Free #8 The Hatching by Annie Graves Page A

rats sometimes made their way into the school building.
    If we ever actually found them, there’d have to be extra time off while the school was made child-friendly again with a mixture of traps and poison.
    That is probably why they made this Flaherty fellow up.
    Sally Ann is probably the cleverest person I know.
    I didn’t tell her about the Egg, though.
    I couldn’t tell anyone about the Egg. I was too ashamed.
    When I got home, the Egg was on the nightstand once again, whole. Not one crack marred its perfect, eggy surface.
    This time I shoved it in a drawer and didn’t tell Mum.

    There were a few reasons for this.
    1. I WAS AFRAID OF WHAT SHE’D SAY.
    2. I DIDN’T WANT TO WORRY HER.
    3. I WAS GOING MAD .
    And I was going mad, at least a little.
    All night I stayed up, thinking about eggs and imagining little sounds coming from the drawer.

    There were no sounds coming from the drawer. The Egg has never to my knowledge made a noise. I don’t know if it even could.
    It probably could, though. The Egg could probably do whatever the Egg wanted to do.

    In the morning it was on the nightstand again.
    Beside the lamp with the soccer balls all over it that Mum had been given by a friend whose little boy was too old for it now.
    That lamp was pretty stupid-looking, but I pretended to like it in the hopes that I’d get more presents.
    I prefer playing hurling to soccer anyway. Mainly because in hurling you get to have a wooden stick for hitting the ball, and that’s as close to a weapon as a kid my age gets, really.

    The Egg was awful.
    I wanted to crack it open and flush the insides down the toilet.
    But at the same time, I knew it would be back. And I really didn’t want to make it angry.

    When I got home from school that evening, it was on the edge of the nightstand.
    It should have been teetering wildly, but the Egg didn’t teeter. It perched decidedly.
    Mum had vacuumed my room, but when we ate dinner she didn’t say anything about the Egg.
    Maybe she never noticed it.
    Maybe only I could see the Egg now that it had risen from the gooey dead.

    That night I awoke to find the Egg on my stomach, pressed down into it almost roughly.
    It felt heavier than it had the last time I had picked it up.

    I tried to roll it off me, but I couldn’t. I tried to peel it off, but it had stuck to my skin like those bandages you get when the doctor takes your blood.
    I got the lamp from my nightstand and lifted it up above my bare stomach.
    Again and again I brought it down upon the Egg, and again and again the Egg remained flawlessly, heartbreakingly whole.
    Eventually I gave up and cried myself to angry, dreamless sleep.

    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