#8 The Hatching (3 page)

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 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.