WINNER, Spring 2026
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award

BY MARI HARRISON

The cells were dying and I could not feed them anymore because my hands had gone smooth.

My fingerprints had faded over months until my phone stopped recognizing my thumbprint, and I had to sign the divorce papers with a pen that kept slipping between fingers that felt as slick as my steel lab bench. When I pulled on nitrile gloves, I could not tell where my thumb ended and the plunger began. The media spilled over the side of the flask, pink and warm, the exact color we had painted Mia’s room before she got sick and we had to repaint it grey because the brightness hurt her eyes during the headaches.

Dr. Reyes did not know the cells came from Mia. The line was labeled SK-N-BE(2)-M, Passage 407, filed under my research project testing kinase inhibitors on neuroblastoma proliferation. She thought I was using a commercial line, and I had let her think it for seven years. I published a few papers early on, before the cells started changing me, and I couldn’t stop feeding them. Those publications bought me time.

The cells grew adherent on the bottom of T-75 flasks, spreading across the plastic like a city seen from an airplane at night. Mia made that connection first, when she was five. We flew to visit my mother in Portland and she pressed her nose to the window during our descent. She said the lights looked like cells under a microscope, and I remember being startled because I didn’t think she was really paying attention when she visited the lab with me. I asked which parts reminded her of cells, but she was already bored with the question and pointing at something else outside the window.

The neurosurgeon had told us he got clean margins. He sat stiffly with his hands folded on the desk like a man at prayer, and I noticed he wore no wedding ring. The walls of his office held degrees and certifications, but no family photos. I remember thinking that he had probably never fed someone applesauce when they could not hold the spoon, had never washed vomit out of dark curly hair at three in the morning, and had never promised a seven-year-old the headaches would stop soon even though he knew he was lying.

The cells he removed from Mia’s brain went to pathology first, but I worked in the same building and I knew the techs who processed the samples. It was not difficult to request a small piece of the tumor for research purposes, and they were kind enough to look away while I filled out the paperwork with trembling hands. That was Passage 1, the month before she died.

My hands were not smooth then. They still had fingerprints, which I left on the cool metal of the biosafety cabinet when I pressed my palms against it to steady myself the first time I fed Mia’s cells.

Mia was sick, but her cells were strong. They attached overnight after I plated them in their first flask. When I came in the next morning, they had spread across the bottom in small clusters that looked like the constellations we had painted on Mia’s ceiling. I warmed the media in the bead bath to exactly 37 degrees Celsius, the temperature of a living body, the temperature of Mia’s forehead when I would press my lips against it in the dark to check if the fever had broken.

The media smelled faintly sweet and chemical. Even after seven years, it made my stomach twist with something that was neither hunger nor nausea but some third feeling that had no name.

I started staying late with the cells two weeks after Mia died.

“I need to finish an experiment,” I told David one evening. “I’ll be home late.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table holding Mia’s ashes in the blue ceramic urn we had chosen together from a catalog that felt obscene in its cheerfulness. He kept turning the urn over in his hands as if he were looking for printed instructions, some manual for what to do next.

“Okay,” he said without looking up.

“David—”

“It’s fine. Go.”

We had already stopped asking each other questions by then. We moved through the house like ghosts haunting the same space, careful not to touch, careful not to speak about anything that mattered for fear we would break something else.

I settled into a necessary routine. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I fed the cells. On weekends they would be hungry, the media turning from pink to yellow-orange as the pH dropped and the cells ran out of nutrients. I started going in on Sunday mornings while David was still asleep or pretending to be asleep in the guest room where he had moved his things. The cells would be dense by Sunday, piled on top of each other because they had run out of space to spread. I would split them at eighty percent confluence, adding trypsin to lift them off the plastic, spinning them down in the centrifuge, resuspending the pellet in fresh media and dividing them between new flasks. One flask became two, two became four, and the passage numbers climbed like years.

Passage 12 was when Mia would have been eight. Passage 56 was ten. I marked her birthdays by bringing a cupcake to the lab, chocolate with vanilla frosting because that had been her favorite. I would light a single candle and set it next to the incubator where her cells grew in the dark. I would whisper happy birthday to the warm, humming box, and the cells would just keep growing, dividing every twenty-eight hours, needing to be split again and again in an endless cycle that felt less like science and more like ritual.

