A shot doesn't sound, it tears the world in half. First there was the crunch of snow under paws, the heavy breathing of the wolf beside me, my bright, foolish little bell—and then a noise that doesn't even have time to become sound: a sharp blow, as if the sky itself kicked the earth with a hoof. I'm thrown to the side, the air is knocked out of my chest, the bell starts singing on its own—long, off-key, like someone else's voice. I don't even manage to see him fall. I only feel how something huge and warm beside me turns into a motionless stone. The world cuts off in the middle of a breath.
When I open my eyes, there is no snow. No pen, no shepherd, no gun, no blood. I'm standing in the middle of emptiness—a flat, warm, pink silence, like the soft inner side of a closed eyelid. The air is neither cold nor warm, it just is. I feel strangely light, as if my fleece dried in one second and turned into down.
In front of me—me. Only not quite.
The one standing opposite is a white sheep, but cleaner than any of us in the pen. Her wool is even, like freshly fallen snow where no one's had time to leave any tracks. On her head there aren't tangled curls but real little flowers. Yellow, warm, alive. They grow right out of her skull, blossom as if spring decided to settle between her ears. Tiny glowing particles rise from beneath the petals—like snow that changed its mind about being cold and chose to become fireflies.
She looks at me with familiar eyes—my own, only without the tiredness. There is no fear in them, no knife, no charcoal crosses. Her eyes are clear, like water in a barrel before anyone dips a bucket in.
"I feel wonderful," she says. Her voice is soft, slightly muffled, as if it's coming not from her mouth, but straight out of her chest. "As if I'm finally blooming."
I look at her flowers and realize that, in this world, that really is true. They stir, reaching toward some nonexistent sun, smelling of something sweet. Inside me nothing is blooming. Inside, everything is tightening into a small, hard knot.
She takes a step closer, smiling the way I have never smiled. In our yard no one smiles—at best, they just stop trembling.
"And you?" she asks. "How are you? What's going on in your head?"
I want to answer "nothing." That would be easier. That's how we're used to it—no bothering each other with thoughts, no stirring the muck we're standing on.
But for some reason the words stick.
Because in that moment I feel that someone is standing behind me too.
Heavy breathing, familiar and strange at the same time. A smell—not of grass and not of sheep's wool. The smell of night, blood, wet fur and metal. The smell of that very instant before the shot.
I turn around slowly.
Behind me—him.
The black wolf, just as I remember him from the pit: tall, lean, made entirely of shadow. His coat doesn't shine—it seems to swallow any light, even the light coming from the flowers on the other me's head. His eyes are yellow, tired. There is no animal rage in them—only a thin, sticky weariness, as if he's been carrying something heavy in his teeth for far too long.
He isn't looking at me, but at my glowing copy with flowers. He looks the way a person looks at a picture in a window they'll never be allowed to step through.
"Well?" the flowery me persists. "You're quiet. That's not fair. I just told you."
The wolf twitches an ear. You can see the muscles roll across his neck—like rocks moving when water flows under them.
"Nothing," he says at last. His voice is dry, low, too calm. "In my head… nothing."
But in that very second I see that he's lying.
Because the world behind his back splits open like torn skin.
Out of the black silence crawls another creature—a red maw, huge, wrong, like someone tore it off a monster and threw it here. The jaws are stretched as in the moment of a predator's leap, the teeth long, crooked, each one gleaming with someone's blood. This mouth is silent, but I hear its scream—it's so loud that the sound collapses in on itself and turns into emptiness.
The black wolf stands in front of it like a shield. His muzzle is calm, his eyes slightly narrowed, like someone used to standing with their back to a storm. But I can see how the red maw thrashes behind his head, jerking on an invisible chain, trying to burst through him outward.
The flowery me smiles as if she doesn't notice any of it.
"Really?" she asks gently. "Absolutely nothing?"
She takes another step forward, and I suddenly notice that the ground beneath her hooves is not ground. It's paper. Charcoal crosses are drawn on it in thin lines. Each of her steps smears them, turning them into meaningless black blots.
