I do not really want a new window in my house, but the cancer in the north wall must be cut away. It is growing scales of its own, and decorations I did not ask it for, and it might drop something motile and hostile any day. I harvest a blade from the garden, and I cut it, one big square and then into strips that coil up in the pot, potentially contaminated knife following after; the tip of the blade curls up in the steam, flinching from the warmth. It has been cloudy, and my purpose-grown food has been producing less; cancer stew is acceptable. Cooking will kill the rebellion.
The pot is the one thing I have that is not me. It is made of clay, so that it can hold up to a fire fueled by me and cook bits of me that were either grown to be food in the first place, or are no longer needed for whatever other purpose they began with. I have grown myself into my house, and into everything in the garden. Since I've harvested a knife, and am not keeping it, I plant a new one. A scale, oozing a little where it's peeled from my arm, is dropped into the plot next to all the other tools; it knows what it ought to do, and if it fails in it, I'll boil it too. I plant another scale in a spare bit of earth, instructed to grow for me a thin filmy leaf that will serve as a patch on the new window I did not want to have. The house will grow to fill the hole, since it knows there is not meant to be a hole there; the film will at some point be big enough for whatever amount of hole is left; in the meantime I will simply have a gap in my house.
While I am out planting my new selves, my neighbor is out too. It is not me. It is blue-green where I have pink edges, and its motile body is built shorter, and its scales are a little pointier at the tips.
"What are you planting?" it asks.
"That is none of your business," I tell it.
"You should be friendlier to me, I think," it says. "It will all work out better in the long run that way."
It says this like it knows something I don't. Well, I know something it doesn't, despite my having told it so repeatedly: I don't like it. "No."
"I have a flower coming in."
"It will die unloved just the same as its parent."
"Don't be like that," it wheedles. "You could grow a flower, too. In your garden, if you don't want to meet me in person, and then there could be a seed."
I don't want a seed with my neighbor. It has been here as long as I have, as long as I can remember, and I have never in that entire time admired it or thought it would make a good pollinator. A seed made with me and it together would just be worse than growing more of me, and I haven't done that so far, either. Though I have thought of it. Two of me could overpower my neighbor and tear it to pieces and cook it and eat it. I will need to at least wait for sunnier weather, though, to grow something so energy-intensive as another motile self. I am not going to starve, or even run out of knives and windows, but I would not choose to try to feed two of me in the arable garden around my house.
Instead of answering my neighbor, who surely already knows everything I have to say on the matter because I have said it many times, I go back inside. The cut edges around the cancer in the north wall have stopped leaking sap (what there is, dripping down the pink-laced green of the wall, I lick up) and started, ever so slowly, to heal inward. I cut a big hole around a small cancer to be sure of getting it all, and a cool breeze is now blowing in, fanning the flames under my stewpot. It is not actually good for the stew for the flames to be quite so high, so I upturn the table as a temporary measure to shelter the flame.
While I am at it, I check the table for cancer, but it is smooth and colored me-colors all through. The chimney, full of self-scrubbing little pores that usher the smoke into the sky, is clean as can be. The other three walls of my house are healthy. The roof looks well, too, though I should really check the outside of the house, in case a cancer has manifested there since I last looked. I step out again.
My neighbor is still there. "My flower will be ready soon. You won't have to do anything but grow one of your own. Do you want to keep both seeds?" it asks. "Do you want my house and garden to feed them on? I could move away."
"You could move away without any seeds," I reply. "And then I would not encounter you."
It shakes its head. "Do you want me to keep both seeds, so that you never need to bother about them or share your self?" it asks. "They will be able to eat of my garden as well as yours."
