Direct Hit

Today at the creamery with its pumpkins painted like cartoon characters, where we bumped up a road on hay bales in puffs of tractor smoke, where the children fumbled up a bald dirt slope to ride a slick white slide down to a lawn with corn stalks and a field of plucked pumpkins. . .today at the creamery, within the first five minutes of our visit, Beatrix tucked up to the rusty red fence to touch the baby goats with their tufty horns and soft tails--and got sprayed by a male goat. Fore hooves propped in the rail, he sprayed all down the line of children with their hair pulled back picture-perfect, his pee a torrent of glittering beads caught in the pure autumn sunlight--

Step back! Step back! I yelled

all to no avail. . . .

Stinky, stinky Bea on my lap on the hay bales up the hill to the endless corn maze, stalks glowing papery in the blazing morning light.