My hands started changing at Passage 143. I noticed it first in the shower when I pressed my thumb against the glass shower door and the print it left was blurred, the lines barely visible. By Passage 152, my phone didn’t recognize my fingerprint anymore and I had to switch to using a passcode.

Six months later, when David and I signed the divorce papers at the kitchen table, he reached across and took my hand. We had not touched in months.

“Jesus, Em. What happened to your hands?”

I pulled away. “It’s just dry skin. From the lab work.”

But even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. I’d seen techs who’d worked in tissue culture for thirty years with perfectly normal hands. This wasn’t from the work. This was from the cells. From Mia. From feeding them, warming their media to body temperature, and keeping a piece of her alive in the dark. The cells were changing me. I could feel it now—not just in my skin, but somewhere deeper.

“They don’t look dry. They look—” He stopped, searching for the word. “Smooth. Like wax.”

“The constant washing. The gloves.” I shrugged.

He stared at me for a long moment, and I could see him deciding whether to push. We had been married for twelve years. He knew when I was lying.

“You need to take care of yourself,” he said finally.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine since—” He stopped again. We still could not say her name out loud. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

We signed the papers. Three days later, he moved out, taking only his clothes and his books and leaving everything else behind like a man abandoning a sinking ship.

After he left, the sounds of the refrigerator humming and the furnace clicking on and off seemed amplified. The mechanical breathing of the house keeping itself alive reminded me of the sounds of a pediatric ICU. I couldn’t take it.

I started staying at the lab until midnight or later, watching the cells under the microscope. They would cluster together with their thin cellular processes reaching out toward each other, trying to make connections, trying to form the neural networks they would never complete.

Mia had loved puzzles when she was small. She would sit at the coffee table with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, fitting the cardboard pieces together with her stubby, determined fingers. I would watch her and feel my heart swell, and I remember thinking that this was what it meant to be a mother, to watch your child solve problems, to watch them figure out the world piece by piece. After the cells were fed and the incubators closed, I would wonder what my new definition was.

At Passage 208, I stopped being able to feel temperature. I was warming something in a water bath for a graduate student and reached in without gloves to adjust the position of the bottle. I didn’t notice until Dr. Reyes screamed from across the room.

“Emmett! What the hell—”

I pulled my hands out. The water was 53 degrees Celsius, hot enough to scald. My skin had turned bright red. I felt nothing at all.

She drove me to urgent care, where a nurse bandaged my hands and asked me if I was safe at home so she could check a box.

In the parking lot, Dr. Reyes turned to me before starting the car.

“What’s going on with you?”

“I’m really sorry. I just wasn’t paying attention.”

“Emmett. You put your hands in boiling water and didn’t notice. That’s not normal.”

“It wasn’t boiling. It was like fifty degrees.”

“That’s hot enough. You should have  felt it.” She paused. “Is this about Mia?”

I looked out the window. “Everything is about Mia.”

                                                                                 * * *

The blisters healed within a few days, and when they did, the skin underneath was even smoother than before. I was grateful it was winter and I could justify wearing gloves in public more often.

Dr. Reyes started asking questions at Passage 330. She came into the tissue culture room one afternoon while I was feeding flasks and leaned against the counter with her arms crossed.

“Emmett, what are you actually working on?”

“Pathway inhibitors. Characterization work.”

“You haven’t published anything in years.”

I kept my eyes on the flask. “I’ve co-authored, you know that. And I’m being thorough.”

“Wei found you sleeping in here again. On the floor by the incubator.”

“I was just tired.”

“You’re scaring the grad students.” Her voice softened. “You’re scaring me. When’s the last time you took a day off?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Look at me.” I did not. “Take a week. Go home. Sleep in an actual bed.”

I told her I would, and I meant it when I said it. But I spent that week parked outside the lab in my car, watching the windows on the fourth floor where my daughter’s brain was still growing. On the fourth day, I could not stand it anymore. I went in through the back entrance at two in the morning while the building was silent except for the mechanical breathing of freezers and ventilation systems keeping a thousand experiments alive.

