part0024

Her eyes narrowed at the corners, the way they did when she scrutinized me for a lie. Or a half truth, as I often tried to sell them. The skin on her nose twitched subtly as she attempted to temper her reactionary disgust.

“It’s an Easter egg,” I said.

“Jeremy, that is not an Easter egg.”

“Yes, it is, Mom. Look at the painting.”

She tried to lean closer to the offending orb, while keeping a safe distance from it. Her pupils bounced against her irises as she brought her eyelids up and down in examination.

“Who would paint an Easter egg gray and brown? It looks like it has been pooped out. Easter eggs are supposed to be pretty, in pastel colors, with stickers. I don’t know what this is supposed to be. Where did it come from?”

“From inside a chicken.”

“Boy, I will find a wooden spoon in this kitchen.” She tried not to laugh behind her hollow threat.

“You brought some strange, ugly, poop-colored egg into my house?”

“Boy,” she said again. “You have no idea where it has been. You don’t know what it is.”

“Mom, it’s an Easter egg.”

“It is not an Easter egg. Ugly thing.”

“Well, whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“But can I keep it?”

She stood up, from leaning on the counter beside me, and took a step back. I watched the corner of her mouth fold, as she started to nibble on the back of her lips, the way she did when she wanted to tell me no, but lacked the justification to win the fight.

“Fine,” she finally replied. “But I want it out of my kitchen. I want you to wash it. And your hands. And keep it out of my sight.”

“But what if the paint comes off?”

“Wash it and your hands, or it goes in the disposal right now.”

“OK, OK. Thanks, Mom!”

I felt the unmitigated smile on my cheeks as I scooped up my new, homely treasure. My chest fluttered with victory at the undeniable rush of persuading a grown up, rare as it was intoxicating. My footsteps banged on the floor, as I bounded up the stairs.

“I don’t hear water!” my mother shouted up after me .

It was like she had eyes in the back of her head or hidden cameras in every hallway. I turned on my heel and dashed into the bathroom. If she did not hear water in seconds, there would be another holler up the stairs at me. If she had to climb up to me, my egg was as good as gone.

I tugged the hand towel from the rack and folded it into a pile beside the sink, perching my precious little egg on top of it like a display pillow for its distant Faberge cousin.

I cranked the knob to turn the water on high, so my mother could hear it with her supersonic spy hearing downstairs. As I absently rolled my fists under the spray, I bent down to bring my eyes near the egg’s strange shell.

My mother was right, another rarity; it did not look at all like a traditional Easter egg. Where there should have been the streaked application of dye that fizzled out from a tablet, I could make out fine and meticulous brush strokes. The brown and gray that my mother found so unsavory formed crisp lines in tiny, alternating triangles. The shapes expanded around the full waist of the egg then faded smaller as they climbed toward either end.

Who could have painted something so small and detailed? And why? The ugly and unappealing mystery fascinated me.

The water temperature climbed against my skin until my nerves shrieked at the burning edge and yanked me away from my examination .

“Don’t worry,” I whispered to my egg. “I’m not going to wash you.”

I sloppily dabbed my hands on the towel then hastily cradled the egg in my palm. The shell felt warm to me, even as my hands recovered from my distracted scalding. The egg felt right in my hand, at home, natural. I wanted to pull it closer still and let it caress against my cheek, but something in that impulse felt eccentric.

I could hear the mumble from the television floating up the stairs. I knew my mother had collapsed onto the couch, still in her nurse’s scrubs. She might have had a beer bottle keeping her company, but it would be the only one after a long shift. She said more than that when I was home would be inappropriate and too much like my father. Wherever he was.

In any case, she would be immersed in her decompression time, and it would be better for all of us if I just took my precious egg to my room with me. I was sure it wanted to play video games with me, anyway.

I took a shirt—a clean one from the drawer, not even one of the scattered dirty ones littering my floor—and created a makeshift nest for my new friend on the dresser beside my bed. Something in the pit of my stomach seemed to know the egg wanted to be upright, a difficult enough task for such a shape. I coiled the cloth tightly to prop it up and keep it warm, just as its assumable chicken mother would have—had it still been alive under all that precise paint .

My fingers danced over the controller in learned and skilled patterns, and the Navy Seals on the screen moved at my practiced whim. My mind wandered off, abandoned the thin rails of my prepubescent body, and climbed into that screen—inside the skin of my avatar that pushed to traverse the uncanny valley. If my mother ever granted me enough hours, I felt like I could disappear entirely into that other world, which looked more realistic with each game release.

