Love Story with Cow’s Eye

In seventh grade science, we dissected cows’ eyes with Miss Susan, a young teacher who was not a nun like the other teachers. She walked around the classroom, plopping an eye on a piece of cardboard on top of our paired desks, mocking the girls for being all girly, shrieking and ewwing. And then, of course, it was a boy who got sick, Bob Richards. She was gentle with him, shooting a stare back at us while leading him into the hallway. 

Where she got the eyes, we never knew. Round, gelatinous, they sat in front of us, and we imagined them quivering when it was we ourselves who quivered. Each pair got one scalpel, though she insisted we take turns. “We all need to experience the cutting,” she said. Miss Susan was very short, and with her pixie haircut she resembled Mary Martin in Peter Pan on TV. I was already taller than her, though my body was half-empty with everything I didn’t know. I had to bend down to ask her permission to go to the restroom. I was not sick like Bob, but I was my own kind of sick—more in the head, thinking about a cow staring at me in unwavering and accurate judgement like a nun in religion class when I dared to ask that one-word question, “Why?” 

We sliced the eyes open and examined the goop. We tried to identify the various parts. I sat with Sue Grabowski, who had once wet her pants in second grade but was on her way to becoming our homecoming queen in high school. We were all on our way to becoming. Sue was impatient with my clumsy cuts and smears. Give me that, she said. Let me do it, she said. And I did. The fishy smell reminded me of the one time I’d been to the ocean and had nearly drowned. 

I didn’t follow up with biology in the public high school across the street. One eye was enough for me. I took Electronics and Earth Science with the other dumb kids. Rocks were more my speed. Bald, skeletal Mr. Bubble taught Earth Science. “Bubble” was not his real name. I saw a picture once of the painting The Scream. It might’ve been on a T-shirt. The guy in the picture looked like Mr. Bubble. In Electronics, big gum-chewing Mr. Southern passed along his wisdom to our all-male class: “No matter how you shake and dance, a few drops always ends in your pants.” 

Miss Susan changed to Ms. over Christmas break. What’s anyone’s real name? All the sisters were named after saints. Ms. Susan was my saint. I had a crush on her, on the clear truth of her and everything she said, though I realized it only in retrospect, after the nuns on one side and The Scream and the wise man of pissing on the other. 

She blew the minds of those who paid attention. She took us to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama at a downtown Detroit theater and to Earth Day in Ann Arbor, where I bought a Give Earth a Chance button that still rattles in one of my drawers beneath the soft fabric of clothes I no longer wear. In our little anonymous subdivision on the border with Detroit, in an all-white subdivision dominated by car factories whose pollution in our skies was the smell of money, we’d been taught not to look up or down. Or even in the general direction of Detroit, which was simmering with racial unrest. Just taking a bus across Eight Mile Road and into the city many of our parents had abandoned had us steaming the windows. I’m not saying I understood the entire movie, but a talking computer gave me a lot to ponder.  

She also explained the science of reproduction to us, drawing and erasing pictures on the chalkboard with such fierceness that no one dared giggle. When Kevin Warren asked her how the sperm got to the egg, she gave the slightest little smirk. Kevin was the oldest in a family of Warrens. His father was named Wally. Wally should have explained a few things to his oldest boy. I don’t know if anyone else saw the smirk. I felt it was a secret thing between me and her, just a slight wind blowing through a crack in the wall between our lives. Then she said, with a straight face: “It swims.” Which is, of course, true. The bell rang, which was maybe a blessing for all of us. Some of us were already groping each other in the adolescent pool of our young lives. Kevin was still splashing his water wings in the shallow end. I saw her put a hand slightly against his back as he left the classroom. 

When I came back for my last year at St. Mark’s, she was gone. None of the nuns scurrying back and forth from the school to the convent at lunchtime mentioned her disappearance. Maybe there was a cow’s eye nobody wanted to touch in that story—once you cut it open, who knows what would come out? I think I can say with some confidence that she did not become a nun. It’s too easy to make fun of nuns, and kids with weak stomachs, and kids who are clueless about sex. I’ve just done all three, haven’t I?  

Also too easy to make fun of kids like me who never learned to correctly pronounce the s sound without slurring, though that never kept her from calling on me. And I was half like those other kids, half sick to my stomach, half ignorant about sex. And half in love with a teacher whose last name we weren’t even expected to know. 

Jim Daniels received the Michigan Author Award for 2025–26. Late Invocation for Magic: New and Selected Poems was published in 2026, and An Ignorance of Trees, nonfiction, was published in 2025. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.   

This essay is a Short Reads original.