A Halloween Story
What follows is a very disturbing, very true* incident. You have been warned.
It’s a thing that happened to me that I have been unable to get out of my head. I think about it all the time.
I was around ten years old, and my mother was teaching me to cook something. It involved baking. Pancakes? Pastry? I remember there were ingredients in a bowl that had to be mixed first. Butter, flour. I remember watching the process with interest. I was looking forward to eating whatever it was we were baking. I appreciated that my mom was instructing me, which meant that I could make this dish myself some other time, on my own. We were standing at the small segment of counter in between the fridge and the stove, right above the dishwasher, which meant we were right next to each other and the bowl. I could just look over the top of the bowl. My mom was taller, and could get better leverage as she stirred the ingredients. The sun was shining. The kitchen was clean.
It was a very wholesome scene.
“Now you add the eggs one at a time,” my mother said.
She cracked an egg into the bowl and folded it in to the ingredients. And then she picked up the second egg and cracked it into the bowl.
But there was something wrong with this egg.
Instead of a bright yellow yolk and viscous whites, there was a tiny baby bird skeleton in the egg.
Dead, of course.
We couldn’t see anything wrong with the egg until it had been spread all over the rest of the ingredients in the bowl.
The pieces of the dead chicken fetus crumbled and separated. Black bits and white bits. Maybe even some feathers.
I don’t remember screaming or freaking out, but I probably turned away as quickly as possible. To my mom’s credit, she didn’t freak out, either.
“Oh. Sometimes a fertilized egg must get in there by mistake!” she said, or something else explaining the science of what had happened. She removed the ingredients from our sight as quickly as possible.
In my mind, the day turned dark and ominous. I think we gave up on whatever it was we had been baking. Who could crack another egg so soon after that?
Who could eat another egg after something like that?
But I eat eggs all the time. On their own for breakfast, in cakes and cookies. I’m constantly cracking open eggs, not knowing exactly what will come out. There hasn’t been another dead bird fetus, but that doesn’t mean there never will be. There’s always a chance.
Every time I open an egg, I think of that moment in my childhood kitchen, and I know that the sad and disturbing and wild is right next to us, separated by the thinnest eggshell.
*OK, fine print time. I wish I didn’t have to write this but I think it’s only fair. I remember this incident SO VIVIDLY. It is A PART OF ME, this story. But......... ten minutes ago I called my mother and asked if she remembered it... and she said it never happened. So either I conjured this memory out of nothing, or she’s completely blocked it out (and who would blame her)?
She says maybe once there was some blood in a yolk, and she might have seen that and explained to me that if this egg had got fertilized it would turn into a chick. Which I then could have transformed into the graphic memory I have now. I don’t know what to believe. (Her version sounds probable. Likely, even. But there’s always a chance I’m remembering it correctly...)