The Dead Sheep

A Pen4 challenge set by another member of the community was to write a very short story (no more than 480 words, that began with the line “I came home from the city to find a dead sheep on my doorstep.” This was my effort:

I came home from the city to find a dead sheep on my doorstep. I might have fallen over it, if the porch light hadn’t come on as I walked up the drive and illuminated its bedraggled form. It might have been sleeping, but for the fact that it was dead. I looked at it. It looked at nothing; its tongue protruding from the side of its mouth.

It was, on the whole, not what I had expected to come home to after a heavy night out. But there it was, and it wasn’t going to go anywhere of its own accord.

Groggily, my head suggested that perhaps it wasn’t proper to have a dead sheep on your doorstep in Pennyacre Drive. Was there, perhaps even a law against it? It seemed quite plausible.

I pondered on the situation. I could hardly drag the thing into the house; it would make a terrible mess on the cream carpet. But I didn’t want to leave it on the doorstep either; to embarrassingly reveal itself to the postman, and the world, in the morning.

There was only one thing for it, I decided. Armed with my phone’s tiny torch, I first located the shed, which seemed to have moved slightly, and then deep within its darkest recesses, a spade.

It took three hours to dig a hole in the front garden that was big enough for the beast, and the first glimmers of dawn were lighting the sky by the time I’d finished. As quietly and nonchalantly as possible, and at the risk of another hernia, I dragged and heaved the animal’s dead weight from the porch, across the gravel drive and onto the flower bed, where eventually, after a slippery struggle in the mud, it reluctantly surrendered to gravity and rolled lethargically into the hole. Night was fading fast and I could already see the end of the street in the paling gloom as I hastily dragged the soil back over the body to create a new hillock in my previously flat rose bed.

I looked down at my mud-encrusted suit and brogues, reflecting, now that I’d sobered up a bit, that I probably should have changed into something more suitable for grave digging. It was 4:00am, I was exhausted, mostly sober, and angry with myself and the world.

I didn’t even bother to shower before I collapsed into bed.

I was still groggy when the phone rang at 7:00am.

“Hello?”

"Mornin. Did you gerrit?"

"Sorry?"

"Did you ger yer sheep?"

"Sorry?"

"Yer sheep! Don’t tell me some bastard ad off with it? I left it on yer doorstep.”

“Well, yes, there was a sheep on my doorstep, but why would you leave a sheep on my doorstep?”

“Is what you ordered.”

“What?” But even as the word left my mouth, a light flicked on in my brain.

“In the pub, t’other night. I said do you wanna buy half a lamb? And you said, I’ll take a whole one.”

My growing awareness gave me a kick then; a hard one.

“But I thought it would be in pieces”, I wailed.

"Oh, yer should have said. S’extra if you wannit butchered."