I wandered.
What else could I do? I had no phone, no money, no door, no job, no house, no—stop thinking!
The sun was still happily shining above me—genuinely, aggressively happy, like it had never heard of seasonal depression. Yeah, must be glad to be you, son—sun, son, sun, uh—sun.
The grass stretched in every direction without the courtesy of providing a landmark. Peaceful and void. I had to resist the urge of wanting to roll on this soft bed of green. I didn't want to starve!
The crow was gone. Good, no more crow-yapping.
I walked.
After some time—ten minutes? An hour? I had no phone to check—I saw a figure in the distance. A person. A human person, presumably, standing in a field and doing something with considerable focus and zero urgency.
I approached. Strangers are dangerous, but for now, nothing was more dangerous to me than being alone.
The person was a man. Medium height, broad shoulders, the specific build of someone who worked outdoors and had never thought about it as exercise. He was crouched over a hole in the ground, and in the hole was a cow.
Not a dead cow. A cow. A regular, living cow, standing in a hole that went up to its knees, looking at me with the particular vacancy that cows had apparently maintained across dimensional boundaries.
The man patted the cow on the head, said something to it I couldn't hear, and began filling the hole with dirt.
I watched this for longer than I should have.
"Hello," I said finally.
The man looked up. He had a broad, open face—the kind that defaulted to friendly without effort. He looked at me the way people looked at neighbors they hadn't seen in a while. Familiar. Unconcerned.
"Brother!" he said.
I looked behind me. There was no one there.
"...Me?"
"Yes, you!" He stood, wiping dirt from his hands onto his trousers. "You look like you're in search for Ey."
"I'm in search for—what?"
"Ey." He said it simply. Like it explained everything.
"What's Ey?"
He smiled. "Good question."
"...What's the answer?"
"Nobody knows."
I stared at him.
"That's the point," he added helpfully.
I decided to file that away for later. Possibly forever.
"Right," I said. "I'm Meyer. Meyer Mayer." I paused, then, out of habit: "I know, I know. It's a weird name. I should change it. Heard it a thousand times."
The man's face lit up. Genuinely, enthusiastically lit up, in the way of someone receiving very good news.
"That's a crazy cool name, brother! It also sounds like mine. Cast Ration!"
I processed this.
"I'm sorry," I said carefully. "Cast... Ration?"
"Cast Ration!" he confirmed, with the pride of a man who had made excellent life decisions.
"That's—" I stopped. "That's your name."
"My cool name, yes."
Something in his phrasing snagged.
"Your... cool name."
"Yes." He picked up his shovel and patted the soil flat over the cow, who had accepted its burial with philosophical resignation. "My birth name is Cass Ration. Very weird, very uncool. Cast Ration is much better, don't you think?"
I looked at him.
I looked at the buried cow.
I looked back at him.
"Much better," I said.
He beamed.
I made a mental note to never say his name out loud if I could avoid it.
Based on the last twenty minutes of my life, this world was very strange.
"The cow," I said instead. "You buried it."
"Planted it," Cast Ration corrected, with the gentle patience of a professional. "You harvest beef flowers from it later."
"Beef... flowers."
"Yes." He gestured at a section of the field further along, where something was growing. Something that was, upon closer inspection, flowering. Something that looked, from this distance, distinctly like it was made of meat.
"Huh."
Not a question this time. Just acknowledgment. I was learning.
"You're not from here," Cast Ration said. It wasn't an accusation. Just an observation, delivered with the same cheerful openness he appeared to bring to everything.
"That obvious?"
"You looked at the cow like it was strange."
"It was in a hole."
"Yes," he agreed. "That's where you plant them."
I nodded slowly. "Right."
We stood in comfortable silence for a moment, or what Cast Ration appeared to find comfortable and I found to be the silence of a man rapidly revising his understanding of agriculture.
"Cast!"
A woman's voice, from the direction of a structure I now noticed in the middle distance—low, wide, the kind of building that had been added to several times without any particular plan. A woman was walking toward us, carrying something.
She was older than Cast Ration by some years. She moved with the specific efficiency of someone who had things to do and was not interested in doing them slowly. Her expression when she saw me was neither alarmed nor particularly surprised—more the mild appraisal of someone cataloguing a new variable.
