“Did you ever catch your friend?” Kate must be watching her, too.
Emily glanced outside. A film of frost dusted the window’s glass. The iron chimney billowed white steam against the gray sky. “Yes. I did catch her.”
Kate turned her attention back to the scope. Abel approached with a sheaf of bills he’d corralled in her absence. “We OK?” he asked quietly.
“Perfectly.”
“I can assign Tom to cull if you’d rather not do it.”
He was blaming her absence on the work when he should know her better. She’d never convince him she hadn’t been avoiding the task. But he hadn’t ordered the euthanizing done in her absence, either, and he hadn’t performed the work himself. Abel wasn’t squeamish. He was ruthless about the priorities of discovery and the imperative to cure. Some reason particular to her must lie at the core of his delay.
Abel hadn’t pulled up his stool, as was his habit when they spoke. He was avoiding her eyes as she was avoiding his, worrying his hand with the familiar anxiety. Emily shuffled the papers in her hand and laid them aside. Amelia’s drawing from the other day poked from the stack. The amber circle was a ring of fire after all, not the sun. The empty space within the flames was colored a bright, cheerful blue. Beyond the ring a roller coaster’s skeletal frame loop-de-looped around a single empty car on the track. On the other side of fire, Amelia knew to draw what she one day hoped to experience.
Better than married.
Well, she knew what Dinah would say; that the wedding’s proof lay precisely in Abel’s waiting for Emily to carry out the killing.
“I’ll take care of it, Mike.” Emily handed him the drawing. “How was Amelia’s appointment?”
If he felt relief, he didn’t show it. “What controls her symptoms best is what zonks her out the most. Nothing’s going to change that. Except us, right?”
Even if Abel’s research led to new drug development, Amelia would be living with her soul’s flight for years, fragments of her life forever missing. “Right.”
Abel watched her leave the lab as if observation could be intimacy.
In the basement, after suiting up, Emily stepped into the cage room on her way to Lab Will Care. No stickers had been mounted on the cage’s identifying cards indicating which mice would be euthanized. Every detail of the cull had been left to her.
And every opportunity.
Release would put up the initial funding to seed the lab’s migration to chips and scans on human subjects. Who can afford to maintain it? was Emily’s first unspoken reaction to Dinah’s offer. Dinah would think it immoral to compare technology and human trial costs, not to mention efficacy, to animal subjects. What Emily had said was, “I’m nobody. Not a leading researcher, not even a scientist anymore. What use would my conversion be to your people?”
Dinah had laughed. “Your conversion is the only one that matters, Em.”
Dinah would insist on molding her into the scientist she always believed Emily would be. Emily told her the effort was wasted. The lab was Abel’s, not hers, to convert. But Dinah viewed Abel as another of the tasks Emily could manage if she chose.
Dinah left him up to her, too. She’d noted the times Val was likely to be out, but Emily wasn’t about to have anything more to do with that stunt. A stunt blessedly interrupted by Val, but perhaps the interruption, too, had been part of Dinah’s grand design. Of the hours Dinah had written on a scrap of paper, she hadn’t included the time of their visit.
Now Emily would have to decide quickly to kill these animals or release them to Dinah. Something sadistic had always lurked in Dinah’s treatment of her, but the same impulse was rooted in Emily, she couldn’t deny it now. She wasn’t dreading the cull at all anymore. She’d spent her career ensuring she would be the one to perform such deeds methodically and conscientiously. This was what Dinah and Abel both recognized in her and sought to use, her daily devotion to extinguishing life. Each hoped to find lodged in her heart different strains of mercy. What she’d almost done to him had shown how far beyond mercy she really was.
But Dinah was wrong about one thing. Emily didn’t need to make a quick decision. In the lab, one takes time to consider.
Emily clicked off the cage-room lights and entered Lab Will Care. After two days away from Emily, the mouse scrabbled from her handling. In the acclimation room, the needling claws clicked on the metal table, fought for a grip on the cool steel. Emily scooped him up gently, imitating the arc that would soon carry him to fear. Before long he would reacclimate to her scent and then to her touch, give her his faith in a safe journey down.
Photo by Ron Thomas.
About the Author
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
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