Last Sheep On Earth (2024)

In the place where I grew up, many of my neighbors celebrated Eid al-Adha.

They would lead a sheep through the neighborhood, and within days, when I returned from school, all that remained were empty hooks and chains glistening faintly with traces of blood. Later, one of my classmates, who had gone for lunch, never came back to school. Our teacher asked each of us to bring a bar of chocolate for him, which his mother quietly collected. And when I was already feeling sorrowful about my approaching elementary school graduation, we were given a day off. Every news channel and newspaper was filled with images of a towering pair of buildings collapsing into dust.

These memories, from before I turned 13, form my first and most indelible impressions of the world. Childhood consciousness is misted, dreamlike, as Carl Jung observed in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: childhood memories slowly shape the prologue to our life’s dreams, coloring our view of the world, setting the undertone, the backdrop for all that follows. Growing older, I came to understand that the sheep were sacrificed as part of a sacred ritual; as humans, we have decided we hold dominion over their fates, casting them as symbols of evil and slaughtering them in ritualistic roles of our own design.

As for my classmate, his death was a fragment of sheer, ungoverned chance.

It was a day of biting cold, twenty degrees below zero, yet bathed in a fierce sun. Icicles hung from eaves, occasionally falling with a sharp crack. Who could have known that one of these frozen spears would break free, plummeting down upon a boy’s head? Could he have stepped aside? Could he have escaped his fate? In that instant, it was as though nature itself had delivered an unexpected blow, descending mercilessly upon a lone, unguarded child and ending his path in silence.