Rachel Wolcott, Fact & Fiction

The egg

Two minutes ago it had been whole. Now I’m telling myself: It’s only a thing, an object. It doesn’t matter. But I hesitate throwing it away and I’m trying to piece it back together, this blue egg with golden flowers painted on it. Maybe this porcelain knickknack had it coming and my backing into the side table while vacuuming was foretold, written in the stars but too mundane for anyone to predict. It makes me think some things are meant to endure, like my one hundred year old grandmother. This blue egg was meant to perish in a banal hoovering accident. My best friend dies of cancer so quickly I hardly get a chance to say goodbye, but my parents still have paintings I drew thirty years ago. I like to think I’ll have better luck than this blue egg, that someone as clumsy as I am won’t back into me while cleaning the bedroom or come at me in the street with a rabid dog on the end of a flimsy rope. It could happen.

The damage isn’t too bad. I try to superglue the pieces together but some get stuck to my fingertips. It hurts and I panic, because I don’t know how to remove them without causing more damage. Some of the golden paint has chipped and my repair efforts have created another fissure. Bits are slipping through my fingers, like yolk, and fragments of shell remain stuck on my skin. I try to put the egg aside and go back to what I was doing, but it takes me twenty minutes to pick the pieces off my hands and fingers. I’m the only one in the house who will register the egg’s demise. My husband probably doesn’t even know it was here and our daughter won’t miss it either. Finally I scrape the last bit off my palm and manage to wrap the egg in tissue and put it in a drawer. I’m wondering how to go about fixing it properly when my attention veers onto my next task.