Sheep in the Bathtub

My bathtub is full of sheep, not the kind that smell like dung and farm soil but the white fluffy kind in commercials and cartoons. They crowd against the white sides, sharing not really matching. They should be hopping over fences as I snore into my pillow, drooling a tiny stream that could be a waterfall to tiny people with tin foil houses. Instead they baa against the sides of my tub, that’s deeper and smaller than any bathtub I have ever seen and that makes me think of a song we once sang in Sunday school, wide and deep that just seemed to turn into um and um. Whatever that meant. Nothing to do with Jesus really. The sheep have found my makeup, and they dab on the daring hues that I thought would ring my eyes with glamour and interest, but only scared me when I looked in the mirror and saw my face blooming with bruises that were like the swirl of sherbet when I pried the carton lid off, in the deep freeze like a frost lined casket of creaking rusting tin. The sheep have somehow climbed inside the drain, and their baas echo in the pipes and through the white room. The faces are now purple and pink and melon and orange and their hooves are daubed with the contents of the bend in the pipe, slick with rinsed away (not quite) conditioner, stubbled with the stubborn hairs from leg after leg after leg. One sheep stands white and apart, dripping slowly with what could be water, what could be every tear ever shed in that shower, a wet salty drop that should have blended with flowery shampoo or harshly scented manclean shaving cream and filtered through the lines and forgotten wet places. Some angry water nymph must have saved the tears and poured them wherever life needed salting. She has a heavy hand. I shut my bedroom door, considering the sturdy walls around me that almost block the baaing from the white room, daubed with sheep. I need to close my eyes, scrubbed clear of any color, scrubbed until they are hot and prickly, blooming with cactus flowers ringed with thorns, but I can’t seem to do it. What if the sheep decide to go where they belong? I don’t want their imposing hooves in my dreams anymore. Another baa and I may jump of that tall building in my dreams that always seems to be waiting for a needed plummet and leave the tin foil village and angry nymph behind. This idea makes me smile a minute, cracking across my cheeks an unfamiliar pattern of muscles and commands my face has to obey, creaking with misuse, angry to be disturbed. My pillow lies there, it pretends I am not considering it, but the dreams that I have had while I hover in agony and delight over its clumpy softness are as much a clump and less a soft as any feather or insinuating pillow case. Some mornings I feel it climbing into my ears, trying to bargain with my brain for just another moment of that dream, a few seconds to feel what was coming, barreling down on me with a sunrise awakening nightmare.

My bathtub can stay full of sheep.