Free #8 The Hatching by Annie Graves

“Eat this,” yelled Sally Ann, brandishing an egg in front of my face, “and I’ll give you five dollars.”
    â€œWhat kind of egg is that?” I asked her.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said. “I found it on the road.”
    Sally Ann was always finding things on the road.
    Old keys.
    Belt buckles.
    Pages out of books.
    Eggs were new, though. I don’t think she’d ever found an egg before.

    I didn’t eat it.
    But she thrust it at me, and I took it from her.
    I wish she had kept it.
    I wish she’d never shown me the cursed thing.
    I wish against wish that the Egg had remained on the road to be buried in muck and car dust and never noticed by anyone at all.
    As soon as I touched the Egg, I felt a shiver run up the small bones in my wrist.
    It was almost like the feeling I got the time I had a secret go with Mum’s electric chainsaw. Only without the glee. A sort of dull shock.
    I put it in my pocket all the same.
    After all, it was only an egg.

    I felt its smooth weight against my leg, like a promise.
    A promise of what, I did not know. I don’t speak Egg.
    I forgot about it then, and it stayed nestled in my pocket throughout the school day.
    That evening, I changed into my pajamas and the Egg remained, neglected, in my gray uniform pants pocket.
    But in the night I suddenly awoke and it was there, looming whitely on my nightstand.

    It wasn’t a pink, grainy egg like hens lay.
    It was a white, perfect one, like the kind of egg you see in picture books.
    â€œMaybe it’s a duck egg,” said my mother when I went to put it in the fridge the following morning.

    She denied going through my pockets and placing the Egg on my bedside table, but years of experience had taught me that she was an expert snooper. No catapault un-confiscated, no firecracker un-removed, all without ever admitting to any of it.
    In a house like mine there are no secrets, but there are a lot of unspoken things. Mum never makes a fuss, just quietly fixes the problem at hand, wiping it down like the surface of a table or a countertop until you don’t really remember what was there in the beginning of it all.

    When I got home, the Egg was on my nightstand again.
    I returned it to the fridge and closed the door the way Mum says I should, pressing it tightly, so the seal inside sucks it firmly shut.

    I awoke to its eggy presence on my nightstand yet again.
    That was when I realized that I was scared of the Egg.

    This was a very embarrassing thing to realize.
    Boys my age shouldn’t be scared of eggs.
    Especially when they’re best friends with Sally Ann, who isn’t scared of anything and once ate a living spider “for the laugh.”

    I hated the Egg for making me feel so powerless.
    I sat up in bed and stared at it.
    It was so still and smooth and perfect. Mum had rinsed it under the tap, so it was cleaner now than it had been.
    It gleamed dully through the darkness, lurking eggily.
    In the morning I put it in the center of the kitchen table.
    When Mum came in, I told her what had happened.
    We don’t flat-out accuse people of things in my house, but the Egg itself was accusation enough, lolling on its side like a Roman emperor.

    Mum said, “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” and she smashed the Egg into the sink.
    We looked at each other with a sickening kind of relief: I because my enemy had been defeated, and she because, for the first time in living memory, she had wasted food.
    In school that day I was giddy with relief.
    I spent recess happily collecting slugs with Sally Ann in the hopes of luring, and eventually trapping, Flaherty the Hedgehog.

    He was a mythical creature said to roam around the school garden late at night in search of food and fallen bits of lunch.
    Sally Ann was obsessed with Flaherty because she was fairly sure that he didn’t exist, except as a sort of schoolwide conspiracy to deny that there were rats in the yard.
    These