"Who's this?" she asked Cast Ration.
"Brother Meyer Mayer," Cast Ration said. "He's in search for Ey."
She nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation. "Cass Ration Jr.," she said to me.
I opened my mouth.
I closed it.
I looked at Cast Ration.
Cast Ration was smiling with the serenity of a man who saw no issue with anything currently happening.
"Cass," I said carefully. "Your name is also Cass."
"Cass Ration Jr.," she confirmed. "Jr. is part of my family name. Not just Ration."
"Ration Jr. is your family name."
"Yes."
"As a unit."
"Yes."
"So your father—"
"Actually, my father is Cass as well. Cass Ration Jr. Sr."
I stopped.
"Cass Ration Jr.," I said slowly, "Sr."
"Yes."
"The Jr. is part of the surname. Not a generational—"
"Generational?"
I stood in the field, beneath the aggressively happy sun, next to a buried cow and a man named Castration whose wife's family surname contained its own internal contradiction, and I made the only decision available to me.
"Never mind," I said.
Cass Ration Jr. nodded as if this were a reasonable conclusion, which in this world it apparently was. She handed Cast Ration whatever she'd been carrying—some kind of tool—and looked at me with the mild assessment she'd had since arriving.
"You'll need somewhere to sleep," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I don't have any money—"
"Did I mention money?"
"...No."
"Then." She turned and walked back toward the house. "Come. Dinner is almost ready."
Cast Ration clapped me on the shoulder with the enthusiasm of someone who considered this whole situation a perfectly normal afternoon. "She makes beef," he said. "Very good."
I followed them. What else could I do.
...
The beef tasted like bread.
I sat at their table—wooden, uneven, clearly built by someone who had strong feelings about furniture and limited technical ability—and chewed, and processed.
It tasted exactly like bread. Not beef-flavored bread. Not bread with meaty undertones. Just bread. Soft, slightly warm, completely bread.
I looked at it. It looked like beef.
I looked at Cast Ration. He was eating with great satisfaction.
I looked at Cass Ration Jr. She was eating with the focused efficiency she applied to everything.
Neither of them appeared to find anything unusual about the situation.
I ate another piece.
What the fuck?
Still bread.
I put down my fork.
"Is this—" I started, then reconsidered. Then decided I needed to know. "Is this protein?"
Cast Ration looked up. "What is protein?"
"It's a—" I stopped. "A nutrient. In food. For your body."
He considered this with genuine interest. "Beef is beef, buddy."
Buddy now. I had been promoted from brother.
"Right," I said. "Never mind."
I picked up my fork. I ate the bread-beef. I decided that if I died of nutritional deficiency in a world where cows were planted like seeds, that was simply the situation, and there was nothing to be done about it.
"You're in search for Ey," Cass Ration Jr. said. Not a question. A statement, delivered between efficient bites.
"Apparently."
"Where did you come from?"
I thought about how to answer this. "Far away," I said finally.
She nodded. Cast Ration nodded. They appeared to find this sufficient.
"People come from far away," Cast Ration said. "When they're searching for Ey."
"What exactly—" I caught myself. "You said nobody knows what Ey is."
"Yes," they said, simultaneously, with the calm certainty of people who had resolved this question long ago.
"Then why do people search for it?"
Cast Ration tilted his head. "Why wouldn't they?"
I had no answer to this.
Cass Ration Jr. refilled my cup with something that tasted, against all probability, like warm concrete. I drank it because she had offered it and she had given me food and shelter without asking for anything, and some things mattered more than taste.
"You can stay," she said. "Until your search takes you elsewhere."
"Thank you," I said. And meant it in a way I hadn't meant much recently.
Cast Ration grinned across the table. Cass Ration Jr. nodded once and returned to her bread-beef.
Outside, somewhere in the field, a cow was settling into its planting hole.
The sun had finally stopped shining.
I sat in the house of people who had fed me and asked nothing and had names that my brain refused to process correctly, and I ate bread that was beef, and I thought about the search for something nobody could define.
Maybe that was the point.
Or not.
"Hm..."
Man, everything was confusing.
"In search for Ey?"
Am I supposed to search for Ey now?