Bo Peep

Mother Goose has finally hung up her bonnet and retired to a quiet little cottage where the only thing she’s managing is an aggressive flock of geese. Her daughter, Jacqueline, inherited the entire nursery rhyme empire and immediately declared, “We’re dragging these stories into the twenty-first century whether they like it or not.” Some rhymes needed only a little polishing. Others required complete intervention by professionals. Take Little Bo Peep. She legally changed her name to Bo because nobody over the age of six wants to introduce themselves as “Little.” After losing the same flock for the seventeenth time, she stopped pretending this was a mysterious rural phenomenon and accepted the obvious truth: Her sheep were tiny wool-covered escape artists. Every sheep now has a GPS collar, a microchip, an invisible fence, reflective ear tags, and an app that sends Bo a notification the second one wanders more than ten feet from the pasture. She can track every sheep on her phone, smartwatch, tablet, laptop, and somehow her refrigerator. The sheep hate it. Every morning they hold tiny meetings plotting new escape routes. Every evening Bo discovers they’ve attempted to tunnel under the fence with soup spoons, disguise themselves as unusually fluffy rocks, or convince tourists they’re emotional support clouds. Bo has become one with exasperation. She no longer yells. She simply sighs, checks the app, grabs her truck keys, and drives to wherever Kevin decided to investigate today. She’s also developed a terrifying stare that can stop a ram mid-headbutt. The local farmers all agree the system works beautifully. The sheep disagree.