#8 The Hatching (4 page)

In the morning Mum kept me home from school. I was running a temperature, and I also had an egg stuck to my abdomen.

She didn't know about that last part, though.

I don't know why I didn't tell her. Something inside me seemed to know that the Egg demanded secrecy about the process. Loyalty.

I had not been loyal when I tried to smash it with the soccer lamp.

But I would be loyal now.

Days passed, and the doctor came to visit and took my blood. He tried to lift up my pajama top and check if it was appendicitis, but I wouldn't let him.

If he saw the Egg, he would probably try to remove the Egg, to hurt it. And the Egg must not be hurt.

Especially at this most vulnerable of times.

You see, the Egg was beginning to hatch.

Cracks had appeared at the top of it, and eventually they snaked all the way across its body.

It didn't move, though. The Egg was a static being, still and ominous.

On the fourth day of what I had come to think of as the Hatching, the cracks began to unfurl.

They didn't move, but somehow they opened without moving.

It was like watching a series of still photographs with slight differences. The cracks were widening and widening and widening and opening and everything was swirling around me, a terrible eggy blackness reaching out and out and out.

When I awoke there was an egg on my nightstand again.

It was almost identical to the previous Egg, except that it was very slightly bigger.

Every morning I put the new Egg in the fridge, and every evening it returns to the nightstand.

I am still scared of the Egg, but there's another feeling there too.

A sort of a horrid responsibility for its well-being.

After all, I brought it into this world, in this form anyway.

I touch the new Egg sometimes, stroke it softly round and round and round—the whorls of my fingertips so rough in comparison.

They really are a higher life form, eggs. Such simple things, and yet containing worlds. Nourishment and life.

Meat and venom.

Best to stay on their good side. Not that eggs have sides.

But still, you know what I mean.

I was just about to open my mouth and mock Seamus when he lifted up his T-shirt.

There it was: a perfect egg-shaped dent sunk into the soft fat of his belly.

“I call it my nest,” he concluded proudly, and everyone went quiet.

Until John muttered, “I'd probably still eat it. For five dollars.”

I'D LIKE TO SEE HIM TRY.

I REALLY,
REALLY
WOULD.