Gallon Challenge by Avery Gregurich Caught behind the dairy box door again tonight, I count the gallons and touch all sorts of modern milks, not old enough yet to tell the whole truth, but my grandparents did serve us red cap in gold-rimmed glasses better suited for bourbon. I sure got strong bones, never very much to do, growing up in between gravel that used to be prairie, reduced to grassland, reduced again to skim soybean fields where only cream-white morning glory climbed or clumb up them, depending on who you asked and when. No matter: they still got to the top. We bought more challenge gallons than I can stomach now, growing up. The guy we called Gut puked three quarts in my folks’ driveway, giving up. There, they had moved on to cows for strictly meat long before I had arrived. I think I thought they still got the milk by hand or something more organic in nature. Much later, I watched the Mennonite women climb the statue of the milk cow in Des Moines for a photograph taken with a real picture camera. They were all lined up, smiling and stradling 2,500 pounds of fiberglass. My superstitious lineage reminds me that milk ingested with fish causes poison, explaining Friday lent dinners gone sour. Our foreman, my roommate, got mad when I dumped the gallon of turnt milk on the front lawn. I remember the flies, our neighbors coming over to see what had been spilled. Outside this grocery store, there is a giant concrete chicken where shoppers sometimes stop to take their picture. Now, the shelf is full. Let me turn my mind towards juice, eggs, anything, something a little more easily seen-through.
Author bio: Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River and has never strayed too far from it.