I inspect my house for exterior cancer. It looks like none has started today on any of the walls or on the roof, which is angled so I can see it all without climbing for exactly this reason. (Though of course I would have to climb, or else attach a knife to quite a long pole, if there were a cancer up there.) I check my fence. I look over all my purpose-grown food, though if food has cancer that mostly means that I must cook it before I eat it, and should not have it raw. Some of my fruits are ready to harvest and dry. Drying them is less fuel-intensive than boiling, so I prefer it when it is possible. I pick the fruits and bring them inside to cut and leave on the table, which I have to set upright, but at least the stew is by now cooked through.
I eat the stew with a me-spoon, hot and steaming, soupy brown where the pigments all mix and denature. The cancer always tastes a little different from me. Different parts of me may have more or less sugar, be tougher or juicier or woodier, but the flavor is always alike; cancer is trying to be something new. This one tastes bitter. It was not trying to be a good something new. The spoon, which was steadfast as could be asked of it through the meal, is withered by the time I have eaten all my stew, because of the heat, so I eat that too, the stem still raw enough to crunch. It's safe not to boil it. The spoon was loyal. I go plant another one.
My neighbor is not outside any more, when I do. This pleases me.
In three days' time, the neighbor's garden has a flower in it. I grudgingly admit - only to myself - that it is a beautiful flower, with yellow petals and bright inviting stamens and a radial point-petaled shape.
My neighbor catches me staring.
"There's still time," it says. "The flower will live for long enough that you could grow one too. There could still be seeds. My pollen and your -"
"You disgust me," I tell it. "Your flower will die unloved." It is beautiful, but it belongs to a disagreeable individual with whom I want no children ever. I am not sure why my neighbor would have troubled to grow a flower at all in the face of my unwavering refusal. It is an energy-intensive sort of growth. It would have needed to eat a lot of high-nutrition matter, the slow-growing kind that packs a ton of sugar and lipid into a tiny fruit so that you can eat a whole potful of them without needing to wait to digest. Cancer stew will not make a flower like that. It's too bulky.
My neighbor slumps, and goes back into its house.
I check my house and my garden for cancer. I pick more fruit to dry, and plant more fruit to pick up what little sunlight might reach through the clouds and turn it into more food for me, and I harvest a replacement spoon.
An escaped cancer will sometimes form into a functional individual, one that can master itself and its own growths well enough to survive, perhaps eating half its progenitor's garden on its way out, perhaps eating the progenitor itself. That is what I thought my neighbor was: someone's runaway spoon or fuel-log. A proper seed would have had parents, or at least one of them, tending it, and these my neighbor never evinced.
But the third possibility I did not think of: that a larger self had planted my neighbor purposefully, to be a walking and talking subordinate instead of a house or a fence. To do some task, and then to be re-assumed into the larger self.
It brings me no satisfaction to watch my neighbor describe the plot of its garden and the supplies of its dried food to another in its own color, but ten times the size. It brings me no satisfaction to see my neighbor lifted to that great mouth and be devoured, raw, with a louder version of the wet snap I hear every time I peel one of my scales from my arm.
And then my own giant comes.
I assumed I was an orphaned seed, my parents lost to some misfortune, the assortment of produce in the garden edible to me by their shared relation to myself. I had to grow my own house, but perhaps my parents fell to fungus or beast before they had the chance to plant one for me, I thought.
Why I believed this about myself, I can no longer reconstruct.
The second giant, that is me, my green, my pink, my blunt-tipped scales and my build and my voice, when it speaks:
"Looks like it's not just that you made a bad first impression, eh?"
And the first giant, my neighbor's giant, replies:
"Guess so. Oh well. You win, the terraces are yours."
My giant, my self, my only parent, to whom I am a spoon, turns to me, and I know what it wants of me.
As my neighbor did, I report on what is growing in my garden, what is cooking in my pot, what is stored in my cellar, on my own health and that of the house, on the purpose of the window patch - how large a house must my giant live in, how long must it have tended it! - and when the giant reaches for me, to reclaim what it planted and grew here, I hold still for it, neither running nor flinching.
I do not need to be boiled.
I am not cancer.