Or, I thought it moved.

Out of the corner of my peripheral vision, just at the edge of the flickering light, I thought I saw the egg twitch or, maybe, hop just slightly. I paused the game and turned to face the small perch. I stared at the painted shell in the glow of the television. I held my eyelids back until my eyes began to dry. Nothing. Yet the egg was no longer upright, either. It had slumped to the side since I began my game.

I laughed to myself and reached forward to adjust the egg. Nothing could be alive inside after so many nights in the spring snow outside. But, had it not felt warm in my hand?

The break in my campaign allowed me to feel the weight of my eyelids, the lethargy spreading through my muscles. My mother must have dozed off in front of the television to allow me so much uninterrupted play. Deciding to call it a night, I flipped off the television then light and slid myself under the covers.

Then, in my last fleeting minutes of consciousness, I reached out in the dark and drew the egg in with me .

In the middle of the night, still half embedded in a dream, I woke startled and in a cold sweat. Heat radiated and throbbed from my body as the air outside my blanket cocoon licked icy tendrils along my forehead. My head swam disorientated, somewhere between a twisting dream and the stagnant room around me. Then I felt it—a steady thump, almost like a heartbeat—beside me.

Panic popped my brain out of the sleepy fog, like a buoy. In the darkness, I pawed frantically around my sheets, feeling for the smooth edge of the crafted paint. Under the flattened corner of my pillow, I found the egg cradled safely.

I gathered the egg into my hands and, without thinking, brought it up against my cheek. I closed my eyes, to make the black around me a shade darker still, and dropped my breathing into a relaxing trance.

In the suspended moment, I nearly slipped back across the line into swimming unconsciousness. Then I felt the gentle press against my cheek. A throb, just like the sound, a tap maybe. I snatched the egg away from my face and stared at it, through the dark, in disbelief.

The shell expanded slightly against my fingertips, and I could hear the pulsing in my head again. I must have been dreaming. I had to be dreaming. Yet the world around me felt so thin, the way only the waking world could be so shallow.

The quiet pumping inside the egg mesmerized me. The sensation enlivened the egg, made it something else. It was no longer a coffin encasing what could have been a chicken. It was holding something. Something alive.

Sleep won, though. The same way it did when I would try to sneak hours of gaming after my mother went to bed. It reached its heavy hand up over my brain and pressed my eyelids down.

My alarm shattered the persistent echo of the heartbeat in my dreams. I found the egg still cradled in my immobile palms. I had not moved the entire night, locked in a drowsy paralysis. The eggshell stuck to the curve of my palm, but in the daylight, it looked decidedly not alive, decidedly not as animated as it had felt in my hand in the night.

Maybe it all had been just a dream.

“Jeremy, you better be out of that bed!” my mother bellowed through the door.

I shrugged to myself then placed the egg back in its t-shirt nest on my dresser. Without a second thought about it, I threw on questionably-clean clothes and sprinted down the stairs.

I heard Aiden's voice swim up through the steady thumping that still echoed in my ears. The bell sliced through the air around us as I lazily swung my head in his direction.

“You in there, J?”

Aiden cocked his head to the side and opened his eyes expectantly at me. Even at the desk right next to me, he felt so far away, like he was talking to me from the end of a long hallway. I tried not to take too long responding, blinking hard and shaking my head to clear the eerie, throbbing fog between my ears.

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, man.” I stumbled on my words.

“What? Did you stay up late sneaking in some campaigns last night, or what?”

“Nah,” I said, reaching under my chair to gather up my books. “Something way weirder, dude.”

We stood up from the blue plastic chairs, wrapped with smooth desk surfaces, and began shuffling down the aisles towards the classroom door.

“Well, then what?” Aiden asked, as we approached the hallway.

I opened my mouth, intending to tell Aiden all about my strange new egg with the intricate, morbid Easter paint and the pulsating warm shell.

“Mr. Ramirez,” Ms. Clark interrupted. “Hang back a moment, please.”

Aiden gave me another wide-eyed stare, popping his eyebrows for emphasis, then disappeared out into the teeming stream of passing students. I walked up to Ms. Clark’s desk, struggling to suppress the undulating sound gaining volume against my skull again. I tried to orient myself by staring at the gouged edge of her desk.

