It's hot in the house and hotter outside, so I go to spray some water on Ned.
The humidity in the greenhouse is good for his growth but looks uncomfortable. I'm always struck by the shimmering dripping glass. It feels like an alien planet, or maybe a prehistoric Earth.
My dad built the greenhouse at the back of our property, and from the front, from down the road a little, it looks like a wet mirage is swallowing our house. When I go for walks at night I go out along the low rows of plants to the side of the house and look back over my shoulder and the building looks like a beetle crouching. Glass can look lots of different ways.
It's cold here at night even during the summer, and when I pass by the greenhouse on my way back to the house I can hear Ned shivering and breathing.
I open the door and steam spills out. Inside it smells like clean fur, which I always thought was strange because Ned is hairless, and I walk across the room past him and trail a finger along his side. I stop at the diagnostic station and suck on my finger, which is salty, and I read the charts.
Because you can get any nutrients you need from the vitapacks the state sends out, keeping livestock is kind of antiquated. Most food hobbyists are happy with just a garden. Keeping something like Ned is more common in the city, but where we live, anything grown to be eaten is seen as a frivolity.
Dad was raised on a farm, though. When universal income was abolished and the food shortages began, the variety of different foods dwindled, and he scoured the state and bartered whatever he had for seeds and sprouts. Radishes, asparagus, sorrel. Built the greenhouse to nurture the plants through their delicate young stages.
He wanted us to have a pet, too. He didn't think it should be illegal to own something with a soul. But it was, and there was nothing he could do.
Personally I don't see why Ned couldn't have a soul. Just because he doesn't move or make sound.
My dad whistles to me from the back door so I bump the charts to my handheld, cut a few slabs off of Ned, and run back to the house with the little bundle of meat under my arm.
---
Dinner is salad from the garden and Ned meat and mustard. Afterwards, Dad and I put our plates and forks into the cleaning basin. He pulls up some news on his handheld and I go over Ned's charts.
Some of the numbers look strange. I show Dad the heat stats and fluid reabsorption graphs and he looks at them for a little bit, stands up and goes out to the greenhouse. I sit on the sofa. I'm scared, though I don't really know why.
Finally he comes back with a little slice from Ned, puts it on the table and picks at it with a little metal instrument. He calls me over and has me look through a magnifier and points out these tiny bumps, maybe four or five of them spaced pretty far apart, barely visible without the lens.
While I'm looking, he gets us both little orange antibiotic pills from the bathroom cabinet and says "take this just in case and go to sleep. I'm going to call the doctor about Ned."
"Okay," I say, and go upstairs and get in bed. My stomach is queasy, and I'm not sure if I'm sick or just riled up. Through the floor, I hear Dad's voice calmly rumbling, talking to the doctor, and eventually I sleep.
---
The next day the doctor arrives in a shining grey car. It growls away on its own once she's gotten out.
Dad and I lead her to the greenhouse, where she spends half an hour walking around Ned, taking and analyzing samples of his skin, and looking over the diagnostics screen on the wall. Dad tells me to stay out of the way. I go across the room and rub Ned's side, peering around at the doctor and trying to interpret her facial expression.
After some time, she calls us outside, where we stand sweaty and flushed in the dirt by the greenhouse doorway.
She says "this is a microbial infection called molluscum carnum. It is transmitted between assemblages of cultured meat by human contact. You're seeing some of the effects now: temperature disregulation and tumerous polyp growth on the surface of the culture. Eventually, there will be widespread tissue death and decay."
My father says "what can we do? Is there some antimicrobial drug treatment?"
The doctor says "I'll spray it with something that should prevent further growth at the surface level, but the outcome of the culture as a whole will depend on the depth of the infection. You will have to remove decaying areas of the meat as you notice them, and refrain from consuming any flesh from the culture unless the infection is totally resolved. Otherwise, you could dispose of the culture now and inoculate a new one immediately" and I say "we're not getting rid of Ned" and my father shushes me and apologizes to the doctor, who looks confused.
That afternoon I swing open my bedroom window and watch as the doctor walks around Ned with a metal hose, spraying a clear fluid over his back and sides. I lead my head against the window frame and the heat outside dries everything up, and I smell sweat on myself, and my eyes sting.
---
Over the next few weeks Dad and I develop a routine of going out to the greenhouse in the late afternoon after chores and removing the rot from Ned, carrying it past the garden to a pile at the corner of the property. Animals come at night and take pieces away into the woods.
