"THIS FIRST PYSANKAis going to be awesome," said Kat, blotting the black mottled thing she had pulled out of the mason jar of dye with a paper towel.
Michael grimaced. "Somehow, I find that hard to believe."
This Tuesday night was the fourth time that he had come by after supper in the past week. Since Kat had first shown him her pysanky, he became determined to perfect the process for himself.
What had confused him the most was the concept of doing everything backwards. The melted beeswax went on like black ink, but it was used only as a temporary seal for the colour underneath it.
Each day before he left, Kat submerged his egg into a different mason jar of dye, starting with the lightest first: yellow, then red, then black. By the time she fished it out of the last jar and blotted it dry, it was totally black and mottled with bumps and ridges.
Michael's eyebrows frowned in confusion. "Okay," he said. "I know that all the colours are underneath the wax, but how do you get the wax off?"
"Very carefully," said Kat with a smile.
She lit the small stub of the candle on her table, then waited for the flame to burn clean and long. "Now watch."
Holding the blackened egg between her thumb and forefinger, she held it close beside the flame. Within seconds, the beeswax heated up and began to liquefy and drip. With a quick motion, Kat grabbed a facial tissue and blotted away about an inch square of melted wax. A tiny bit of Michael's colourful pattern was peeping through. Kat held the egg at a slightly different angle and again held it close to the flame, then blotted away the melted wax. More pattern was revealed, and the tedious process continued.
"Why don't you just put the whole thing in the microwave?" asked Michael.
"It would explode," said Kat.
"Oh."
Kat didn't want to confuse him by telling him that it was actually possible to microwave the beeswax off pysanky, but first, the raw egg had to be removed from inside. And it had to be removed after the succession of wax and dye had been applied. It was incredibly tricky to do it without breaking the egg and without disturbing the design. One time, when Kat had accompanied her grandmother to the chemotherapy room, she had joked about the big-barrelled syringe the nurse used to inject the anti-cancer concoction they had nick-named the "red devil" because of its vile side-effects. "Wouldn't that be a great syringe for pysanky?" her grandmother had remarked.
After a few minutes, Kat had removed almost all of the wax. There were a few places where it stuck, so she scraped the remaining bits away with her fingernail, and then she held the finished work up with a grin. "See?" she said. "I told you it would be awesome."
Michael's egg pattern was one that Kat had sketched out for him as a good one to start with. It consisted of two stylized eight pointed stars: one on the front and one the back. The points were each so elongated that they connected up with their mirror image on the other side of the egg. The result was stunning, although there were a couple of fingerprint smudges and one or two places where the wax had loosened and dye had bled through in the wrong place.
"Why did that happen?" asked Michael, pointing at the imperfections.
"You were holding the egg too tightly," explained Kat. "Next time, don't try so hard."
Michael nodded in understanding.