Audrey Coldwell

Egg

There was a full-grown woman in my omelette today.

I hadn’t been expecting her. Hadn’t wanted any more protein for breakfast than a cooked yolk or two—if I had, I’d have made bacon. But when I cracked the egg on the side of my frying pan, there she was: long brown hair slipping out from the crack in the shell, limbs already tumbling down, sending my pan crashing to the floor. I was quick to turn off the burner, but her shirt got singed, anyway.

She laid on the stove in a fetal position, shallots in her hair and paprika smeared over her cheek, as if the egg might reform around her if only she didn’t disturb the memory of its shape. No such luck, of course. And then I was stuck with the problem of the woman on my stove.

“Twenty dollars? Thirty?” I bartered, trying to prompt her to move. She just blinked at the wall, stare glassy and hollow. “Forty-five? There must be something you want for forty-five bucks.” Secretly, I was hoping there wasn’t, as my cash stopped at two crumpled twenties in the bottom of my purse.

“How about a bike? A dog? Okay, then a vacation? My uncle’s got a timeshare in Rio, you can stay there four days out of every year.”

The woman pulled her knees tighter to her chest at the mention of a far-off place. She shook.

“Okay, fine, no Rio. Listen, there’s a bunch of open studios just down the street, they’ve each got their own stove you can lay on. Or, you know, a bed, if you want to get comfortable.” She seemed comfortable, which didn’t make any sense. Her shoulder was bent painfully under her, and her legs tucked in at an awkward angle I’d previously only associated with dried-up lizards who had roasted on midday pavement.

“A winning lotto ticket?” I offered, growing desperate; at this rate I’d be late for work. “A blessing from the Pope? A red carpet night just for you, with your face on billboards and your name in lights and some hottie hanging off your arm? A college degree? A minimum wage job? A husband and a kid and a personal tragedy that nobody ever talks about but your sister remembers well enough to tag you under motivational Facebook posts? How about a peaceful death? Isn’t there anything out there that you want?”

If there was, the woman didn’t want it badly enough. Or maybe she wanted it too badly. Maybe it was behind her, and she couldn’t turn back. Maybe it had never been anything but mist. Maybe she knew that no matter how much she struggled, cried, begged, reached, her fingers would never close around it, and so the only thing to do was to stop moving at all.

I sighed and pulled up a chair by the stove, resigned. Being on eye-level with the woman felt different, somehow. Like there was nothing solid separating us—only a membrane, if even that. Like if I leaned in close enough, pressed her face to mine and breathed in, it would be me on the stove and her in the chair.

“How did you even get in the egg?” I asked. Finally, the woman lifted her head. Her face was both mature and startlingly unguarded, like her body had aged without her soul’s consent. She blinked. “How did I get out?”

Audrey Coldwell is a fiction writer and English teacher from South Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in The Chestnut Review and has been featured in Creation Magazine, The Roadrunner Review, and Cher. Her accolades include the Gus and Leanne Weill Award for Playwriting and the 2023 Take 9 Film Festival’s Award for Best Writing. She’s currently thinking about her next nap.