COUNTING DOWN — SARAH FANNON
/I didn’t expect to see so many sheep when I died. There’s a sheep for every night I couldn’t get to sleep and counted them on my fingers instead of in my head, unfurling and refurling my hands in the dark. In my bedroom, I would imagine the sheep inverted, white faces and black fleece just for the hell of it. They didn’t hop fences but winked into existence one by one and bunched together on my rug. It never really lulled me to rest. I made them too mesmerizing, and it pushed me farther from sleep’s reach. But I liked their company.
I had a boyfriend once who told me I made noises in my sleep, not snoring or gibberish, but a strange animal sound. When I asked if it was like a sheep baa, he frowned at the strangeness of how I’d guessed it, how I’d made him recognize something he hadn’t been able to place for weeks. You know what, he said, I think you’re right. He looked at me differently after that, as if afraid I would leave wool in the shower drain.
Now the sheep are all staring at where I’ve materialized in front of them, like they are the humans in a car waiting for a bundle of lambs to cross the street and I am the offending animal slowing them down because I don’t know what streets or cars or time is, just what it means to walk from one place to another. But there is nowhere to go for any of us here in this borderless black space like a closed mouth. It is only me, a young woman dead from some accident I can remember about as well as a dream, and all the sleep-sheep I’ve ever conjured, lined on top of each other like monstrous teeth.
I’ve had trouble sleeping my whole life and always suspected it wasn’t disorder but fear of death so potent it turned sleep to enemy, induced a primal dread that armed my body against the rising tide of evening. I tricked myself into thinking I could stockpile time if I stayed awake, blinking at fabricated sheep that didn’t blink back at me.
And now they are all here with me at the end, as if they’ve pulled me into existence for their bedtime. The sheep watch me with glowing eyes that are fully black and mask their rectangular pupils. Their gaze is upsetting and comforting at once, as it's better to be seen than to be alone. But I am too afraid to touch them and find they are just made of more darkness.
Sarah Fannon is a graduate of George Washington University's Honors English and Creative Writing program and she continues to live in the DC area. Her work is featured or forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Dark Moon Digest, Diabolical Plots, Divination Hollow Reviews, The NoSleep Podcast, and others. You can find her on Twitter @SarahJFannon, Instagram @ampersarah, and online at www.sarahfannon.com