The doctor returns to perform surgery. She shaves a ring around Ned, places silicone sheets on the raw flesh to prevent contamination. Seeing the reddish, leaking meat inside Ned distresses me. It makes me feel ashamed for him.
One day hauling the sick-smelling meat to the forest edge with Dad, I break down and drop everything to the ground. I scream at him that he brought the illness, he picked it up at some farm while working and brought it home to Ned, and now Ned was being tortured for no reason and would die no matter what we did.
I sit and eventually clear my eyes, and Dad comes to me and hugs me tight.
We stay like this for a while before he gets up and says "go on inside, let me do this" so I do, and I sit on the upper part of the sofa and look out and watch him walking out to the dark green mass of trees with the thick rotten slabs from Ned slung around his neck.
---
I wait until he's asleep that night and creep down through the house and out the door. Bugs or frogs are chirping it sounds like from all around.
I open the greenhouse door and go to Ned and I can't touch him while he's quarantined, but I press my hand against one of the doctor's silicone dressings and feel his fevered heat below. The moon is almost full and everything in the room is grey-blue.
I sit there with my palm pressed against him and feel his trembling and imagine it's me who is heavy and rotting in the greenhouse, no ears to hear my fate muttered about by adults, no senses at all, no appendages, no capacity for movement, just my mind in there aware that something terrible is happening but probably unable to figure out what or why. Just sitting in the greenhouse full of fear, and waiting. Feeling irreplaceable parts of myself being taken away.
---
Ned died last night and a truck comes in the late morning to take the rest of him for burning. The men load him up with pitchforks shoving straight into him, tearing up chunks from his scabby corpse and piling it all in a mound in the back of their truck. When the big pieces are gone they muck out the greenhouse and spray all the pink blood and little tendons and stringy things down into the floor drain with the same green hose we used to water him with when he got too hot or dry.
When they're done, I go out to the greenhouse and look at how empty it is, just two rows of sprouting plants along the side walls. And then go back inside and take a shower so hot my skin stings.
---
Dad comes home late in the day and makes dinner. He chops up sorrel and asparagus and blends them with leeks, a radish, some garlic and oil, and swirls it around and ladles it into bowls with some cashew sour cream.
We eat for a little while and then he puts down his spoon and says "when I was a little older than you, a terrible thing happened. Our dog ran into the woods. My brother and I looked for him for days. We went as far deep into the woods as we dared, and yelled as loud as we could for him, but he never came out."
"I wanted to believe that he had gone out the other side, hundreds of miles away, and that another family had found him and that he was being taken care of. But I knew that he couldn't have gone that far. The woods were full of hungry animals and he wasn't a large dog, or a very tough one. You have to be mean to survive there and he wasn't."
"Even so, I hoped that he had found a home and was alive and warm and well fed. It didn't matter that it couldn't be true, I still hoped that for him."
He says "I know you probably wonder what happened to the part of Ned that bonded him to you. Whatever Ned's essence was, I want you to try to believe that it still exists in some form."
He's silent for a long time, just bringing spoonfuls of soup to his mouth.
"What do you think?" he asks me.
"Okay," I say.
---
Many months go by.
In the middle of winter and he calls me down to the basement to see. There's a bulb out above the staircase and I have to feel my way down, hands on the rough unfinished wood walls.
He is by his workbench, and as I come over he beams and says "I was working on this for you, now close your eyes" and I do and he puts something in my hands, a smooth box with edges.
I open my eyes. The box is plexiglass and inside a pink lump no bigger than an eyeball.
I know immediately it's him, it's the core from Ned. The deepest part inside of him.
Dad says "on her second visit, I had the doctor remove a little piece as a starter for the next culture, just in case we couldn't save him. I wasn't sure it'd take and I didn't want to get your hopes up. But it looks like it did. It's healthy now but still delicate. So you need to keep a close eye on him for a little while and make sure he grows right."
I hold Ned's box to my chest and say "thank you thank you I will, I'll pay such good attention to him. Nothing will ever happen to him again."
---
The little piece of meat is suspended by the greenhouse's framework floating in the room on barely visible strings, illuminated by a soft yellow LED panel on the wall. The small nozzle of a metal appendage sprays it intermittently with mist. Particles of ice and dust move together outside.
It's night. From her window, the child watches the small thing rotate slowly. She rests her elbow on the frame.
After a while the room becomes too cold, and the child reaches out and pulls the window shut, and shiveringly crawls underneath the covers. She sleeps.
Out in the greenhouse, glistening, it grows.