“Jeremy, are you ok? You seem distracted today.”

“Yes, Ms. Clark. I’m fine. Just tired. I did not sleep well last night.”

“I wanted to talk to you briefly about your essay.”

“What’s wrong with it? ”

“Oh, it is not that it is wrong, just not finished. As always, your writing was quite impressive. Your vocabulary is always stunning. However, past your vocabulary, I’m not sure what you are really saying. The assignment is to decide whether the witches’ prophecy drives Macbeth to madness. I want you to give me another draft, and I want you to really concentrate on your argument. What are you trying to convince me of here?”

I floundered under her words, which seemed to wash over me in waves—tides to the rhythm of that egg’s steady heartbeat. I knew she stared at me, in anticipation of either a gracious acceptance of her critique or an outraged rebuttal. I grasped onto the sentiment that she wanted me to make an argument. I could remember that.

Make an argument. About Macbeth.

“I can do that, Ms. Clark. When do you want the revision?” I asked.

“Friday. Just have it on my desk by Friday.”

“Will do. Thank you, Ms. Clark.”

The school day vanished in a blur. The voices around me fell distant, and the volume of their sounds rolled in swells. While my teachers droned on about algebra or biology, the strange intruder perched in a crumpled shirt beside my bed consumed my thoughts. I saw every brush stroke in the gray and brown paint, felt their texture against my fingertips. I felt the warmth and movement of the shell against my cheek. I was so fixated on the small orb that I did not even think that my thoughts shifted in strange patterns or worry about what those patterns might mean.

I could not dash up the stairs of my house fast enough. I leaped, taking the stairs two at a time, feeling the reach along my groin to make each stride. I felt an almost claustrophobic fear that my egg would be gone. Or that it had fallen and broken. Or that it had hatched and left.

I flung the door open to my room to find the egg perched exactly where I left it, silent and unmoving atop the folds of fabric. I felt the smile stretch my face, possessed and unnatural across my cheeks. Like a foreign emotion embedded in my brain. Yet, I snatched the shell into my palm, closed my eyes, and traced the shape over the curve of my cheek.

The distant anxiety that had nagged on the edges of my nerves all day faded with contact with my egg. Even though I found the shell cool and dormant, its presence snapped me back to the surface of my brain, quieted the steady rhythmic thumping in my head.

I rolled the egg back and forth between my hands, watching it bump and sway along the shapes of my fingers. Then I noticed something in the previously perfect paint. I brought the shell close to my eye and scrutinized it in the afternoon light breaking through my window. Below the lines of gray and brown, a black vein snaked along the surface. As I turned the egg over, there were more veins. The branches of black lines drew a strange map around the gentle curves of the shell.

That had certainly not been there the previous night, before or after I had examined it with my mother. She would have noticed and told me how very disgusting it was. It would have been dumped straight into the disposal.

I caressed the surface with my fingertips, attempting to trace out the lines, but I only felt the brushstrokes in the paint. As I brought the egg closer to my eye, a distinctive tap shook the edge of the shell. My body startled so hard I nearly dropped my new treasure. I pulled it back from my face and froze anxiously on my bed.

Tap again, harder this time. The egg jostled against my hand, and the pulsating sound returned to my ears, echoing against the canals and into my brain. I stopped breathing.

Tap! Beneath the sound of the tiny impact, I thought I heard the slightest crack. I frantically turned the egg round and round through my fingers, searching for the perforation. The surface remained immaculate. The egg fell dormant again as I stared desperately for the next movement.

“Jeremy Anthony!” My mother’s voice severed my trance.

She was home from her shift and brandishing my middle name. I felt the tickle of panic run cold down my back, and I set my egg safely on my makeshift nest before hurrying down the stairs to face my fate.

“Jeremy,” my mother said again, when she made eye contact. “What in the hell happened here?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? You left the back door wide open. Then you just trailed all your crap through the house. Your backpack is just dumped in the kitchen. ”

“Oh, yeah.” I leaned around to look at the trail I had left. I had not even noticed in my pursuit of my egg. “Sorry.” I shrugged.

“Sorry? Baby, what happened?”

“Um,” I stumbled. “Well, Ms. Clark is having me rewrite my essay.”

“Why? You always do so well in her class.”

“She said my writing is fine. That my vocabulary is impressive, but I did not make an actual argument.”

