Ovum

Written By: Olivia Madeline Abigail

The wall of eggs crested over her a like wave. Each carton brightly colored and emblazoned with ad copy. Some were free range, others cage free. The most expensive were certified cruelty free. The bottom rows – the worst eggs – were farm fresh. They came in Styrofoam cartons. They were jumbo. The farm fresh cartons bore images of barns or cartoonish cows, as if to distance their contents from the concept of a chicken and more importantly the state of a chicken which could produce an ovum of such magnitude. The cartons in the top row showed photo-realistic chickens enjoying an open field.

Her basket was heavy already, handles dragging at the crook of her elbow. She’d been greedy in the produce section, piling in apples and oranges, a head of cabbage, several shallots and a shamefully ripe mango. Worse, she’d allowed herself to be seduced by one of the premade dinners, strategically placed on warming trays at the entrance of the store. She checked the time.

Nine hours until her next shift. The dinner would have to stay in the basket. With an imperceptible moan, she bent down and selected one of the farm fresh cartons. The foam squeaked unpleasingly under the pads of her fingers. She tucked the carton next to her loaf of bread.

The self-checkout machines were down and a formidable line formed for the single open register. The woman joined the queue. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead. When it came her turn to check out, she said something sympathetic to the cashier, hoping to establish an air of commiseration. The cashier either didn’t hear her, or pretended not to. She fell to examining the tabloid rack. From the corner of her eye she watched each item cross the scanner, feeling her bill increase with each beep, unable to look at the rising total. Before scanning her farm fresh eggs, the cashier paused to open the carton and examine them. She waited for the beep as the eggs crossed the scanner, but it did not come. The cashier was still looking at the eggs. The woman followed his gaze.

Aberration! She nearly recoiled, but caught herself. Her stomach turned over. One of the eggs, center in the front row, was scaly with caked matter. The crest of its drywall shell sported a crown of taupe refuse whose origins would not bear reflection. A ring of down marked the sore’s edges, dried in place. The cashier watched her. She cursed herself. What hubris had possessed her not to check the contents of the carton before taking it for purchase? Still the cashier had not scanned the eggs. Judgment hung heavy in the air. The woman awaited reproach. For a single chilling moment she made eye contact with the cashier. Then, as if no humiliation had occurred, the eggs passed over the scanner. The woman fumbled her card to the tap point, snatched up her groceries, and fled the store without a word.

The eggs remained in her refrigerator, untouched, for a week afterwards. Instead, for breakfast, she fed herself oatmeal and ate plain rice at night. It would serve to remind her when next it came time to buy eggs. But this, too, was waste. For the dozen eggs tucked behind the loaf of bread grew no fresher for their seclusion. And, among the dozen remained eleven if not handsome, at least entirely serviceable eggs. In the second week, she sneaked one egg from the carton and fried it up for her dinner. It was inoffensive. A few days later she scrambled a pair.

These tasted better. Each time she opened the carton the gravity of her shame tugged at her eyes.

By the time her supply dwindled to a half dozen, she took to pulling new eggs from the carton by touch alone. Her slender fingers crept over crevices where the healthy eggs had been. The presence of the soiled cell loomed in the chill dark, a cave beast ready to pounce. More than a month it lingered as she could not bear to touch it.

The problem was this: she could not buy more eggs until she finished the eggs she had, but eating that final egg was no more an option than throwing it away. Even if trashing it had been acceptable, doing so would still require touching the egg. She researched symptoms of protein deficiency. One could not reliably diagnose oneself using the internet, of course, but had she not found herself more fatigued recently? Were small cuts and bruises not slower to heal?

Strands of hair littered her shower, but she could not bring herself to clean them. The bathroom scale, long exiled under her bed, reappeared next to her toilet. Fresh from the shower each morning, she stood in front it and took a long breath before stepping on. Now, though, as she dripped and shivered on the cold glass, she prayed the number had not shrunk.

Her therapist was catching on. Each session was peppered with questions intended to be subtle. How was her sleep? Her hobbies? Was she seeing friends? Her answers were plainly lies, but her therapist would never call her on that outright. The closest she ever came was asking the woman, once, about her appetite. Nothing to report, the woman replied. Everything normal. She was planning a vegetable stew for that weekend. Something hearty, with potatoes and lentils. Maybe a beet. This made her therapist happy. She surprised herself by following through on the lie, picking up an assortment of produce at her new grocery store. She inspected each leaf and tuber thoroughly for signs of blight.

That weekend, though, she made a mistake. Perhaps because she’d sent so many queries on protein deficiency to Google’s servers, her YouTube account recommended a short documentary on vegan lifestyles. An attractive young couple popped up on her tablet screen and began talking about the health problems which plagued them in the past. Propping the screen on her knees, she snuggled into her pillows. The first ten minutes or so focused on young, formerly ill people describing what veganism meant to them and the health improvements they credited to their conversion. The speakers cited everything from cruelty to inflammation as reasons to make the change. The woman pulled out her phone and searched ‘how to cook tofu’ as the video played. She’d selected a recipe for tofu scramble when the clucking of chickens snapped her to attention.

This, the unidentified narrator was saying, is where your eggs come from. Her stomach curled in on itself. Onscreen was the angry red cloaca of a hen, dilated beyond belief. An egg, impossibly large, emerged from the bird and fell, glistening, to the floor of the cage. The woman’s asshole tightened in sympathy. And this bird, continued the narrator, is one of the lucky ones. It’ s on top of the stack. When it uses the bathroom, that drips down through the cages. The chickens on the bottom are not so lucky. The camera panned down and as it did the woman realized what it was about to show. She leaped up, hurling her tablet across the room. But it landed facing up, and so she saw anyway.

