The fly chased her to the delta. The moon, that rhyme, was sung many years later by children who didn’t know her. If she knew them she might lesson them on the offense it gives, conflation of cows. But bovine awareness had no grounds for invention at this point, and if justice blinked from her slumber, the delta cow would no longer have hooves and horns but instead return to her original form, upright as asphodel filaments and free from the spit.

Her flanks shuddered and dripped from the chase. She let her forelegs sink into the silt and resigned to the fly’s sting, the Nile’s advance. The river touched her knees and rose up her belly. It cleansed the clods and burrs from her travels and invited her to a new ideology.

When the water ebbed, the maiden had regained her human form, more or less. She kept the horns. The moon glowed between.