"We almost got out," she goes on. "It was fun, wasn't it? You pulled me out, we ran through the snow, I jingled, you laughed…"
The red maw behind the wolf's head jerks harder, you can hear the crunch of invisible bones. Other pieces start to whirl around it—a white skull with a scratched-in cross on the forehead, eyes torn out of someone's heads and floating in the air, a heart pierced by a knife with a familiar handle. All of this swirls around the wolf's head like a storm of flesh and metal.
I realize: this is his memory. His hunger. His deaths. Maybe mine too—the ones I haven't remembered yet.
"You wanted me to live," the flowery sheep insists. "You wanted me to get out of the pit. You wanted me to… bloom. Well, here I am blooming. Look."
She tilts her head, and the flowers open even wider. Glowing specks fly from their centers, drifting toward the black wolf like little warm pellets.
One lands on his nose.
The wolf flinches as if scalded.
For a moment his eyes flare brighter, and I see a reflection in them: not me, not the flowers, but a blazing flash tearing the sky apart. Not a gunshot—something much bigger. A city I've never seen but somehow know: long straight streets, iron birds in the sky, crackling, fire, white light after which there is nothing at all.
Somewhere far away, beyond this strange pink world, something inside me answers. As if a very old, very ancient fear stirs and says: This is your work.
I feel cold, even though it's impossible to freeze here.
"What do you see?" I ask myself, suddenly forgetting about the flowery me. My voice sounds muffled, as if it's coming not from my mouth, but from someone else's. "When you close your eyes. What do you hear when you don't want to hear?"
The black wolf slowly turns his head toward me.
Now he's looking not at the glowing sheep, but straight at me—the real me, the one still lying in the snow beside his body.
Behind his shoulders the carnival of nightmares keeps spinning: the red maw, the skull, the knives, the heart, a black shadow with a huge circle instead of an eye, someone's heart with the letters "ШТ" carved into it in white—I don't know what that means, but the word itself feels like the sharp click of a switch being thrown.
"In my head," he says quietly, "there's too much of everything."
The red maw opens wider, showing the emptiness inside.
"I…" he falters, as if his tongue had stuck together from blood. "I don't want you to carry it."
The flowery sheep tilts her head to one side.
"But you already brought it anyway," she reminds him softly. "You pulled me out of the pit. You knew I wouldn't stay the same."
The wolf smirks with one corner of his mouth.
"I thought you'd just go far away. Farther from the knife."
"Farther from you?" she asks.
He doesn't answer.
I feel I'm about to ask a question that will change everything, and that frightens me. But the words string themselves together on their own:
"So what… is in there, after all?"
The wolf closes his eyes.
The world behind his back goes still for a second, like the sea before a storm. The red maw freezes, the knives in the heart stop moving, the eyes in their little bubbles stop turning.
He inhales.
Exhales.
Turns back to the glowing sheep with flowers and says, almost in a casual tone:
"Oh, you know. Nothing special, probably."
And in that moment the red maw, skull, knives, heart, the shadow with the round eye—all of it drops at once into a black hole, as if someone tugged on a rope and yanked his entire nightmare somewhere else.
The pink world cracks.
The flowers on the other me's head crumble in a yellow rain and, as they fall, turn into black charcoal dots.
I blink—and hear snow again.
The smell of gunpowder.
A heavy, already cooling body beside me.
Somewhere far off, someone is shouting loudly—a human voice tearing itself to pieces, as if it doesn't believe it pulled the trigger. The sheep are bleating in chorus, trampling the snow into gray slush.
I'm lying in the snow next to the dark blotch that was a wolf a moment ago. The air slices my lungs, my legs won't obey, the world rocks back and forth like a trough hanging on a rope.
Inside—there is not emptiness.
Inside me now sits a black wolf with his silent nightmare. And above him—a small white sheep with yellow flowers, who keeps smiling as if nothing happened.
And I understand that the question "what's in your head?" will never be simple again.