“What are you supposed to be arguing?”

“I’m supposed to be arguing whether the witches’ prophecy drove Macbeth mad and is the root of everything he does after.”

“And what does your essay say?”

“She’s right. It doesn’t really say anything. I pretty much give a nice little summary of the prophecy and what Macbeth does, in eloquent ways.”

“That’s my little wordsmith, but what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Can you really blame a bunch of awful decisions on some suggestion? Just some old women planting ideas in your head?”

“Ideas are powerful, baby. But are they a cause or an excuse?”

“In both cases, wouldn’t it drive him to act?”

“That’s what you have to decide. Did the prophecy lead to the actions, or was he going to do them even without the idea?”

“Maybe the idea could have infected him, could have unlocked some malicious intent in him. ”

“See, you know what you think. Now, you just have to write it. Well, baby, you better get to it. I know you’ll do just great. You’ve always been my smart cookie. Did you get some dinner?”

“Yes?” I fumbled on the word in my mouth, my mind struggling to connect thoughts.

“No, you didn’t. Here, let me make you a quick sandwich. Fuel for your essay writing.”

With a heaped plate, I hustled back up the stairs, leaving my mother to her quiet, uninterrupted trance in front of the TV.

When I opened my door, I could only hear the steady, and now deafening, pulsing of the egg. My eyes found the small shape, increasingly darkened by the spreading of the eerie black veins, and became transfixed. They were ensnared, trapped as I discarded my entire meal to my desk, beside my untouched Macbeth essay. I slapped behind me until my arm found the door to close it behind me.

As I stared at the strange orb, I realized it was moving, vibrating against the cloth nest. In the dim light from my desk lamp, it twitched and jostled.

Something was hatching.

I crawled across my mattress like a tentative cat, and wrapped my fingertips around the edge of the dresser, bringing my face against my paled knuckles.

The egg rocked side to side, rolled with the movement beneath the shell. The veins began to ripple the surface of the shell, throbbing against containment. The sound of the heartbeat climbed to a crescendo, filled my head, overflowed from my ears, undulated against my skin.

The crack split my world as the shell fractured open. The pulsating sound disappeared. Even the egg finally froze.

I lost my breath again. My respiration disappeared somewhere beneath the terrifying swell of my anticipation. Some terrible blend of excitement and disoriented terror.

The egg remained still long enough for my pulse to start knocking on my eyeballs, begging me to gasp in a breath. I did not dare gulp at the air. I surrendered to slowly suck in the oxygen through the side of my mouth, soft and gentle and immobile. My eyes began to dry from being fixated on the shell. The cracks spread across the surface, adding routes and intersections across the black veins, making the world more complicated.

I nearly gave up. I almost resigned myself that the hatching was as far as it would go. Then another, louder crack echoed against my bedroom wall. A large chunk of the shell at the very apex of the shape popped up and tumbled to the cloth nest below.

With my heart seized in my chest and curled up against my ribcage, I leaned forward to peer inside. Before my eyes could even cross the plane of the shell, a thick black liquid began to ooze from the hole. The same color as the veins on the outside, the goo began to pour out of the egg like an oil well.

The liquid was thick and shiny. It looked so sticky, the way it dripped and clung to the egg shell, pooling tightly around the base and over the folds of the nest. Something inside my quivering heart told me not to touch it, but I had to know how it felt. The ooze seemed to speak to me in a strange, unintelligible language that sounded just like that sick pulsing in my head.

I could not resist. I extended a trembling finger and slowly moved towards the hatching egg. The liquid seemed to respond to me. The swell reached out and climbed into the air toward me, almost expanding in an identical shape to my fearful digit.

Our movements were slow at first, my own and the slime. The two of us moved toward connection in a near frozen moment. Then the goo contacted my skin.

The black liquid was slimy and alarmingly warm. It bubbled so hot that my skin tried to retract away from the burn. Yet before I could withdraw my finger, the ooze surged. I let out a startled scream and leaped back, pulling my trapped finger with me. Yet the liquid clung to me, wrapping around my entire hand.

Below the goo’s writhing and warbled surface, I felt the vivid bite of pain at the tip of my introductory finger. I wanted to rip the slime from my hand, but I was too terrified to spread it to my free hand. With panic welling in my chest and through a barrage of struggled outbursts, I shook my arm as hard as I could, hoping to fling the ooze off me with sheer force.

