“Can you believe this?” Carl asks as soon as I’m through the door. Two guys my age look up from the cooler full of blue drinks. He doesn’t wait for me to answer and says, “They cloned a sheep. Cloned it. A sheep.”
“So?”
“So? What’s wrong with you, son? Didn’t you stay in college long enough to learn anything?” The twitch in Carl’s face becomes faster and more frantic than usual.
“That poor sheep—Dolly, that’s what they named her—is going to live her whole life in a box. Poked and studied and I don’t want to know what. And all you say is, ‘So?’ What kind of life is that? It’s no life. Not even for a sheep.”
The bell rings on the door as those guys leave without buying anything, or maybe without paying for it since neither of us was paying attention. We’re alone in the box of the store, the two of us at the counter and our two reflections a few feet away, the measuring strip between us and its colors much brighter than the weak blue of our aprons against the dark glass.
“I guess I haven’t thought about it.”
“I guess you haven’t,” says Carl.