Little Bo peep has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them.
Leave them alone and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating,
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were all still fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook
Determined for to find them.
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could,
As a shepherdess should,
To tack again each to its lambkin.

* * *

Insomnia.

Sometimes it happens without a reason.

Sometimes it’s do to stress.

Or sometimes it’s do to some form of trauma.

Hers was definitely the latter.

Bonnie Peep. Later nicknamed “Little Bo” by her family and friends.

Little was a good word to describe Bo. By looking at her, you’d think she was born to some French royalty, instead of poor farmers. Everything about her radiated grace; and an aura of fragileness seemed to hover around her, not helped any by her thin bones and tiny frame.

But though she sometimes liked to pretend when she was a child that she was born a princess, she was not, and at the tender age of nine she had been given the job of shepherdess by her father, who aimed to bring her head out of the clouds and back onto the farm where it should be.

It was a simple job, she was to take the sheep out into the meadow to graze, watching them to make sure they didn’t wander off, and then head back come nightfall and return them to their gated padlock until the next morning.

But it was boring for a girl of nine, especially one who was prone to daydreaming, and one day she found her self paying more attention to her own wants and dreams than the sheep. She wasn’t asleep for long, but it was long enough.

In a panic to discover her flock was gone, the small girl fled across the rolling hills, crying – not because she loved them, but because she feared what her father would do when he found she had lost his precious wool.

When she came upon a strand of trees, with something different about them and an odd smell in the air, all she knew was that suddenly the urge to flee without pressing any further came over her. And she almost allowed herself to give in to that “survivalist” instinct.

Almost.

Somehow she pressed on to discover a neat set of tails nailed to each tree directly in the center.

Sheep tails.

Ten years later, she could no longer sleep without that image hanging in her mind. The blood that stained the pure white fluff and dripped slowly off to cover the grass below; the scent of blood, of fear, of death, that hung in the air until it was almost tangible.

No, she didn’t sleep.

* * *