When I got home that morning, the sun was rising and the light was grey and thin. I held my hands up to look at them and saw that they had developed a texture I hadn’t noticed before. Small parallel ridges were running across my palms and fingers, regular and repeating, like the pattern of cells growing in a monolayer. When I pressed my palm against the wall to steady myself, it stuck there for just a moment before I pulled it away, releasing with a faint wet sound, like cells peeling off plastic.

By Passage 407, the cells were dying. I had been careless, or maybe I had passaged them too many times and they had reached a limit I did not understand, some boundary between life and replication that I had pushed them past. The flasks were full of floating cells, their membranes compromised, their nuclei fragmenting, and the ones still attached to the plastic looked grainy, stressed, and nothing like the healthy cultures I had maintained for seven years.

Dr. Reyes found me at the microscope at three in the morning. I was watching the cells die under the scope, clusters of them detaching and floating away, and my face was wet.

“Emmett.” Her hand touched my shoulder and I flinched. “What’s going on?”

“They’re dying.”

“What’s dying?”

“The cells. I can’t save them.” My voice came out wrong, too high and thin. “I tried everything. I changed the media, I lowered the density, I added fresh serum. They’re still dying.”

She pulled over a stool and sat down next to me. “We can get more cells. This happens. Contamination, or the line gets senescent—”

“No.” The word came out too loud. “Not these. I can’t lose these.”

“Why not? Emmett, where did this line come from?”

I looked at my hands, the smooth, waxy skin visible even through the gloves, the ridges catching the fluorescent light.

“They’re Mia’s,” I said, and saying it out loud made something crack open in my chest. “From her tumor. Before she died. I’ve been keeping them alive.”

Dr. Reyes was very quiet. I could hear the incubators humming, could hear the ventilation system, could hear my own breathing too fast and too shallow.

“How long?” she asked.

“Seven years.”

“Jesus, Emmett.” She stood up and paced to the window and back. “Jesus. Do you know how many regulations you’ve violated? Ethics board approval, informed consent, biosafety—”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because I could lose my lab over this.”

“I know,” I said again, and I did know, I had always known, but it had not mattered because the cells were all I had left of her.

She sat back down. Her voice was gentler when she spoke again. “Emmett. You know they’re not her, right?”

“Of course I know that.”

“Then why?”

I looked back at the microscope, at the dying cells, at the last remnants of my daughter’s tumor-ridden brain floating in pink media. “Because when I’m feeding them, she’s still alive. When I’m splitting them and counting passages and warming media to exactly thirty-seven degrees, she’s still alive. “

Dr. Reyes reached over and turned off the microscope light. “Freeze them. Then go home.”

I spent a month at home, lying in Mia’s room under the grey walls and looking at where the stars used to be on the ceiling. Across town in a minus-eighty freezer, there were two frozen vials of Mia’s cells, Passage 407, cryopreserved and waiting.

When I went back to the lab, Dr. Reyes was waiting for me in her office.

“The frozen stocks,” I said before she could tell me to get rid of them herself. “I want to be the one to destroy them.”

She looked at me carefully, then handed me an autoclave bag. “If you’re sure. I’ll leave you alone.”

The culture room was empty. I pulled the frozen vials from the minus-eighty, two small tubes containing millions of Mia’s cells suspended in dimethyl sulfoxide. I should have dropped them in the biohazard bin right then. I should have put them in the autoclave bag and walked away.

Instead, I thawed one vial in the water bath. My hands were so numb I could barely feel the warmth through my gloves or grip the pipette when I drew up the cell suspension. In an incubator across the room was a flask of SK-N-SH cells, a different neuroblastoma line that one of the grad students was using for her project.

I opened the flask and added a single milliliter of Mia’s cells to the media.

In a few passages, Mia’s cells would be so diluted they would be undetectable, lost in the larger population. In a few passages after that, they would be gone completely . . . or maybe they would somehow persist, hidden, a ghost in the culture, continuing to divide long after I had left the building.

I pressed my smooth palm against the warm glass of the incubator door one last time. My skin caught the light, cellular, strange, and growing. Then I turned off the overhead  and walked away.

 The incubators kept humming behind me, keeping their thousand invisible experiments alive in the dark.

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