In pitch black darkness, when you're upside down, soaked in blood and gasoline and have traumatic brain injury, mud can fool a victim into believing it's dark chocolate.

Angelina's parents said she should be grateful to the cow who saved her life, like she should go back to the scene of the accident that wasn't an accident in her shiny new wheelchair, say thanks, maybe pat the beast's rump, talk about the elements in mud which make grass grow and cows eating grass which becomes a white liquid containing lactose, an ingredient of milk chocolate confectionary. 

Before being discharged from intensive care she was beguiled as a surgeons's lips animated with speech bubbles which burst before she could read them: something about frontal lobes. In post-trauma maelstrom, she feared that frontal lobes was doctor-speak for breasts, and maybe he was going to carve them up like he'd done to other parts of her body.                 

Later, learning what frontal lobes were made Angelina think that God, or whoever was responsible for Everything would never get hired by Mercedes-Benz. Her dad worked as a mechanic at a Benz garage and extolled the safety record of their vehicles. Angelina didn't even know she had frontal lobes, but a medical dictionary revealed all. The outside of the forehead bone is smooth, but - and this is where God's design job was redolent of Heath-Robinson's contraptions - the inside of the forehead bone is uneven and rough. There's some goo swilling around behind the rough bone of the back of the frontal lobes which acts as a cushion in case of minor blows to the forehead, but when a body is hurled forward violently in an accident like a car crash, the goo isn't effective so the lobes crash onto the jagged bone, and then the brain starts misbehaving.

Surgical operations kept Angelina alive, but she would never walk again. As for not speaking, a therapist said not speaking was not physiological, but psychological trauma and she would talk again one day, but Angelina secretly vowed she'd only talk to the cow and to Brahim. Brahim was dead, buried in the mud, but that wasn't acceptable so the authorities dug the Mitsubishi out of the ditch, cut his corpse out of the wreckage and cremated him. Not many people get buried and cremated. Lucky throw of the death dice for Brahim.

§

Angelina didn't want to speak about the accident because she'd have to admit she was partially to blame. If she hadn't punched Brahim in the face whilst he was driving because he'd flirted with Sophie Alumerz at the discotheque earlier the car would never have skidded off the wet road into the ditch. And she would never had ended up with dead legs and a messed up mind.  She knew from the moment she laid eyes on Brahim that he would be her nemesis, yet his guileful trickery persuaded her to swallow the bitter pill that was the poison he peddled.
        
She had flashbacks. The car had skidded off the road, rolled and landed on its roof. Inside, the outside was overlapping trapezoids with acute angles. A sticker on the shattered windscreen had a red check sign which read Mitsubishi Corporation AOK, but everything wasn't o.k. She didn't want to die in a Mitsubishi with Brahim, and heard her father hollering, heck, why didn't you date a white guy who drove a Benz?
        
Brahim had the steering wheel forced into his chest and as an earring wore a pair of fluffy dice that had hung from the rearview mirror. As if being the partly responsible for the crash wasn't bad enough, her body was pushing Brahim's face down into the mass of molten dark chocolate. Unable to move anything but her head, she lay there crying as asinine love songs blared from the radio whilst she licked chocolate from Brahim's face so he could breathe until the mud and worms and grass and grit made her throw up and the brown avalanche slowly covered his head, leaving only one eyed snakes on the dice visible.
        
Later, that dumb cow that wasn't so dumb climbed the grassy knoll above the ditch and stomped over the fence the Mitsubishi had knocked down before wandering onto the road, bringing traffic to a halt so someone would call the emergency services.

§
        
Whereas most people in the walking world had been indifferent to her passage through life, walkers in the wheelchair world were kind and helpful. And when they realised she had the further handicap of not being able to speak and communicated by writing on a small whiteboard, they gushed sugary altruism.
        
When her parents helped her find a ground floor apartment, Angelina insisted that it must be unfurnished and have full length sliding windows to a garden.
        
She wrote a letter to the scrapyard the wrecked Mitsubishi had been towed to, and another to the farmer who owned the cow that had saved her life. Days later, the cow was contentedly eating grass on the lawn of her new abode and a crane hoisted the wreck of the Mitsubishi over the garden wall so that three hardhats could push it through the sliding windows into her empty living room.
        
'It's leaking oil onto my rug.' Was all the flabbergasted landlord could say when he came to investigate complaints made about the cow by neighbours. 'That's a new rug.'
        
Angelina raised a finger to her lips before scribbling on her whiteboard: Schhh! Can't you see my boyfriend's ghost is asleep in that car?
        
The landlord looked nonplused. 'That cow in the garden. Lease says no pets.'
        
Angelina scribbled furiously: it's not a pet, nor a farm animal. He used to be Saint Christopher, patron Saint of travellers, but submitted to sin. Got reincarnated as a bovine.
        
'Lady,' the landlord sighed, irritation overriding sympathy he had previously shown for her handicap, 'animals is pets. And pets is animals. Same difference. Who's going to milk the damned thing?'
        
