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Strangers dropped off a large egg for you
earlier in the day. It was important you recieved it intact. They
asked that I not hold it up to candles to determine gender, genus, or content.
The egg sat around for a while and they called to remind me not to look inside.
So the day went by and the egg and I watched
television. I made some coffee and sat a cup by the egg as a joke to myself. The
TV show was about a farmer and his plow and how he had problems talking to
people because he was distracted by the hands of women that never worked. He had
known working women and he knew their hands but they were not the ones who
distracted him. By the end of the program I had recieved a phone call to not try
and look inside the egg.
I held the egg up to a candle but the candle wasn't
bright enough, not for the size of the egg. So I came up with a strategy. I
would make a curved pipeline right around the egg, to wrap around it, and fill
the pipes with boiling water. I know the soul of an egg: If I warmed up the
liquid but not enough to harm the creature I could funnel a hole through the
boiled bits and see inside. If I did not let the pipes touch the egg then the
egg would not discolor. Replace the punctured shell with itself and hope the
hatching occurs before it is noticed.
The phone rang and they reminded me again not to
look inside of the egg. "It's all fine, thank you."
The pipes ran hot for a while and I tapped it with
a spoon along the outlines. I took a knife and removed a square eggshell panel
of two inches. I was able to see inside through a drinking straw but all I could
see was yellow. I knew the anatomy of the egg, and wanted a beak. An eye. A
wing.
The phone rang and I didn't answer this time. The
machine picked up and no one left a message, but the ringing began again.
I had drained the yolk into a paper cup. The
yolk was sitting in the pan and I put it in the shower so it wouldn't spill. I
put the straw back in to see. The phone had stopped ringing.
I put on the TV for background noise. Inside of the
egg was a small hairless chicken. I sat down and watched a rerun of the
documentary about a solar eclipse in Antarctica, where the penguins become
agitated and then go to sleep. I woke up to the sound of your body in
the shower.
-e.
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