The Sheep o' Leavenworth

A languid fog rolls off San Francisco’s bay, curling around the iron lattice of Leavenworth Street where an orphaned lamb—lacquered in soot and neon—becomes both witness and accomplice to a citywide fever dream. The beast, christened only by the chalk scrawl "The Sheep," is smuggled into a boarding house run by a one-eyed ex-railway surgeon who moonlights as a pawnbroker of forgotten futures. Each tenant projects salvation onto the animal: a stenographer with ink-black teeth believes its wool will spin a letter that will resurrect her lover executed at San Quentin; a boy saxophonist, ribs showing like cracked ivory keys, is convinced the creature’s bleat contains a blue note that can halt the construction of the Golden Gate; a retired cartographer maps the sheep’s nightly wanderings onto the city’s veins, discovering that every hoofprint lands where a murder will soon bloom. Over thirteen lunar cycles the sheep swells, mirroring the metropolis’ own distension, until its fleece splits to reveal not flesh but a phosphorescent lattice of cable-car tracks humming with the voices of 1906 earthquake dead. In the final reel the city itself—its hills tilting like ships in a storm—appears to kneel, and the sheep, now the size of a cathedral, ambles into the bay, dissolving into a flotilla of rusted streetcar tickets that the tide reassembles into a single, unreadable prescription.