Oskar Weiss is pleased to announce Kühe und Pferde, curated by Maya Oehlen.
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He hadn’t wanted to take the job. But the job came from his uncle, his uncle had arranged it, and not wanting to offend him, he’d nodded when the man threw him a wink that suggested a familiarity that didn’t exist. He left the birthday gathering with a part-time job; he started the following week.
The morning was cold, frost on the road and on the harvested fields he passed in his father’s car. He’d barely left town when he switched on the high beams. As if the car were growing. It was half-past six, perhaps a bit later, but certainly not yet seven, and it was still dark. As he turned into the yard, the car’s ventilation pulled in the smell of cowshed, of cow shit and straw, of mud, and he smelt the plane trees that surrounded the yard.
The owner wasn’t there. The workers had been at it all night, slaughtered the entire herd on the premises—they could do that with the bolt guns, which they didn’t normally use here. Normally there was no slaughtering done on the farm, only processing, then the meat was sold in the farm shop. But the abattoir was overwhelmed, the owner was overwhelmed, and since you got a premium for carrying out the emergency cull once you’d proved the carcasses were destroyed, word had gone out to find people who wouldn’t understand or tell anyone what had to be done.
If he’d gotten to the farm sooner, he might have seen the cattle’s breath in the air. It had been going on for weeks: first they couldn’t move properly, then they had to lie down more and more often. There were maybe two or three from the herd behaving like that, because the cattle had been fed dead cattle and dead pigs and dead Christ-knows-what, which had itself been infected, and so what had started out wrong just carried on that way.
On the field, wooden pallets were smoking, old beams, straw. Next to them a van, tailgate open. He saw the calves, curled up like sleeping dogs, their eyes closed, their legs stiff and twisted. They were small, smaller than sleeping dogs.
When he lifted the carcass from the flatbed, he grabbed the hide, which was cold and damp. Two of them could shift the animal, but if one of them lost hold of either the front or back legs, the body hit the ground—this happened maybe three or four times out of the twenty bodies altogether. A sound, too: when they landed on the beams in the fire. A quieter sound: when they fell next to the beams in the straw. The fire burnt badly; the smell was unbearable.
Who’d come up with this useless idea, this botched job, this dodgy operation?
The smoke rose into a grey midday sky as he drove home. He’d forgotten his jacket. The money was in his trouser pocket.
Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff, excerpt from a novel manuscript, November 2025
