“Hey, Frank. Can I ask you something?” Cletus asked as he hopped over the fence. He was getting fed up with this fence-jumping nonsense, finally. It had started out as fun and games, but now Cletus had to get something off of his chest.
“Shoot, Cletus. What ‘choo want?” Frank called, right behind him. It was Frank’s turn to jump the fence, but he wasn’t very good at multitasking. He had to say that before he jumped, since talking and jumping could be hazardous. If he thought long and hard about it, he wondered why he (or any other sheep, for that matter) would talk at all. Thankfully for Frank, he only ever thought long or hard. He never did both at the same time; it made the world seem wrong, somehow.
“Why are we jumping this fence? Seriously, we could go around it. There’s a gate just over there, we go through it to get shaved.” Cletus shivered at the thought of being shaved. It just made the world seem wrong, somehow. “We don’t even need to be on this side of the fence. Every day, we line up, and jump back and forth, back and forth, over this same fence. Why? Are you getting something out of this? Are we training for something that is going to happen soon? Are we worried about some disaster that would only happen in one part of the field?”
Frank’s brain hurt a little bit from hearing that many questions at once. “Ow” was all he could manage for a reply. He started wondering why he was talking again, and was subsequently killed by a massive migraine.
“Frank? ‘Ow’ isn’t much of an answer to any of those… Frank?” Cletus looked back and saw a pile of sheep. Apparently, the sheep behind Frank didn’t know that Frank was going to die from a migraine headache at that exact point in time, and was caught completely unprepared for the situation. It tried dealing with the problem by walking in a straight line, now following Cletus, though from about a sheep’s length distance. It ran into a second problem, though, when the sheep after Frank tripped and fell over Frank, causing a chain reaction of tripping and falling, winding up in the largest pile of live sheep in the history of the world, with one dead sheep at the bottom. The pain from their collective headaches would have killed a small whale, but they somehow managed to cope. Cletus felt that this could have been avoided somehow, but wasn’t sure how, and wasn’t too concerned with hindsight anyway. That was one of the perks of being a sheep.
“What just happened? I’m not on the ground anymore. I was on the ground before this. I remember that. What just happened? Did anyone see that?” One of the sheep said from inside the pile. It was hard to tell which one; they all sounded and looked almost identical. Maybe it was Jordan, maybe it was Jordan IV. It was hard to tell.
“Why are we jumping that fence? Does anyone know? Do we need to be over here, and if we do, why are we going to jump over that same fence again in a few minutes? Wait, we won’t be jumping this time, unless all of you get out of that pile.” Cletus hoped that he’d have a better chance of getting an answer this time, since he was asking many sheep all at the same time. Surely one of them would know.
“Dude, why are you asking questions?” Ah, this is Dude, Cletus realized. Dude was the only sheep that announced himself when he spoke. Dude was handy like that.
“I’m just curious. Are we training for something? What is the benefit of jumping this fence again and again?” Cletus asked. He sincerely hoped Dude had an answer. Even if it was wrong, it would be something.
“Dude! Relax. You need not concern yourself with why you are jumping this fence, only how you are jumping this fence. Asking ‘why’ only complicates the issue, man. There’s nothing hard about jumping this fence. Look at me, you know? I suddenly find myself trapped in a humongous pile of sheep, and do you see me asking why? No. Dude, I’m just in a pile with all my friends, there’s nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of this eventually, piles never last, man. Balance, amigo. Everything seeks balance. For now, there is pile, and looking at you, we see there is also not pile. Pile and Not Pile, that’s balance.” And Dude fell silent.
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