The Boy and His Egg

This is the short story that suddenly made me want to write a novelette for Bug.

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There was a boy, some number of lives ago, who was an egg-collector.  He had big hands for such a small body and he would dig up holes in the dirt, layer them with half-decomposed leaves, and nestle little pebbles in them to play at being a mother bird.  Sometimes he would cluck, and sometimes he would tell me that at school he had been teased for having a beak instead of two lips, but I would always say that birds were better than school children, at least that was what I thought.  He would smile.

He lived in a cottage with his father at the very edge of the forest I had been born in.  The cottage was built thirty years before, by the boy’s grandfather.  The boy loved that cottage, and every day he would go around and look for cracks in the cement holding the stones together; if there was a crack, he would mix a little cement in the shed and seal the hole up tightly, patting it and saying that the cottage would stand for another thirty years under the coverage of the forest canopy.

I never asked about his mother, but some days, after he was done checking the stones, he would sit inside on his bed, and I would watch from outside the window while he flipped through the worn, yellowing pages of a journal that he kept in a drawer.  He asked me if I would like to read it some time.  His father would call out to him, to help with dinner, so I would sit on the roots of a tree and eat berries and wait for the boy to come out to play.

During the time that I knew him, there were six days that he couldn’t play with me.  The fourth time, I went to find the two trees that made a perfect X over each other, and just beyond them were the make-believe bird nests.  I would sit with them and push the pebbles around, wondering what sort of creatures would be born from the rough gray stone.  Worms would get in the nests so I picked them out and flung them away, protecting the pretend eggs.  After all, if the boy couldn’t come take care of them, I was the only one left, the only one to be here to make sure no nasty foxes stole them, or the boy would have his heart broken.

When he came back, he brought me bread and we had lunch together.  It was Saturday.  He spoke in trilling bird tongue about his lady-bird, her soft gray feathers, wings tipped in white, and her delicate feet, scratching at his palm in the sweetest way possible.  His eyes were blue when he said that she had come to his window every morning, and he’d given her a seed.  I knocked the pebbles around until he flicked me on the wrist and told me I was killing his children, the children he had with his lady-bird.

On Sunday I didn’t watch his eggs, but went to spy on his window, hoping that his lady-bird wouldn’t come and that he’d dreamed it all up on his own.  I was a little afraid, perhaps, that the lady-bird marked that my time was already gone.  An hourglass with all the sand in the bottom called to me in my chest, and no matter how hard I shook my head, I couldn’t shake the feeling until the sun was high in the sky and the lady-bird hadn’t yet come.  I laughed a little, and smiled a lot, until I saw the boy throw his journal against the window.

I ran away.  And I didn’t come back until Tuesday.

When I went to see his eggs, the holes were gone, covered up in mounds of packed dirt, and right in the middle of all of them there were two wooden sticks in a perfect cross, tied together with twine, and stuck in the ground.  A smaller image of the X in the trees.  It was windy that day, and minutes passed like lifetimes while I waited for him to come see me and tell me why he’d killed his own chicks.  It might have been the fifth day he’d deserted me, if only I wasn’t so lonely and gone to his cottage.

His father was smoking a cigarette and leaning against the north wall.  Two friends of his were there, holding shotguns, and I started to sweat under my blouse.  My feet dug themselves into the dirt.  Through the west window, into the boy’s bedroom I could clearly see him on his bed, his back curved over like an old tree in the wind, and he seemed to be looking at something.  I crept to the window.  I tapped the glass, cool under my fingertip.  My finger had a spot of blood on it, just to the side of my ragged nail.

As he turned, I looked at his hand and saw something blue hidden in his palm.  He didn’t open the window for a moment, as if wondering why I would come here with his father’s shotgun friends.  He never told me to stay away from them, but I had lived enough lives to know they were dangerous.  Especially to birds, but maybe not so much to Bugs.  I said this when he opened the window, though my whispers were drowned out by the wooden frame scratching against itself.  He didn’t smile, and neither did I.

On another day I would have climbed inside, but that Tuesday was not another day, so I stayed on my tiptoes, sinking into the soil, and asked him what he was holding.  Perhaps I should have asked about his lady-bird first.  He didn’t say much but held out his hand and showed me the egg, speckled white over blue, blue like his eyes when he’d talked about his lady-bird.  From the other side of the cottage I heard laughter, the clanking sound of metal, and a shot.  The boy reached through the window and grabbed my hand.

Take this somewhere safe, Bug, he said.  Another bird, I don’t know, but please don’t let it die.  It’s all I have left of my lady-bird.

The wind rushed through the leaves on the trees, a sound like rain filling the air and drowning out the boy’s words.  He pecked me on the cheek.  I started running.  And then it was raining, but only slightly, just a light drizzle in the autumn air.  I tried my hardest to keep the egg nestled in my hand, but not squeezing so hard to crack it.  And if I cracked it, maybe the boy could make some egg cement and put it back together.  The poor egg, it couldn’t be lost, not now.

When I passed through the X, the cross made out of twigs was gone, pulled away by some other bird or animal needing it for protection.  I went by, stepping carefully over where I remembered the pretend nests to be, and I started to look for somewhere to put the lady-bird’s egg.

On Wednesday, I left the egg with a lonely lord-bird.  He was singing to a beetle about the tragic tale of his love.  I thought it would be a good home.  And that was the last time I saw the speckled egg.

I was picking my way back through the forest, which had been torn apart and turned upside down by the wind, when I found myself staring at a single poppy flower, growing where the cross had been.