You Find an Unhatched Egg In Your Tree

by Brittany Ackerman

It sits in a nest, abandoned by its mother. You question whether it’s some kind of ancient species. I tell you it’s most likely a bird, but you want to believe it’s more. “A Tyrannosaurus Rex, I hope,” you say. 

This is after we’ve decided to be lovers. I have one more year of college in Indiana. You’re heading to California after the summer, off to work in postproduction finance, an office job. I’m spending the summer in South Florida with my family, living at home and working at a retail store. I walk around the store with a scanner to make sure the prices are right; I type in a new number and peel off the sticker to adjust when needed. I collect plastic wrap in the waist of my pants. I would rather spend the summer with you. I want you to drive the seven hours it takes to come see me.

“I want to be here when he’s born,” you tell me, about your unhatched egg. “I’ve named him Montgomery Wick, Monty for short.”

The first time I met you was over the phone. I was walking around campus in Bloomington, when my best friend called, but it was you dialing random numbers on her phone. It was almost summer and you were high and you had seen my picture online on my friend’s Instagram. You told me about your unborn egg, how you’d named him, how you vowed to be a good father to him once he came into this world. You told me to have a good class. 

My best friend invited me to drive with her to Tallahassee, to help her collect her things for summer, before she too had one more year of college. “And you can meet James,” she said, the path already laid out before me. 

I met you for the first time in person at a TGIFs with two-for-one whiskey-cokes and potato skins. You held my hand under the table like we were secret lovers. When we got back to your place you showed me how to drive an ax into a tree stump, you showed me your collection of books, you showed me the egg, unbirthed.

The egg was opalescent, oval, small. “Too tiny to house a dinosaur,” I said. “That’s my son you’re talking about!” you joked, your hand around my waist. I wanted this weekend to last forever. But my best friend and I made the trip home the next day. We didn’t speak. She wanted to say something but couldn't. Instead she played the radio so loud I started to worry that I did something wrong. I thought meeting you had been part of the plan. I watched Florida change from cows in pastures to power lines to our hometown city with its palm trees and flamingo pink buildings once again, finally. All the while, you texted me until my battery died. 

The egg doesn’t hatch. You start to wonder if you should keep it warm, if it’s too cold outside without its mother. You bring it in, ill-advised by the Internet, set up a light bulb underneath a pillow atop a crate. 

Weeks go by, our phone calls grow sparse. I spend my days at the store unboxing new merchandise and checking for flaws. The imperfect pieces never make it to the floor. They get repackaged and sent back. A big truck pulls into the back of the stockroom and I board to help load the boxes. I wear all black and shoes with rubber soles. I wear my hair in a braid, my bangs a wisp across my face. 

I tell you I’ll take off work so we can spend some time together. You’re not sure, though. It’s unsettling to you, the way things move so fast, how one day you’ll be in the apartment you’ve had for four years and the next you’ll be gone to California for the rest of your life. You’re not sure how I fit, where I go, how our story will unravel. 

One night you get drunk and call me. You apologize. You say you think you love me. You say you’ll try harder to make this work. You tell me to go outside and look at the moon, which is a thin sliver like a tiny piece of pie. “We see the same moon,” you say and I accept your apology, tell you I have work in the morning and need to go to bed. After we hang up I stay on my parents’ balcony and wonder if the moon is waxing or waning. 

A few days later, you recap a conversation that you and your roommate had after we had said goodnight. You’re energized when you speak about the future now, how full it feels, like a big balloon of possibilities. While I was staring up at that moon, you were cradling the egg in your hands. While I was trying to decide if the moon would become full or whether it was getting ready to disappear to almost nothing, something came over you, something I’ll spend years trying to understand. You tell me how you took the ax and bore down on the egg. The shell cracked open to black yolk, a rotten center. 

I think of the light bulb being put back in the closet, the pillow placed on your bed, the crate tucked away. I imagine a mother bird returning to the nest, poking her beak through twigs, through her own dried saliva. I know now that naming something won’t keep it from breaking.

Published December 20th, 2020