Silent lamb

You get that flood of doubt and anxiety when you first see a little black mass on the floor lying very still. Too still. It's just sleeping, you say to yourself, and you move on to check the other 79 ewes. But when you come back a few minutes later and it's still "sleeping", you realize it's not. Breath is gone and eyes are closed, it must've been asleep. And then it just slept too deeply. I wonder what lambs dream about. Or if they dream at all. But you think hopefully in his dream he's in the middle of a field of squash, content. As a morbid afterthought you think he was a boy, he would've been killed anyway.

But then from the corner, the other brother bleats. Life! At least a little bit of relief.