Under Shifting Glass Read Online Free Page B

eat? Unlikely. It doesn’t have a mouth. But then plants eat and they don’t have mouths. Excretion—not important. If you don’t eat you don’t need to excrete. Respiration—yes, it breathes, doesn’t it? And it has to get energy from somewhere or it couldn’t move—and it certainly moves. Growth—yes again; I think I can imagine it growing.
    To be alive, Pug says, you have to be able to carry out all seven of the processes. Not two, or five, or one. All seven.
    I think Pug may have missed out on some of his training. This thing is definitely alive.
    â€œWho are you?” I say. “What are you?”
    The thing does not respond.
    I retreat a bit. “I think you’ll be safer in the flask for a while,” I say.
    I mean, of course, that I’ll feel safer if the thing is in the flask. I’ve heard adults do this. They tell you something they want by making it sound useful to you, like,
You’ll be much warmer in your coat, won’t you?
    â€œBecause,” I add, “I have to go to the hospital in a minute. Gran’s taking me to the hospital.”
    No reply.
    â€œTo see the babies.”
    No reply.
    â€œSo I’m just going to pop you (
you
) back in the desk for a bit.”
    No reply.
    â€œOkay?”
    â€œYou see, I noticed how you rushed back in the flask yourself, so it must be your home, I guess. Am I right?”
    No reply.
    â€œMy name’s Jess, by the way.”
    Some little silver seed fish, swimming.
    â€œHow do you do that? How do you make the fish swim?”
    No reply.
    â€œIt’s beautiful.”
    No reply.
    â€œSo just wait, okay?”
    No reply.
    â€œPromise?”
    Very gently, I place the flask back into the dark space behind the left-hand drawer in the desk.
    â€œSee you later,” I say as I leave the room.

14
    Our local hospital is too small to deal with cases like the twins’, so we have to go to the city. It’s a long drive.
    â€œYour Mom will be very tired. You know that, don’t you?” Gran says.
    She makes it sound like we shouldn’t be going, but I know why we we’re going. In case the twins belong in the thirty-four percent who die on day one.
    The Intensive Care Baby Unit is in the high-rise part of the hospital, on the fifteenth floor. We come out of the elevator facing a message telling us we are
In the Zone
and to make sure we scrub ourselves with the Hygienic Hand Rub. The doors to the unit are locked and we have to buzz to be let in.
    Si hears us as we check in at the nurses’ station and comes out to greet us.
    â€œAngela,” he says to Gran and then, “Jess.” And he puts his hand out to touch me, which he doesn’t usually. I look at his eyes. They aren’t sparkling, but they are smiling. “Come on in.”
    There are four incubators in the room and five nurses. Two of the nurses are wearing flimsy pink disposable aprons and throwing things into bins. There’s an air of serious hush, broken only by the steady blip of ventilators. Beside each cot is a screen with wavy lines of electronic blue, green, and yellow. I don’t know what they measure, but they’re the sort of machines you see in movies that go into a single flat line when people die. Mom is not sitting or standing, but lying on a bed. They must have wheeled her in on that bed, and parked her next to the twins. She doesn’t look up immediately when we come into the room; all her focus, all her attention, is on my brothers.
    Brothers.
    All through the pregnancy, Mom’s been calling them my brothers.
When the twins are born, when your brothers are born
. . . . But, I realize, standing in the hospital Intensive Care Baby Unit, that they are not my brothers. Not fullbrothers, anyway. We share a mother, but not a father, so they are my half-brothers. But half-brothers sounds as if they’re only half here or as if they don’t quite belong.