I don’t remember much about mama. I remember her heartbeat. Sometimes I think I can remember hearing her chew her food. I know she must have been big, because I am big. But on the night of my birth, she lay down to have me there in the hay and died. She had just gotten too old, too tired, too something. And now there I was, trapped and unable to breathe. That’s when it happened. The next thing I knew I was being pulled from the warmth of my birth sack and into life. Pulled, mind you, not delivered. And there was a lot of noise. Human noise, as I would learn later on. There was this woman yelling and pulling and crying, I think it’s called. Then I was free and took my very first breath of life. Ahhh it felt good. I opened my eyes and saw mama lying in blood and not moving, and as I would learn, never would again. But the woman was moving and moving fast.

She cleaned me up, then put me into some kind of pen. A stall, I think it’s called, and then she was gone and I was left alone. I think I called out to mama in my own way, but she didn’t answer . Yet I could feel her, as if she was still with me and telling me it was all right. The woman returned almost as soon as she had gone, it seemed, and brought others with her. I could see by the look on her face she was scared. She was scared? She should have been me. After all, I had only been around a few minutes and in that time been jerked and pulled and penned. But it was all right when I looked at the woman, for her face was smiling. The odd thing was, although she didn’t look like me, or smell like me, or even sound like me, I could tell she was my mama. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. As if she had replaced my birth mother. As if the old and new mama were of the same spirit. Oh, I think I forgot to mention something. You see, I am a bull.

Now that might sound crazy to you, having a human for a mama, or her having a bull for a son, but it worked out real nice. And I guess we looked as strange to the other humans as we did my kind. She’d put a bow around my neck, a big red one, and sort of trot me through something called a town. You should have seen their faces. Oh yes, we had a good life, mama and me, but you know how time flies and soon I was grown and outweighed mama by fourteen hundred pounds. And I guess they were afraid I’d hurt mama somehow when I love-bumped her with my head, because before too much longer they moved me to a pasture down the road and it was terribly lonely. So I’d break the fence down and wander back home to see mama, and they’d take me back, and I’d do it again and again. Finally, one day some strange man came, put me in a truck, and I never saw mama again.

No, I don’t know where mama is and I don’t think about it much anymore. I’m kept pretty busy by the human who owns me, I think it’s called. But sometimes...sometimes when the wind is just right, or the moon, or another smiling woman passes by, I think about mama and the night it all happened. And how sweet she smelled, like new hay or cut green grass, and how without her I wouldn’t even be here. And I wonder how she’s doing. And I wonder if anyone has put a bow around her neck and taken her for a walk lately, like she used to do me. ‘Course humans don’t do that sort of thing, why I don’t know, as there’s nothing quite like being loved. And do you know what I wonder the most? I wonder if, somehow, we aren’t all one and the same, just with different shapes. Yeah...I wonder. Miracle is my name, by the way. Miracle the bull. Mama’s miracle one might say, or, perhaps, the miracle of life itself. But, what do I know. After all, I’m just a bull. Just a dumb old bull who misses its mama.