An old lady, tiny and accessorised in beautiful ways, pulls her little cart into town. She visits once every month, selling all sorts of sundries and mysterious miscellany and unidentified uniquities. On it is a variety of products and produce, such as a taxonomy’s worth of medicinal herbs, five pieces of a honeycomb, the claws of a bear who, after a life of predation, consented to the removal of his awful nails, and a single egg. As luck and shoddy infrastructure may have it, the cart hits a bump, and the egg does tumble and begins to roll.
It rolls down the cobbled and hobbled street with speeds too incredible for any oviform that small. People leap out of its way in acrobatic antics, the scene perfectly hospitable inside a circus tent. Perhaps they do to preserve the neatness of their clothes or shoes, but this egg is special, its kinetics not only quantifiable with meters-per-second but emotional with purpose, and we all know fear is the progenitive to self-preservation. In its stampede, it crushes innumerous bacteria and viruses, a brutal end, even for these small things that only bring disease and do nothing but feast on the deceased. After all: their malignance and moral repugnance is not a choice but remains a necessity. For what and why? Why ask at all.
The egg continues, thereby orphaning many ants. Their parents had ventured from the stones they call home to collect fallen leaves or their weight in sugar, a valuable luxury for bugs. The young ones had no way of working through the pain and sorrow, their younger siblings still pupating, so they had no choice but to silently mourn and resign to a slow, sugarless death. The pupas themselves would come into existence in a home without family.
A stalwart beetle answered the panicked pleas of the microscopal and the insectoid alike – she is very strong and possesses a virtuous heart. Bravery courses through her body (as opposed to when bravery is confined to just the veins in those unlucky enough to be anything but an arthropod) and she tackles the barraging egg with her recognisable, battle-scarred horns. She catapults it high! What a hero! The bugs cheered (take my word for it that celebration is a thing bugs do) and she was given an extra sugar ration that day.
But back to the egg, now hanging in mid-air, one could call it gliding, its respectable and aerodynamic shape suggests a certain birdliness to it. But gravity trumps all, it keeps us grounded and it makes us existential. It is familiar in the sense we wouldn’t know WHAT to do would it decide to leave us for a greater pursuit beyond our reckoning. Also, what would happen to the egg if gravity simply decided: ‘no thank you’. I believe that’s when the story would end with the following three words: “So long, egg”. Call it ‘ending A’. Now, we press on to ending B.
SMASH !
The egg crashes against a wall two yards away. ‘Strong’ was not a descriptor chosen lightly – words are blood and blood flows freely through her body, hence this relative, bug-astonishing feat. The wall, lacking locomotion but sharing people’s disdain for being dirty, hesitantly opens his eyes. There is no yolk, white, shards, or other holistic components that make up ‘egg’ staining his skin. Instead of the amorphous, scatter-splatter we’d expect, there is a glowing white hole. White, yes, but not related to the egg white, or perhaps it is, but then a special magical quality specific to this egg. The hole, like any hole, has an entrance/exit and depth. It can contain, therefore it is a hole. The townsfolk who had previously ducked for cover are now gathering around this spacetime anomaly (newtonian and euclidean laws run this town, so this is definitely a weird thing).
The sound of physical struggle can be heard from inside this extradimensionality, oviexistentiality. Not a grunt, a cry, or the strained voice of exertion, but like something is being pushed out of soft, rubbery confines (my guess is that fluctuations like these would feel rubbery). Then, unceremoniously, like everything in life, fiction redirects our attention to the seconds of experience and existence we don’t spend a thought on, to the moments we keep missing,
a larger egg plops out.
The old lady, quite tired from running after the egg, gingerly picks up the new, bigger egg and places it on her cart. She turns to the crowd still processing what just transpired, money on her mind, and says in a sweet voice:
“Who would like to buy a very special egg?”