's chest, his spine crackled into shape, and he collapsed onto four complete hooves. A few more involuntary movements, and it was done. Phil looked back upon his changed self with an eye both surprised and incredulous, for the only remaining signs of his former humanity were his full head of hair, curiously preserved against the onslaught, and a scrap of plaid across his shoulder blades.

"Hmph," said Tessie. "About time you finished up and stopped complaining."

"W-what?" said Phil. A bystander without the power of beef would have heard only languid mooing, but he and the other cows now found themselves connected with the patois common to all ungulates.

"You heard me. That's a blessing right there, that is. The finest body plan on the face of the planet, and you get to partake in it," said Tessie. "Maybe now we can do something about that right bitch Cleo."

Phil the cow raised an eyebrow—which he had also retained—at the notion. "If I can open the barn door," he mooed, "will you and the other ladies follow me?"

Tessie, after a quick canvas of the room, bellowed an affirmative.

Outside, Cleo and her other pals from the Renaissance Faire had set up on the green, their royal picnic a feast fit for a king. In costume, Cleo hoisted her drinking horn for another toast…only to be interrupted by an ominous rumbling.

"What's that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose in annoyance.

A moment later, she found out: it was Phil and his bovine brethren, stampeding out the open barn door in a mad rush of beef and manure, headed straight for the picnic with a Pamplona-style moment of revenge on their minds.