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Sebun stood on the roof of the Hidden Condo. Beneath her feet were the sleeping bodies of tens of animals, most castaways or runaways, seeking shelter or refuge from a life that either didn’t make any sense, or had made so much sense at one point that the consequences of that understanding had caught up with them.
Sebun had tried to convince herself that she was different from them. That this was just a step, a bump in the road, a blip on the radar. The sweeping beam would highlight this moment momentarily and then pass on, carrying her to further shores and wide-open possibilities, unblemished by the beeping and chirping and wailing of a life relegated to the corners of society with the other dregs and detritus.
The night air gusted through her wool. A low-pressure system summoning the wind, brewing a storm in its wake. The smell of asphalt, of exhaust, of animal, garbage, and dirt assaulted her nostrils. A sheep in a grey world, a concrete pasture, the gravestones of buildings rising high around her like the posts of a great fence, hemming her in. The metal of the railing was cool to the touch, the barrier climbing nearly as tall as her. She’d always been small, always been looked down on by architecture and animal alike.
In the cold wind, she bent down and pulled off her shoes, quickly followed by her socks, flexing her toes against the frigid concrete. No one had swept, but there wasn’t much to step on aside from some cigarette butts and maybe a dream or two. The designer shoes, courtesy of the company she worked for. She held them in her hands, looking them over. The socks went back into a pocket. They were made of her own wool, after all. Running into the world clothed in nothing but your own self, that was how a sheep lived.
Part of a herd, blending in, pushed and pulled by the whims of the masses, running, running for something that maybe only a few animals up at the front really saw, and maybe they knew how to reach for that something and maybe they didn’t. In Sebun’s experience, they didn’t. But now she was broken from the crowed, shunted into this hidden away hole on the edge of the gaping wound in the city, surrounded by the fear and stink and worry of the Black Market, keeping pace with criminals and killers, butcherers and thieves and the desperate carnivores that came to them over and over for a salvation they could never attain.
But the shoes. They were the product of progress, right? She didn’t walk barefoot, she didn’t go naked, she didn’t scrounge through the dirt for food and she didn’t grow her own crops. She lived in a room with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. Light and water, heat and cold, power and pleasure whenever she wanted it. This was progress. This was the calling of all animals in this life. Sheep were no longer special for their herds. They were no longer unique in their organization or group fear.
Sometimes she thought the herbivores really had won the war after all. They were all one herd now, all led by the noses of their whims, whims informed and sometimes enforced by forces often outside their control. The global herd. And here she was, on top of her little room in her little building that held her little life in this little city.
She tossed the shoes over the edge, standing on her toes to lean over the railing to watch them tumble through the wind, bounce against the side of the building once, and crash down into the dingy alley below.
She took her coat off.
Perhaps it was the cutting force of the shears she ran through her wool when it grew too thickly in the summer, maybe it was the hard-packed soil of her soul when she strode in to work, determined to keep a straight face and earn her paycheck, eek what nuggets of pleasure she could out of her time before she could go home and sit and stare out the window, the TV playing in the background. Whatever it was, it kept her going. The fear of the unknown, the wild abandon with which she rode the mixed species car to and from work, to and from errands and chores and groceries. The subway was a searing hot line of life through her muddied-down cold coffee cup existence.
Whatever it was.
After all, whatever it was was powerful. Still alive after twenty-nine years, twenty-nine laps around the sun, through good and bad hopes and dreams and utter defeat. It kept her going, kept her wool growing, kept her coming to this roof and looking out over the semi-slumbering city. It was a carnivore. If they were all one herd, then the city was the carnivore, stalking and controlling their lives, looming ever-present and inescapable except for the daring deed of risking great change and bringing discomfort.
And yet, and yet she’d not been eaten. By the city, sure. But that was hardly unique. Hardly a personal failing, not at all a distinct and significant event. No, she’d been born consumed, already half-digested. When she’d screamed eat me, eat me, eat me at a criminal wolf, scarred and marked worse than her, he’d berated her like a lost child and shoved her off the train. Sometimes Sebun still wondered whether she hated him for it.
It was getting colder now, the wind picking up. Off in the distance thunder boomed. She thought she could hear dogs barking and wolves howling already. The steel wind slashed through her thin shirt, skipping her skin and wool entirely and penetrating straight to the bone, bringing with it the promise of more to come, more on the horizon. It’d keep blowing and blowing until all was equalized and perfect, stable, at equilibrium with itself. It’d keep blowing until the sun died and the planet stopped spinning.
Sebun would keep pushing along as well, caught up in the draft, bound in tandem. She set her bare feet against the lower rung of the railing and hoisted herself upward, stepping off with a grunt and easing herself into the corner, kneeling uncertainly and unstably at the precipice, the very edge of life and death, just like that day on the subway when Legoshi had made the decision for her. But now, as she gingerly maneuvered, buffeted and bashed by the wind into a sitting position, dangling her legs out over the promise of an ending that she’d just subjected her shoes to, there was no one else but her to make this decision.
It was cold. So cold. The shivering in her hands made worse by the sudden onslaught of the rain. The metal grew slick and wet, her wool matted down against her skin, the sky broke open and pushed itself against the building, rocking her on this danger seat, caught in her volatile position by the wrath of nature.
Teeth clacking together, she wiggled her toes in the downpour as her shirt was plastered to her figure, making her look half as large. This is what it felt like to be alive. Twenty meters in the air over a concrete bunk, lashed by rain and wind, feeling the cold crawl down through her limbs cell by cell, searching out the last burning core of herself. Either by fall or by freezing fuel, she’d end if she did nothing. With each gust of wind, she thought it had come finally, the powerless plummet to finally round off the already wailing descent of her life. She could barely grip the railing anymore.
The wind drove the rain against her face one moment, and against her back the next, often with such force she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Her muscles twitched and shivered, involuntary shuddering of a body trying to keep itself alive, only serving to take more and more control and composure from Sebun’s hands and lead her closer and closer to a tumbling finale to round off the show.
So all-encompassing and total was the downpour, so torrential, that the rest of the world faded away entirely. Sight and sound barely registered through her fight.
The opening of the roof door behind her went unnoticed. So did the shaft of light from the warm stairway underneath, spilling out to illuminate a rain-lashed rectangle of concrete.
“See Legoshi? It’s kind of exciting, right? You’ve really never sat and watched the… Oh my-“
The frantic slapping of slippered feet splashing against puddled concrete roared up behind Sebun as a small, firm hand grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her down off the railing, pulling her on top of a petite, fuzzy body as they crashed into the roof.
“Legoshi! Get your ass over here!”
More splashes and damp but warm arms encircled her and lifted her effortlessly from the numbing roof. More shouts and urgency, and she was being carried down, down into light and warmth. A white blur sped on ahead, jolted by fear and concern. A door flew open. A cocoon of towels and blankets in a quaint, small room much like her own. Two faces, vaguely familiar looked down at her. Hands rubbed her through the thick walls of cloth, forcefully injecting life back into her body.
The intermingled smell of rabbit and wolf reached her slowly awakening nose. She knew who these two were. She knew this room. If she had to die here, she could think of worse places to go. But there was something she needed to do first. She didn’t want to pass off before she could do it. She wanted to ask them what it was that kept them around, kept them going. She’d ask them later. For now, she was so, so sleepy and the blankets were so warm.