I swung my arm with all my might, feeling the gravity in every joint from my shoulder to my hidden fingers. I felt my tendons stretch and whine, yet the liquid stuck, unaffected, as it climbed over my wrist .

It was going to swallow me whole. How did so much goo fit in such a tiny, ugly egg?

The pain exploded on my fingertip again. I yelled out and went to draw the injury to my body. The sensation rooted at my nail, as if the nail itself ripped up from the bed. I thought I could hear the crack of the nail and the rip of the skin below. When the tearing reached a climax, any awareness of my nail vanished; it was lost below the pain.

Then the liquid appeared to recede in a strange sensation of pressure. It drew down from my wrist, climbed away from my palm. The awful pushing feeling only grew more concentrated as the slick liquid disappeared.

It was not until the base of my fingers reappeared that I realized the goo was disappearing into me, drawing into my fingertip under my fingernail.

Sheer fear, cold and sharp, sent spires out through my limbs, paralyzed me in dumbfounded contortion. I wanted to scream for my mother. I wanted to snatch the tail end of the ooze, before it vanished into my flesh. Yet, I just gaped, wide-eyed and stupid.

The last of the bubbling slime slurped under my nail. The throbbing sound dissolved. The ripping pain under my nail dissipated back across my nerves. The lights in the room even seemed to brighten. The entire experience vanished so completely I could have been convinced I hallucinated the entire mess.

Then I looked down at my nail. The whole thing, cuticle and all, was completely black, the consuming color of that awful goo. Tentatively, I reached toward it, drawing my hand back before touching the infected finger.

The blackened digit felt like mine. My nerves reacted normally, informing me my other fingers were running over it, suspiciously. My skin maintained its normal pigment. I tapped on the nail itself. It even responded normally, yet the discoloration unnerved me to my core.

Still cradling my now traitorous fingertip, I looked up at the egg. As I watched, the shell disintegrated in front of me, rolling into a pile of dust on the makeshift nest.

As if nothing had ever happened. As if it had never mesmerized me, at all.

“What happened to your finger, Jeremy?” my mother exclaimed, as she heaped scrambled eggs on my plate. “Your nail is completely black.”

“Oh, I slammed it in my desk drawer last night. Got it really good, I guess.”

My entire body felt heavy. I had slept under a shifting haze of disorientating nightmares. Every cell suffered the adrenaline aftermath that now felt like just one of the fading dreams.

“Oh, honey. Did you get your essay redone?”

“No, I actually fell asleep after the finger smashing. I’ll try to get it revised in study hall today.”

“Sounds good. Now, eat up. You’re moving like molasses today.” My mother looked at me out of the side of her eye, the way she did when she was examining me. Then she smiled gently before moving to wash the pan in the sink.

The exhaustion continued to pile on my forehead, as the hours ticked away at school. At my desk, the classroom stretched out and thinned into oblivion around me, as I stared at my alien nail. I tapped it on my book, feeling the impact reverberate through the stain and along my nerves. Everything felt dull and far away, except that black color.

“Hey J, let’s ditch study hall today,” Aiden said, bumping his backpack against mine, as we walked down the hall.

“I can’t today. I have to rewrite my Macbeth essay for Ms. Clark.”

“You never have homework to do in study hall, man. You always get it done days in advance. What the hell is going on with you this week?”

“I have had some weird things happen to me this week, Aiden.”

“What weird things? Let’s cut out, and you can tell me what the hell is up, man.”

We stopped alongside my locker, and Aiden moved to look me in the face.

“Whoa,” he said, taking a step back.

“What?” I floundered. My eyelids felt like they were lined in lead.

“Dude, your eyes.” Aiden leaned forward and squinted at me, horrified.

“What? What about my eyes? What’s wrong with them?” I instinctively reached a hand up to the edge of my eyelid.

“I don’t know. They’re like gray, man. ”

“My eyes are brown, Aiden.”

“No, no. Not the colored part. The white part. It’s all gray and kind of, I don’t know, veiny.”

I immediately saw a flash of the black veins snaking over the shell of my cursed little egg. I poked at my eyeball to only feel the usual wet and squishy orb. Aiden leaned forward, squinting at me curiously, almost alarmed.

“Stop it, Aiden. You’re freaking me out.” I took a defensive step back, feeling the cool metal of the locker on my shoulder.

