My grandmother didn’t laugh. She was the last person in town who still kept a milk cow—a sad-eyed Jersey named Buttercup. On the fourth morning, I found Gran in the barn, holding a glass of warm, fresh milk up to the dawn light.

“I was pasteurized. Homogenized. Bottled. Capped. They took my fields and put me in a carton. They took my moo and gave me an expiration date.”

SOON.

The fog solidified into a face—not a cow’s, not a human’s, but something in between. Hollow eye sockets weeping white droplets. A muzzle full of teeth like shattered glass. It wore the milkman’s cap.

“He’s just wandered off,” the sheriff said, but his mustache twitched.

“Raw milk,” she said. “From Buttercup, before the change. The good life. The honest life. It’s the only thing the spooky milk fears—a rival spirit.”

It began, as most things do in the rural nowhere of Potter’s Hollow, with a missing cat. Not old Mrs. Gable’s arthritic tabby, but something far worse: the stray, bone-white tom that drank from the chipped saucer of milk she left on her porch each night.

But here’s the part that keeps me awake: that night, before the circle held, I looked into the open fridge one last time. The carton of milk—the one I’d bought just that morning—was standing upright on the middle shelf. And printed where the expiration date should have been, in letters made of condensation, was a single word: