Last year I came up with a story about Walker Evans, about how when he died, instead of just straight-away dying like most of us do, he was transformed into a marionette version of a cow from one of his own photographs. The picture is called Butcher Sign, Mississippi, 1936, and it is one of the stranger photos from Walker’s best known era. It shows a painting on a brick wall of a stunned cartoon cow with white horns, bangs, and a mystery appendage emerging from just below the ear. Whenever I draw the cow, people mistake it for a Picasso. Guernica, I think, which is dated 1937. It is doubtful, but maybe Picasso saw the Evans photograph. More likely the paintings just share a common flatness, a common bovinity.

I imagined Walker Evans waking up the morning after his fatal stroke, brushing a rusted machine screw from his forehead, and realizing that his face had become two-dimensional in the night. He would look in the mirror and realize he was now a cow puppet, then collect himself with stoic resolve. From there, for Walker, it would be business as usual.

But the press would have a field day. “Walker Evans is a cow from one of his own photographs now. What an unexpected development!” I have to think the history of photography at Yale would be a lot different, had this been the case.