§

Each night, Brahim punished Angelina for making him a ghost by forcing himself on her when she was in bed watching TV. The damaged doors of the Mitsubishi wouldn't lock since the accident, so she duct-taped them shut so Brahim's ghost couldn't get out, but somehow he always did. Staggering into her bedroom on twisted legs, head flapping from side to side on his broken neck, he'd yank back the blanket, hoist up the T-shirt she slept in and open her dead legs, frozen breath smelling of mud, chocolate and gasoline as he whispered Sophie Sophie Sophie into her ear. When raging jealousy drove her to punch and bite him the scabs of his wounds from the accident would open, the bedsheets ran red with his blood and he'd laugh, light a cigarette and make her lick the dark chocolate from his broken corpse.

§

Saint Christopher ate all of the grass in the garden within three days. Angelina was quaffing tequila from a bottle whilst searching the Yellow Pages for animal feed suppliers when a letter arrived from the landlord.
        
'Eviction notice, right?' Brahim's ghost yawned from inside the Mitsubishi. 'Time for us to hit the road.'
        
Gulping down a generous slug of tequila, Angelina's voice was laden with animus.
        
'I ain't going no place with you. I sensed our first embrace was the kiss of death. I knew then that you'd be my downfall.'
        
Brahim's fondled the fluffy dice that hung from his ear.
        
'Gravity is the attraction between all masses in the universe. It decides where dice come to rest. Gravity is also defined as something solemn and serious. So see me as being your unlucky throw of the dice.'
        
The clomp-clomp of the cow's hooves heralded its arrival as it entered the room to interrupt their bickering.
        
'Pardon me for butting in,' Saint Christopher said, clearing his throat, 'but I couldn't help eavesdropping. About moving to new pastures. Take a closer look at the black and white patches my hide. See? It's a map. For souls whose destiny is migration.'

§
        
The police stopped them several times on their way out of the city. A cow with a harness made from duct-tape pulling a cripple in a wheelchair along the sidewalk wasn't against the law, but did arouse suspicion even in a society where prevailing lunacy was concealed behind straight faces.
        
Each time a squad car pulled up beside them, Angelina picked through the jumble in her tote bag of tequila bottles, medication and little cakes of dried mud she'd made for the trip to find her Disabled Person's card so the police would believe she really was a cripple and not a crazy person.

During these interrogations, Saint Christopher took a perverse pleasure in emitting loud and pestiferous flatus in the policemen's direction, whilst Brahmin's ghost swayed from side to side on broken legs, swatting flies away from the empty eye socket above which, affixed to his forehead, was the window sticker Mitsubishi Corporation AOK.

§

A flock of scrawny vultures soared on thermals beneath an obdurate sun as the trio traversed a barren windswept plateau of fine red sand which stuck to their sweat. Angelina dug into her tote bag, pulled out the last of the mud cakes and ate ravenously.        
        
'Are we nearly there.' She mumbled whilst squinting at the map on Saint Christopher's hide. 'I gotta ask. What kinda deed does a Saint have to do to get reincarnated as a cow?'
        
Saint Christopher's sigh was weighty with melancholy. 'I should have let sleeping dogs lie, but curiosity killed the cat. As a part-time private investigator, I smelt rats in question marks. Alien jissom impregnating sleeping virgins? Bacteria released from falling fragments of meteorites corrupting the food chain? Tectonic plates smothered in plastic waste in oceans unable to shift? Which sonofabitch Disneyfied Descartes? Semiological interpretations of Rohrsach tests by a covert cabal promoting Eugenics?'
        
Angelina chuckled, mud dribbling from parched lips. 'You missed fucked up frontal lobes. God Corporation not AOK.'

§

Angelina awoke from a dream where she was buried alive beneath a pile of corpses of other cripples. Her knees and mons veneris felt bruised. Odours of sex, unwashed bodies, excrement, burning tallow candles and rotting flesh filling her nostrils caused her to vomit. Close by, she heard the rhythmic beating of drums and the crisp crackle of a campfire. Wiggling free of tangled limbs in which hers were enmeshed, she crawled out of the tent towards a flickering luminosity in the darkness, dragging paralysed legs towards the light.
        
The whites of their eyes in stark contrast to their dark skin, revellers gathered around the campfire resembled those inside the tent. A queer crew, naked and heinous aberrations, demons, djinns, eidolons, chimeras, monsters and mutants all. A headless hunchback was pushing her wheelchair in which Brahim's crumpled body resembled an abandoned ventriloquist's dummy. Eviscerated, skinned and impaled on a rotating spit over the fire, Saint Christopher's charred carcass was licked by flames.
        
'Hello Angelina.' The words spoken by the defrocked Saint were a blithe attempt at levity. 'When I said I'd guide you here, I didn't plan on staying. Much less becoming your roast beef supper.'
        
When Angelina crawled forward to reach out her hand to him, he closed his eyes and sniffed her fingers appreciatively through flared nostrils.
        
'Ah. Broth from the cauldron.' He whispered with hushed gravitas. 'How very compassionate of you to awaken my olfactory nostalgia. But where's my manners child, you must be famished after all that debauchery. I'd recommend a filet steak. Medium rare.'
        
Angelina urinated in the powdery red dirt, scraping the mixture together and forming small patties with her hands.
        
'Thanks,' she cackled, 'but I'm on a diet.'