Rogue Egg

Children played in the wading pool, splashing among the sprinklers. My baby girl sat on my stomach with her sticky hands, outstretched arms, and floppy bucket hat. My knees bent into a wedge and hovered over the earth. Blades of grass tickled my back and arms while my insides writhed in bursts.

“It’s nothing: a bad snack, too much sugar,” I said.

Soon the bright spots overpowered the dark ones, and the ceiling came into focus, but the rest of me stayed in another place, cloudy, confused.

“When did you last eat?” he asked me.

“A couple of hours ago. Grape soda and some gummy bears,” I said. Catching on the jagged edges of each word, his voice sounded otherworldly. Get it together; I wanted to tell him, but I needed him, so I didn’t.

They took the gold band off my finger and put it in a bag marked with a skull and bones. Scissors cut through my white shirt; the cotton sheared into nervous shards. It was my favorite tee from a shop where the coffee came in paper cups with stick figures stamped on them. The word sewed in black thread above my heart was appropriate for a Canadian, but it was also worked now: sorry.

“So, when did you last eat?” He asked me again. He had to make sure that I was in the room and the moments weren’t flying past me.

“An hour ago,” I said. The monitors hummed and sang an offbeat tune that didn’t make sense.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” I told him. His gloved fingers poked my stomach, and the skin rippled around them like calm waters disrupted by a pebble. Conjuring mother earth, he swirled the wand around my midsection, smearing cool jelly here and there. Watching the screen with squinted eyes, he waited for her to appear.

“There’s nothing in there—just blood,” he said at last.

I plucked the contact lenses from my eyes and handed them to the nurse. The faces perched around me blurred into one another. A gown was tied haphazardly around my neck and draped over my body. I looked down at my bare hands—were these still mine? My blood, too, was slowly being replenished with someone else’s.

A firm hand gripped my shoulder, and a new voice told me that everything was going to be okay. I wondered when this would end—if I closed my eyes for too long, would they reopen?

One of them covered my nose and mouth and told me to breathe in the extra air. I expired and expired, hoping that I wouldn’t expire. My drowsy eyes finally closed. The bulbs above me cast an orange hue over my lids. Soon the glow turned to dusk—the sun set in an open field: wide and far, a beautiful escape from this nightmare.

Weeks later, I arrived back at the hospital for a follow-up appointment. The office reeked of sterility: buzzing lights, linoleum floors, the scent of clean plastics and disinfectants. Women filled the green leather seats that lined the wall like a baby-making assembly line churning out the future. I waited for my turn, surrounded by their protruding bellies—fanciful displays of fertility, some high up in their rib cages; others low and full, concealed under flowing dresses and billowy tops. They were fashioning arms, lungs, even toes too.

The nurse didn’t look up when I approached her desk. She pointed up with a thin and wiry arm and told me to read the sign. I wanted to ask her if I was normal and if the scar across me looked the same on everyone; instead, I followed the instructions and let my identification rattle into her tray.

I plugged my ears with music so that my head was filled with visions of another place—crimson skies, sour candies, soft skin, barren trees. When I looked up from my seat, I saw my friend. Even she was making a furry creature. The size of a lime. Fingernails. Bones.

Wavy tendrils framed her face; pink swatches graced her cheeks. Starting and then stopping, she rushed over to me. Her smile rose and fell and then spread itself out across her face. She asked me if I was pregnant again. And then, falling once more, I cushioned her descent with my arm on hers, my feathery laugh, and a comforting tone.

They called my name, and I left the waiting room behind me.

The doctor spoke to the nurse outside the room. My stomach lurched as if I was about to see someone that had seen me naked, splayed open with all my imperfections—my crooked nose, my quiet judgments disguised as shyness, the cracked skin on the ends of my fingers—laid out for him to decide if saving my life was worth it.

Would he look like someone who tied my feet back to the earth, attached my head back to my body, sewed up the hole inside me that spurted and spouted until there was barely enough of me left?

From the examination table, he pushed down on my fleshy belly and inspected it in sections. I searched in his eyes and the hollow valleys beneath them for a tightrope to connect us. His features—dark hair and round glasses—were in the right places. After the surgery, I tried to recall his face, but the image was just out of reach.

He didn’t remember me. I reminded him about the emergency room and how he’d put me back together. And I wanted to keep going, to tell him that sometimes my heart felt swollen, engorged, and as if it might shatter.

The first time it happened was a few weeks ago when I still walked with a hunch, not healed enough to unfold myself at the seam. We walked through the park in the rain and were protected by low-hanging branches; my daughter splashed her fingers in the puddles, marveling at the drops that spattered around her. It happened again when my friend said that my daughter resembled my husband, and I saw my daughter’s face mirrored in his. I wondered if I didn’t see myself in her, would she see me? Later she held out her empty bottle. Shaking it, she asked me for more, more, more.