When she had finished vomiting she turned her shower as hot as it would go and stood under the stream until her skin turned a raw pink and the water ran cold. She allowed herself the grace not to step onto the scale and instead pulled her lotion from under the sink. The first pump spurted slick across her palm, glistening white. Like a fresh egg…or the bottom cage. She dashed it on her towel. Wrapped in her bathrobe, skin itching, she slunk to the living room and stared at her refrigerator.

It hummed innocently. The woman still needed to make her stew. But all the ingredients were in the crisper. Only a couple of potatoes and an onion sat on her shelf. A sad image crossed her mind, of two potatoes and an unskinned onion floating in a pot of cloudy water, presented as soup. The kind of thing a cartoon hobo would taste and pronounce good eats. Ridiculous. Her knives were not in the fridge. She could caramelize the onions, and she had cartons of vegetable stock. But potato and onion soup is not the meal of a woman who is thriving. And what of her lovely produce? The egg was contained. It should be no problem to open the refrigerator, ignore the egg, and fetch out her ingredients. She needn’t even look at the closed carton. In the end, she ate a sleeve of dry crackers in her bed.

She awoke after sunset, angry and covered in crumbs. The time had come to take action. No longer was she willing to settle for second class nutrition to satisfy some puritanical waste-not ethos. She marched to the fridge and threw open the door. There was her produce.

Thick orange carrots, dusty from the fields. Verdant leaves of Tuscan kale and bushy heads of organic broccoli. One fat, brown beet, ready to be peeled to a dripping red. And, of course, there was the near-empty carton of eggs. She allowed herself no hesitation in reaching for it, simply plucked the box from the shelf and shut the door. Hr hand instinctively gripped the foam around the remaining egg, to keep it balanced. That was how she felt it twitch.

The jolt was barely perceptible. In a moment of frantic bargaining, she convinced herself she’d imagined it. But the second, stronger shake, which came as she stood frozen in the kitchen, was undeniable. The only thing that kept her from hurling the carton across the room was a vision of whatever malformed thing must be inside the filthy egg crawling from the cracked shell and dragging itself across the kitchen floor towards her. She couldn’t throw it away. It would just continue hatching in the trash. The carton twitched again. She placed it gingerly on the counter next to the sink and fled the kitchen to dive under her bedcovers.

She forced herself to breathe shallow, so she would hear any scratches of life from the kitchen. For a long time, she heard nothing. It began to feel very foolish that she was hiding under the covers from an egg which she had imagined to be moving. The egg could not have been twitching. Refrigeration would have killed any embryo. Of course, shortly after coming to this conclusion she heard the squeak of Styrofoam from down the hall, followed by a wet slapping sound. The wet sound repeated several times as tears welled in the woman's eyes.

There came a sudden hiss, which she recognized, after a moment of bewilderment, as the kitchen faucet turning on. This was so unexpected that she found herself rising from bed and creeping down the hall. Water rushed from the tap and into the sink. The foam carton was open and a mess of egg shell and clear goop oozed over the edge. A slimy trail led to the edge of the sink. Her dish soap was missing. Curiosity overcame her fear. She looked in the sink. At first she thought she was seeing some sort of doll. It was featherless, bipedal, and a foot tall. Matted hair tangled around its shoulders. Her dish soap was open on its side, dripping. The sink thing bent with cupped hands to collect the pearlescent leakage. It rubbed the soap over its pale skin with thin fingers, massaging its shoulders and the curves of its hips. Soap bubbles shimmered oil-slick around the drain and the last shreds of mucousy albumen slithered through the mesh catchment. The woman snatched a spatula from the stove and, gingerly, poked the thing. It stumbled forward, caught itself on an unwashed bowl and spun around. She recoiled.

It was her own face, stark against the patterned ceramic. Her pocked cheeks, her forehead, heavy with wrinkles. Her breasts, lopsided and uneven and her forest of coarse pubic hair, too thick to shave without raising welts. The thing wearing her skin made a sad attempt at a smile and pressed its palms together over its heart. Disgusting. It looked like a rat come crawling out the drain to gnaw at her non-perishables and drag its filthy self over her counter. She swatted at it with the spatula, missed and swung again, catching some part of it with the very edge of the implement. A yelp escaped its parasite throat as it scampered up a tower of dirty dishes and out of the sink. The woman shrieked as the aberration shot past her and slipped on the remnants of its ovum, careening off the counter to land hard on her kitchen tile. It dragged itself up and began to limp away from her. To find some place to hide, probably, where it could grow fat and foul off her labor. She kicked it.

The thing went flying off the tip of her bare foot as her leg pistoned through the air. It struck the opposite wall with a flatulent slap. For a moment, it stuck like a wet sock, then peeled away and fell to the floor in a heap. The woman fumbled her carton of milk from the fridge and poured a glass. The little thing twitched. She eased herself to the kitchen floor and caught her breath. Cold, white richness coated her tongue. Its twitching stopped. The smeared red imprint of a tiny face brightened her kitchen wall. The woman raised a hand to her nipple as she drained every last drop from her glass.

Olivia is a writer living in Brooklyn/Lenapehoking. She edits for smoke and mold journal. Her writing has been published in Imposter Review, smoke and mold, and WMN Zine. Her chapbook, "Look, I Have Had a Shit Few Years," is available upon request. Find her online at omalas.blog, oliviamadelineabigail.substack.com or on Instagram @ref_metro