Free I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

night.”
    Jake doesn’t say anything as he leads me out of the barn. There’s something much more disturbing than the cud and the constant chewing out here. There are the two carcasses up against the wall. Two woolly carcasses.
    Limp and lifeless, both have been stacked up outside against the side of the barn. It’s not what I’m expecting to see. There’s no blood or gore, no flies, no scent, nothing to suggest these were ever living creatures, no signs of decay. They could just as easily be made of synthetic rather than organic material.
    I want to stare at them, but I also want to get farther away. I’ve never seen dead lambs before, other than on my plate with garlic and rosemary. It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of beingsure. These lambs aren’t sleepwalking through life. They aren’t discouraged or sick. They aren’t thinking about giving up. These tailless lambs are dead, extremely dead, ten-out-of-ten dead.
    â€œWhat will happen to the lambs?” I call to Jake, who’s walking ahead, away from the barn. He’s hungry now, I can tell, and wants to hurry up, get inside. The wind is picking up.
    â€œWhat?” he yells over his shoulder. “You mean the dead ones?”
    â€œYeah.”
    Jake doesn’t reply. He just keeps walking.
    I’m not sure what else to say. Why didn’t he say anything about the dead lambs? I’m the one who saw them. I’d rather ignore them, but now that I’ve seen them, I can’t.
    â€œWill anything happen to them?” I ask.
    â€œI don’t know. What do you mean? They’re already dead.”
    â€œDo they stay there, or get buried or anything?”
    â€œProbably burn them at some point. In the bonfire. When it gets warmer, in the spring.” Jake continues walking ahead of me. “They’re frozen for now anyway.” They didn’t look all that different from lambs that are alive and healthy, at least in my mind. But they’re dead. There’s something so similar to living, healthy lambs, but also so different.
    I jog to catch up, trying not to slip and fall. We’re far enough away from the barn now that when I turn back, the shape of the two lambs looks like a single inanimate form, a solid mass—a bag of grain resting against the wall.
    â€œCome on,” he calls, “I’ll show you the old pen where they usedto keep pigs. They don’t have pigs anymore; they were too much work.”
    I follow him along the path until he stops. The pen looks abandoned, untouched for a few years. That’s my feeling. The pigs are gone, but the enclosure is still there.
    â€œSo what happened to the pigs?”
    â€œThe last two were quite old and weren’t moving around much anymore,” he says. “They had to be put down.”
    â€œAnd they never got any new ones or baby pigs? Piglets. Is that how it usually works?”
    â€œSometimes. But I guess they never replaced them. They’re a lot of work and expensive to keep.”
    I should probably know better, but I’m curious. “Why did they have to put the pigs down?”
    â€œThat’s what happens on a farm. It’s not always pleasant.”
    â€œYeah, but were they sick?”
    He turns back and looks at me. “Forget it. I don’t think you’d like the truth.”
    â€œJust tell me. I need to know.”
    â€œSometimes it’s hard, out here on a farm like this. It’s work. My parents hadn’t been inside the pen to check on the pigs for a few days. They just tossed their food into the pen. The pigs were lying in the same corner day after day, and after a while, Dad decided he’d better have a good look at them. When he went inside, the pigs didn’t look well. He could tell they were in some