Sky-High Shenanigans

Twenty minutes into the flight, Clive got bored.

This was the fundamental problem with Clive. He could handle danger, chaos, and social situations that would make a normal sheep faint. What he could not handle was sitting still in a confined space with nothing to do. The in-flight magazine had three articles about golf. The movie selection was romantic comedies from 2009. The businessman next to him had fallen asleep with his mouth open, making a sound like a broken accordion.

Clive's eyes wandered.

They landed on the emergency exit. Specifically, on the red handle, and specifically, on the words "USE ONLY IN CASE OF EMERGENCY" printed above it in letters designed to be taken seriously.

Clive did not take them seriously.

What would happen, though? he thought. Just hypothetically. If someone were to give that handle a little tug. Not a big tug. Just a—

He was already out of his seat.

He trotted down the aisle, stepping over a sleeping woman's legs and dodging a drink cart. The emergency exit was three rows down. The handle was right there. Red and shiny and practically begging to be pulled.

Clive gave it a sniff. Then a nudge. Then — because he was Clive, and Clive had never once in his life left a bad idea unexplored — a proper yank.

The door didn't just open. It exploded open. The pressure difference ripped it outward, and the cabin filled with a roar of wind so loud it erased every other sound in the world. Clive's hat vanished instantly — just gone, like it had never existed. His sunglasses followed. His wool flattened against his body, and for one frozen second, every single passenger on the plane was staring at an obviously, undeniably, unmistakably sheep standing next to an open door at thirty thousand feet.

Then the wind took him.

Clive went out sideways, tumbling into open sky with his legs splayed in four different directions. The cold hit him like a wall. The noise was everything. Below him, clouds. Above him, more clouds. Around him, nothing but air and the rapidly shrinking shape of the plane he'd just fallen out of.

He screamed, but the wind ate it.

Somewhere in the chaos — and Clive would never be able to explain how — his flailing hoof caught the strap of an emergency pack that had come loose with him. He yanked the cord. The parachute deployed with a violent WHUMP that nearly dislocated his shoulders, and suddenly he was floating.

Silence. Or close to it. Just the whisper of wind through the canopy and the distant hum of the plane, now a tiny silver dot disappearing into the clouds.

Clive hung there, swinging gently, his wool ruffling in the breeze. Below him, the world was enormous and impossibly beautiful — patchwork fields, rivers like silver thread, clouds casting shadows the size of towns.

"Okay," he said to nobody. "That was stupid."

He meant it. He also knew he'd do it again in a heartbeat.

The peace lasted about ninety seconds. Then he heard it — a growing rumble beneath him. He looked down and saw the top of another plane, heading directly under his dangling hooves.

"No," Clive said. "No, no, no—"

He landed on the wing with a thud that rattled his teeth. The metal was freezing and vibrating and absolutely not designed to have a sheep on it. He grabbed at the surface with his hooves, which was like trying to grip a wet mirror.

Inside the plane, faces appeared at every window. Dozens of them. All staring at the sheep clinging to the wing of their aircraft.

Clive waved. It seemed like the polite thing to do.

The plane began to descend — the pilot, presumably, having decided that "sheep on wing" warranted a change of plans. Clive crawled along the wing toward a hatch he'd spotted near the fuselage, his wool streaming behind him like a ridiculous flag.

The hatch opened. He tumbled inside, landing in a dark cargo hold that smelled like luggage and jet fuel. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard, then picked himself up, brushed off his wool, and walked into the cabin like he'd just come back from the bathroom.

Every passenger watched him pass. Nobody said a word. Clive found an empty seat, sat down, buckled up, and picked up the in-flight magazine.

He turned to the article about golf.