What Grows at Home

We had always wanted something to take care of and nurture. If there’s one thing I hope to convey beyond a reasonable doubt, it's that.

When Morgan and I got back from our honeymoon to our condo that we had yet to furnish, yet to unpack, yet to start our new life, we felt a bit empty, like something was missing in our lives. It was a bit disappointing. We spent all that time dating, building up to get engaged, planning the details of the wedding, picking out the perfect horderves so that all our friends and family would be satisfied with our choices in life, rehearsing hours upon hours our own vows, or at least she did, and then it’s finally done, we’re left with ourselves for the rest of our lives, and, well, I for one felt  a bit disheartened.

Morgan had a great idea, though. We’d get a cat. Something fluffy, cute, and would be wholly dependent on us for its survival. That’s not how she framed it, though.

“I want something to shower with affection!”

So, we went down to the shelter. I saw this long-haired gray cat sitting off to the side. Though sitting wasn’t quite the word for what she was doing. This cat curled itself up so much and tight so as to be as physically far apart from the other cats and people in the room. She looked out of sorts, you know, like she didn’t want anyone to look at her and felt totally uncomfortable with her surroundings. I related. I thought we shared a bit of kinship when it came to our antisocial tendencies. 

The shelter had named her Gemini. But when my wife and I looked at her, all we saw was my Uncle Edward. Her mane reminded us of his beard, and she had the same feral look in her eyes as my uncle did. So, because Uncle Ed liked his whiskey, a bit too much I should add, we renamed her Whiskey. It also seemed like we could explain it to strangers as something innocuous since Whiskey could be short for whiskers, despite having the same amount of syllables, but still seemed plausible since we assumed no one would sit there dumbfoundedly counting the amount of letters and syllables in each word.

Either way, we brought home Whiskey to try and finish off our new home. I quickly realized adopting a cat with the same personality as me was not a bright idea. In hindsight, I should have known that because I detest myself more than anything. Not to say that I detested Whiskey. She made herself too scarce to ever be despised, loved, or thought of all that much. The moment we let her out of the crate she bolted…to where neither my wife nor I could ever find out. 

She hid with the adroitness of a sniper wading through the marsh before quickly disposing of its target from hundred of yards away. If given the opportunity, I’m almost certain she would have been more than happy to take my wife and I out. We left her out food…and water…and made sure to clean her litter, though she seemed to try and use that as rarely as possible, probably because, as we noticed, she tried to eat and drink as little as possible.

We would try and find her to socialize, pet, and play with her, you know, to let her know that we cared about her wellbeing and wanted her to be a part of the family. But we only saw her maybe once a week or so at first. Then less and less. Until one day, Morgan turned to me and asked if I had seen Whiskey that month. I said I hadn’t seen her since before Thanksgiving. It happened to be a week from Easter. 

To this day, I have no idea where exactly she was hiding. This wasn’t one of those million dollar condos with Escher-like  hallways that go on for days. It was maybe 1,500 square feet. No hidden compartments, no weird furniture for her to hide under, no 1920’s style bootlegger drop door that led to some intricate underground compartment to scurry into. 

But gone she was. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t tell you where Whiskey went off to. I assume she’s still in the condo. I imagine when her body starts to smell, then we’ll finally have found her hidey hole. Though perhaps she found a way out. I like to think she did. Whiskey stopped eating the food or drinking the water we put out for her. So, fingers crossed she escaped to the great unknown.

Morgan and I weren’t quite done, though, with wanting to find something, or someone, else to complete our little home. The next logical step we took was to get a dog. Cat didn’t like us, so of course why not go for the total opposite. The reason we had previously gotten a cat rather than a dog was because our space was, as I said, kinda small, and we didn’t have much of a yard. There was a nie park across the street from us. But either way…it’s beside the point. We went back to the adoption agency, and they said they only had cats, but they pointed us to a nice foster group that connected us with a nice lady named Sherry who had decades of experience fostering and adopting out hundreds of dogs of all shapes and sizes.

When we met up with Sherry, she said she had about ten dogs living on her property. All of them social. All of them had their shots. All of them were fixed. Not a bad one in the bunch, so to speak. 

So, we headed out to Sherry’s property, and quickly learned after a series of obscure turns and dirt roads that Sherry lived on and managed a farm. I guess that’s not all that surprising considering she was fostering dogs left and right for all these years. But lemme tell you, at that point in my life, I had never been to a farm. I had never wanted to visit a farm. I had no clue what a farm would be like, smell like, or taste like. The strong scent of manure shot straight through my nostrils and into the back of my throat.

Sherry’s skin looked ursarialian. She towered above Morgan and I, and gripped our hands when we greeted her like she was taking us hostage. But her smile was disarming. Despite missing a tooth. Despite missing a piece of her right pinky, which I assumed had a story behind it but I felt too embarrassed to ask.

We were given a quick tour of her home and all the animals she kept. We met all the dogs she was fostering at the moment. Morgan fell in love with a husky named Cylus. I agreed he was adorable and would make a great addition. Though to be perfectly honest, I was a bit exhausted from the drive. It was a nine hour drive. I don’t even work that long in one day. I don’t even think my commute to and from work accumulated is that long in one week. 

But Cylus was incredibly friendly. He enjoyed sniffing Morgan’s stomach and followed her around. Sherry joked that Cylus might be smelling her pregnancy. We laughed because we thought it was a joke. We laughed because we thought it couldn’t be true.

Morgan and I hadn’t fully discussed it going into the marriage, but I guess we always assumed that we were on the same page about having a child. Sure, it might be nice to settle down in our thirties with a kid, if we felt so inclined. But not until we were well established in our career, with our finances, and had spent plenty of time enjoying the company of each other.

Cylus, on the other hand, seemed to be sniffing at the possibility that we had fucked that up and needed to get medical confirmation.

The OBGYN (which always sounded like the acronym for an old school rap group) confirmed that there was indeed something simmering inside Morgan, waiting to crawl its way out after a period of sucking as much nutrients and life from her as possible for the next several months.

I, for one, didn’t sleep for five days straight. I kept sweating through my clothes. My heart seemed to be trying to jailbreak out of its cavity and go anywhere but where it was. I nervously scratched this one part of my face so intensely that my nail eventually punctured through and I started bleeding profusely. Bloody, sweaty, and balls deep in an insomniac hell…and I wasn’t even the one pushing the damn thing out of me. I could only imagine how Morgan felt, though she definitely seemed to be playing it cool. 

The ultrasound made it real, though. We actually got to see the form our fleshy ooze-ridden organisms felt compelled to produce through some weird genetic concoction/compulsion produced when in the heat-throes-dissection of each others bodies laid plaid in form with stilted, predictable motion that lasted all of minutes but transformed into infinity on loop.

“That doesn’t look right,” I said at the unborn image of Morgan and I’s evolutionary code written hazily up on a screen without color.

“What do you mean?” the doctor asked.

“It doesn’t look like a child. It looks like something else.”

“What else could it be?”

I didn’t quite have the right thoughts to describe. Perhaps due to my sleep-deprived mind. Perhaps because I didn’t possess the vocabulary necessary to illustrate what it was I saw. But Morgan took one look at what was supposed to be our child and said, “Is that a house plant?”

“I….uh, I, well, don’t know how else to tell you,” our doctor stammered, “but yes.”