“You’re freaking me out, dude. I don’t know. Maybe you should go see the nurse. Your eyes just don’t look normal, man.”

My heart knocked against my clavicle, bringing the throbbing sound back to my ears. The pulsing of the egg coming from inside me. It felt like an auditory intruder, like a black thorn in my brain, puncturing the tissue to release the black goo beneath.

Despite Aiden’s pestering, I did not go to the school nurse. I told him I would. He waved to me as I walked in the direction of the front office. Yet, once he was out of sight, I dashed toward the back of the school and slipped off campus as the security guard dozed in his golf cart.

I burst through the door of my house, again leaving the door ajar behind me, and again abandoning my backpack and coat in a trail behind me. Ragged breaths chapped my lips, as my heart continued to hammer against my chest until it felt bruised. I rushed up the stairs through my exhaustion, and flung myself toward the mirror .

Aiden was right; my eyes did not look normal. I leaned into the reflective glass, examining the tainted spheres closely. The white meat of my eyeball was tinged an awful gray: a sickly and unnatural color. I saw the thin spiderweb of veins Aiden had noticed. I pushed closer to the mirror, turning my head to expose more eyeball. As I tugged my eyelid down, a pulsation flared from my black fingertip up my arm and into my face. When that sensation reached my eye, the thin veins popped and snaked black like those in the egg, branching out under my conjunctiva.

Another wave of horror flared over me. The stranger in the mirror swayed and wobbled, before blackness bled out of the corners of the world and swallowed me whole.

The hard tile floor dug pressure points into my joints, but the discomfort was not what woke me. My skin was on fire, crawling with a teeming and relentless itch. A cold sweat dripped from my forehead as my flesh writhed at the surface. My hands clawed at the sensation, but my fingertips flinched away from the lumpy texture of my own body.

I slapped desperately at the light switch, then squinted back against the glare. I dropped to the floor to avoid the deranged and terrified stranger inside the mirror. I almost did not want to look at my skin. The painful prickle on my nerves told me it was serious. I did finally force my disgusting eyes down.

I found my skin welted and puckered. Lumps sprouted up over my hands, my arms, every visible part of my body like enflamed gooseflesh, making the skin look distended and deformed. At the peak of each bump, something wispy peeked through my flesh, something barely visible. I brought a finger to investigate and felt the protrusion ruffle against my touch.

My brain seized. Thoughts dissolved into chaos. What was happening to me? What was that black goop that had forced itself under my nail? What was it doing to me? My black nail, my black veined eyes, now this distortion of my own skin.

Why was my mother working late tonight? How could I even tell her what was happening to me, what that egg, she so instinctively hated, was doing to me? Even in my fear, I did not want to have to tell her how right she had been.

My head swam, somewhere between terror and exhaustion. My heart could not go on beating this hard in my chest. I did not know what to do; so I went to bed. I did not look at my own reflection. I did not touch my own skin. I burrowed beneath my blanket and told myself I would wake up myself again.

I did not wake up myself again.

I heard my alarm squawking from far away, at first. Then, the sound seemed to climb into my ears, penetrating my blanket and piercing into my brain. As my consciousness spread back out into my body, my nerves began sending an assault of garbled messages. All of pain, discomfort, confusion, and panic. I awoke in the exact same disaster I had fled hours before.

When I moved my eyelids to open my eyes, it felt like they dragged over sandpaper. The veins bulged so sharply they changed the texture of my eye. My skin ached the way only a fever could inflame it, where every cell on the surface and every layer stacked beneath pricked with extra, terrible sensation. I was aware of my entire flesh suit, and how very unhappy it was.

As I shifted my limbs under the covers, my skin caught and dragged on the fabric. The blankets and sheets clung to me as if I were tangled in the fibers. I did not want to touch my own skin; I did not want to know.

Every movement hurt. My eyeballs ached, encased in those horrid black veins. My flesh pulled taut and suffered a terrible and constant ripping sensation. My skeleton, itself, felt foreign beneath my sack of fatigued muscles. I took a deep breath through my cracked lips and brought my fingertips to my forearm.

I bristled at the sensation of my own arm, the same way the texture of my arm bristled against me. The lumps managed to rise, even further engorged than the night before. I let my finger trace the incline of one bump to find the projection at its summit. Whatever jutted out of my enraged skin had grown longer. The spire stuck out stiff yet flexed and folded at my touch. It felt familiar, which made it even more alarming.

