The Wolf who Herds the Lambs
An imaginative text composed by Sean (Year 12)
Below me sits an ocean. It’s vast and spans endlessly. Clouds cover the horizon and engulf the water as it flows in unknown directions around me. I feel light and hollow, but not empty. The water is getting closer, I must be floating down because it doesn’t feel like falling. The water feels strange. It’s wet but I don’t feel its cold touch on my skin, like how you know the air around you is there but you don’t feel it. There’s a light in the middle distance, a searchlight it seems. I can make out the silhouette of a small fishing boat with seagulls populating the awnings on each side.
As they approach I feel myself rise out of the water and suddenly I am sitting down in the boat on a small crate which has seemingly been prepared for me. Across from me sits this boat's captain, a wolf man in fisherman’s clothes. He’s hooting and hollering and dancing about talking to the seagulls that surround him.
“This is it fellas, he’s gotta be the one, I can feel it!” He shouts, as if I wasn’t there behind him. I try to speak to him but nothing comes out. He turns around to me, as if he heard my voiceless call to him.
“Oh! I humbly beg your forgiveness, I got a little carried away. You’ve probably got a lot of questions and no way to ask 'em so I'll give you the rundown. I am The Ferryman, fisherman of souls and storyteller for the dead. It is my personal duty and goal to help as many of you lost souls through to her majesty’s eternal paradise. You see that spire over there?” Seemingly on cue, the fog ahead of us parts and reveals a large dark tower in the middle of the ocean. Its peak rises far beyond the clouds above and disappears into nothingness.
“That, my dear friend, is her home and that’s where I'm ‘takin ya. Now I know that you’re gonna be great, I got this feeling - this uh... how do ya say it?” He pulls out a thesaurus from beside him and flips through its pages.
“Intuition? No, but that's good. Vibe? Nah, that's too chummy. Premonition? Ah! Yes! A premonition! Sorry about that, unfortunately I'm not the best with words. Probably why I've been on such a bad streak as of late. I just... got faith in ya. I feel like you’re gonna be great. Now I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna put you back and I'm gonna watch your life through your eyes. I gotta find the story I’m gonna tell her to convince her to let you in.”
“Okay, when you close your eyes, hold them like that for a few seconds. Then I’ll take you back to your earliest memory. And no matter what happens, no matter how much you might want to, you can’t stay. So just, try to enjoy it.”
And there it was, just as he said it, before my eyes like a movie playing mere inches away from my face. The day at the beach I had when I was a toddler, my mum was telling me all about the plants and shells at the beach, she was always so smart about those things. She told me about the Agave plant. In 11 years it would die and turn into a tree covered in flowers. I get to see the days I spent sitting next to my mum as she painted. How she wove life into the canvas in front of her, giving life to the world around her. What I would give to see the world through her eyes. I see the doctor's office where I saw my mum cry for the first time. I remember that night, she was crying in my dad’s arms and he was doing his best to comfort her. I see the next year fly by almost in an instant. Me, bedridden from the deflated lung I’d manifested. 11 years old, like the agave plant. I hope I died as beautifully as it did.
Before me once again stood the wolf. He was quieter now, reflective almost. It took a moment before he spoke to me, and I could feel every second of its quiet.
“I always thought my problem lied in my lack of words. I thought that I was a bad storyteller because I couldn’t say the right thing. Turns out, I just wasn’t talking about the right people.”
