Flash Fiction February - Unwanted Egg
This flashfic is inspired by a prompt posted on 11th February 2022 by the Writer’s Digest to write about “something being somewhere they shouldn’t be”. This story is just under 600 words. Enjoy!
I was born with an egg timer in my hands.
Sometimes I would just sit there watching it as it turned, the bottom half dead still on the desk, on the bed sheets, on the carpet, while the top spun, clicking past measureless white intervals.
I used to think it was strange that we made egg timers in the shape of the eggs they regulate. Isn’t there the chance they will be mistakenly boiled instead?
Yes, that’s exactly how my mother’s timer went, cracked and mutating at the bottom of a soup pan, the water long boiled away: her blank face staring down at it, weightless fingers still steering a wooden ladle.
I had been careful with mine. Kept the red plastic clean and repainted the white lines with permanent marker when my fingers began to rub them away.
Sometimes I imagined a little bird slumbering inside of it, and I’d cradle it gently, patient as an old hen for the day it finally hatched and flew free.
Sometimes I’d see it in old pictures perched on my shoulder, ever turning towards an indistinct, unknowable deadline. Hundreds of photo albums then, and hundreds of camera rolls now, featured that little red egg. Regularly in my hands, scarcely on my knee, almost never in the background, forgotten or abandoned by me, when I look through those old photos of us it just serves to remind me how much this egg had adsorbed onto my personality – or how much of my personality had formed around it.
When I look at it, I see myself as if it’s surface was the clearest kind of mirror.
Matt and unreflective, maybe it’s hard to see any resemblance between us in practice. But something about that shade of red, something about the spacing of those valueless intervals, the inevitability of each click as the timer starts a brand-new cycle, the mystery of what is hidden inside beneath that plastic eggshell – it just reminds me of myself in a totally earnest and indescribable way.
My parents don’t acknowledge it, and that hurts almost all of the time. They know something is strange, that there’s some part of their beloved, perfect son that just shouldn’t be there. They feel it when they look at me. They see it when I stare at that egg, holding it so gently in my hands, wondering when that timer will go off, praying, hoping that it would be someday soon.
I am dying to know. I am dying to meet her.
They have all the money in the world, big ships, cruisers, cars, mansions, and for as many doctors they can pass me under and questions they can ask and extended family they can shepherd away, I find more reasons to side with this strange, unwanted egg timer.
Because, the more I think about it, I already know.
I am the part of me that should not be here.
I am the strangeness that looks out of my eyes when they look into me.
I am the bird nestled within that plastic casing, anticipating my time to fly, so unbelievably scared of being boiled away or scooped out by a surgeon’s hand.
What is it counting down to? The question keeps me up all night, watching the top turn, a feint, beating light dotting red on my ceiling – sniper lens, warning siren, traffic light, oven finally finished baking?
Is this the countdown to the day I stop hurting and start feeling... free?
Or is this the ever shortening peacetime before the day the real agony begins?
11/02/2022
To Be Proofread . . .