Burning the Unclean: Foot and Mouth

Something's burning. The sunset is ill with a dusty blue cancer,
slowly gorging on the horizon. It was the year the cattle were placed
on pyres fit for vikings. Cheap bags bearing the name of local
supermarkets round their swollen feet, dry tongues loose in open
mouths. They burned on the farms, filmed for TV, choking meaty smog
enveloping the farmhouses. When it snowed, strange to have snow in
March, they spared the lambs the guns, injecting them softly. The fire
did not cleanse, and it spread like pollen through the fields, into the
petting zoos, across the sea.

In the absence of animals farmers became confined, the infected to save
and the clean to be saved. Disinfectant lay in protective rings around
the farms, daubed on walls in the hope the plague would pass them
by.

Nanna Bernstein cried when the ash replaced the falling snow. The
haggard faces behind the fences poked at some memory we could not speak
of, and when the smell of the pyres entered the valley she would not
leave her room.