Sheep and Wolves Read Online Free

used to be a nutritionist, not a nurse. I wouldn’t know how to—”
    “No, here. I want you to take care of me here.”
    “Oh.”
    “You’re a very unique man, Tomas. Most people hide from their pain. But you. You bathe in it like it’s a hot spring. Not that you enjoy it like you would a hot spring. Sorry, I’m not very good at metaphors.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “What I’m trying to say is that your nightmares are beautiful, and I need your suffering much more than you do.”
    “No,” I say. I’m still scared of her alright, but I’m more frightened of the prospect of giving away my pain.
    It’s who I am.
    “The problem for you, Tomas, is that while I’m here I can control…well, next to everything. And, I know what you’re afraid of.”
    I laugh so hard the room shakes. “I’m living my fears every day of my life. You couldn’t make it any worse.”
    She shakes her head, and light dances on her gliding hair. “I can see how you’d think that. I used to be a lot like you before my brain gave out and I lost the connection with my past. But you’re wrong.”
    “I find that very hard to believe.”
    “You’re not the first.” She disappears.
    *
    It was, of course, all just a dream. Now I’m back home in the wild where I belong.
    That’s right. I live in the jungle and forage for berries and nuts and hunt wild boar with my trusty spear named Sir Stabs-a-lot. The smells and the waterfalls of these parts are to die for. The caves are just deadly.
    If you saw me praying over this bloody bunny rabbit I just bludgeoned to death with a river stone, you might assume I was an eccentric before abandoning my old life. You might guess it was my life-long dream to live this kind of life.
    You’d be wrong.
    Some desires are beyond simple dreaming. Sometimes you don’t know what you really want until you have it.
    Sometimes you survive a plane crash and before the rescuers show up, you realize the thunderbird that flew into the engine was actually a blessing in a feathery disguise.
    So you stay.
    I’m chomping on raw bunny organs when a photograph falls from the sky and hits the ground in front of me with a bellowing thud. I see them there, in that frozen smidgen of time. She’s wearing a t-shirt that says “I LOVE MY BABY” and his says “I LOVE MY MOMMY.” I made those shirts on some strange whim the night before Mother’s Day. I burned my thumb on the iron and sucked it like a baby. This made me laugh amidst the pain.
    The memory flashes in my mind for an instant, like I flipped on a light bulb that reveals so much and then burns out.
    A horrible feeling attacks me. It’s a feeling with claws and teeth and a sharp tail and breath of fire. I imagine the beast in the cave that I know is there but’ve never seen.
    Here I am, living this life, and they’re not. BABY and MOMMY.
    If I sucked my thumb now, I wouldn’t laugh or smile. I’d curl up in a fetal position on the jungle floor and cry myself to sleep.
    The photograph catches fire.
    And me with it.
    *

    It was, of course, all just a dream. Now I’m back home in the wild where I belong.
    I may be wrong about this, but I think I dreamt of the cave. I think I wandered too close to the darkness and the beast dragged me inside by my right foot. He towed me through tunnels. He showed me glowing petroglyphs on the walls created a long time ago.
    Created by me.
    I look down at my feet, and a green stem snakes up from the forest floor. A red flower explodes into bloom. I feel like shielding my eyes, but I can’t move.
    Shapes begin to form in the petals. A woman and a boy.
    The trick isn’t to stop seeing them. It’s to ignore them without looking away.
    But I can’t.
    I remember.
    *
    It was, of course, all just a dream. Now I’m back home in the wild where I belong.
    An almost orgasmic sense of relief gushes inside me. I release the horrible feeling that ravaged me, because whatever I was dreaming about, whatever happened inside the cave, it