Counting Sheep
Rated PG-13

Author's note:I've always been a total sucker for the tortured soul but Vin Diesel took this study of grief and made it perfection. My offering is humble and not worthy but I was inspired, anyway.



He’d never really understood the deal with counting sheep. Come to think of it, he’d never really had problems sleeping. Sleep was always his friend, his place for rest and sweet dreams, an arm around him and a gentle kiss as he stirred, but not any more. Sleep was an elusive state, a place of taunting and cold consolation, even though he accepted he must go there occasionally in order to function.

The concept of counting sheep was immediately daunting. For example, does one imagine them gamboling over a picket fence one by one in orderly fashion or was the idea to completely exhaust and befuddle the brain by imagining them flocked together and trying to count them like that. It irritated him no end considering those possibilities so he’d fallen into the habit of counting some other way.

One. There was only one Stacey Vetter and there would never be another.

Two was the number of bullets that hit her.

Three – the times she said “I’m fine,” as she smiled into his eyes, desperate to comfort him, even as she lay bleeding and dying.

Four times he fired his gun into the night, too blinded by rage to even notice that she’d been hit and was lying there, too fired up by the audacity of the sonofabitch who’d come into his house and shot him.

For five days, he’d drifted in and out of consciousness, too out of it to comprehend that she was no longer with him and above all else, he berated himself for not being able to feel that she was gone. How could he have missed that when the woman had been his very breath?

Six times, he’d turned on the radio that night, desperate to drown out the sound of the ocean that only reminded him of her, of that night and their last dance together. Even as he sat on the sand in the grey, empty light of a dawn without sun, he couldn’t bear the sand between his toes. The music was too sad or too grating to give him any comfort and even the talk show tormented him with phone-ins about broken hearts, broken marriages and broken dreams. In the end, he’d smashed the thing with his fist and surrendered, after all, to the sound of the waves. At least they were repetitious, hypnotic. At least they were familiar. They tried to soothe him.

Seven chimes of the clock. He’d lain there since two am and sleep had eluded him for most of the night. Eight minutes was the longest he’d slept at any one time, only to awake each time feeling weak and cold and shaky, arms clutched about his body for comfort, nauseous with grief and too terrified to go on. He’d smoked nine cigarettes watching the waves and counted ten pelicans flying across the beach.

Ten bottles of beer hadn’t numbed the pain, only filled his bladder so he’d plundered the last of the Jack Daniels instead, but that didn’t make him numb, either, just dry. Dry and parched and hollow.

Eleven years he’d been married to her and he would gladly trade the eyes in his head and the very soul of his being to live just one minute of them again; any one minute, he didn’t care which.

With a leaden body, he trudged back toward the house and beyond it, clambering into his truck and only then feeling that if he closed his eyes, sleep would take him. Wasn’t that just a bitch? He folded his arms over the steering wheel and rested his forehead against them for a moment, letting his eyelids surrender. He had work to do but it could wait for just a few minutes…just a few.

One. There was only one Stacey Vetter and there would never be another.

Two was the number of bullets that hit her.

Three – the times she said “I’m fine,” as she smiled into his eyes…

END

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