When I heaved my broken and distressed body from the mattress, I managed to ache more. I found it awkward and near impossible to stand normally. When I attempted to straighten my spine, stack my shoulders above my hips, my back rounded in protest. My chest pushed forward unnaturally; my legs bent severely, bringing me down closer to my thighs and to the ground. My arms refused to hang at my hips; instead, they hovered and near flapped at my sides. I went to take a step, and my entire body undulated in a strange movement, my chest swaying up and back, my legs lifting high into my belly, my head bobbing in aftermath.

Hot tears burned down out of my hideous eyes. A crushing sensation of panic overtook the foreign body in which I now found myself trapped. My mother could be right all she wanted. She could be right until the end of time. I just wanted her to put her arms around my ugly, lumpy shoulders and tell me it would be all right.

She was still working. Since she said she saved lives for a living, I was only permitted to call her at work in case of a “real emergency.” This definitely felt like it shattered the very definition of emergency.

“I need to speak to Yolanda Ramirez,” I squawked into the phone. My voice felt strange in my throat and came out as unrecognizable as I felt.

“I’m sorry. She’s just gone into a trauma. Can I take a message and have her call you back?”

“Oh. Um. Could you tell her to call her son?”

“Jeremy, is that you?”

“Yes. Hi, Linda.”

“Oh, honey, I didn’t recognize your voice. Is everything OK?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I’m really not feeling well. I think I might need her help. ”

“Sweetheart, do you need me to go get her? I can tag her out if it’s serious.”

“No, no. I’m OK for now. But could you please have her come home after the trauma?”

“Yes, of course, Jeremy. You hold tight. OK, kiddo?”

“Thanks, Linda.”

When I hung up the phone, the tears rained down my face again. I imagined they were black, just like the veins.

All the pain in my body began to concentrate. It climbed up my limbs and out of my eyes, drawing to a terrible peak in the center of my face, pressing and stretching behind my nose. I forgot about the weird plumes exploding out of my pores or the rotten-looking veins mapping my eyeballs. My awareness tunneled down and reduced to the tip of my face.

An intense pressure erupted from the back of my skull. Something tried to split my face open and escape. Perhaps the living thing rolled into the black tar of that dreaded egg. As the sensation culminated, I thought I could hear the cracking and popping of my cartilage breaking, the shredding of my very skin.

I moved to sprint to the bathroom, to see what was being unearthed through my face, yet I became tangled in the new awkward movements of my body. Instead of taking sprinting strides, my feet popped up in a flapping march. My chest contracted down toward each rising knee. My head pecked forward and back in jerking motions hard enough to knot my muscles, if they even were my muscles anymore. I felt myself receding, falling back away from the skin and the eyes that were no longer mine. Disappearing beneath the black ooze-infected body.

I bobbed and weaved through the hallway, scarcely noticing when my fingertips winged hard against the wall or when I slammed my toes against a corner. I managed to toss myself into the bathroom and stand before the mirror.

I could not believe my eyes or the foreign eyes that stared back at me. The black veins had receded. A giant orange iris, consuming my entire eyeball like a bloody sunset, stared back at me. The black pupil in the center darted waywardly. I had to struggle hard to focus on anything. The world became glimpses and flashes back and forth.

The swollen pimples along my flesh had blossomed, full feathers unfurling from the misshapen skin. My own skin vanished under the interlocking layers of white and brown feathers. They moved individually, ruffling in waves with my panic. Even in the small mirror, I could not recognize the shape into which my form now contorted.

I leaned closer, bringing my twitching amber eye near the glass, striving to lock onto my nose. As I stared, another burst of pain throbbed up from my center and out of where my nose used to be. A spatter of blood dropped into the sink. I reached my fingertips out from the feathers and explored the protruding shape.

The point curved slender and firm, the surface slick under my blood. The end hooked downward before parting into two snapping pieces. I went to scream, and the two points parted. A distressed squawk exploded from my lungs. My body descended into a flurry of unfamiliar hopping and flapping movements. With each alien sound and gesture, I felt myself falling farther away, becoming less the boy who picked up an ugly Easter egg he found outside.

Far in the distant downstairs, behind the bathroom door, I heard my mother’s worried voice calling me. Her footsteps slammed frantically through the house as they ascended closer. I never once called her home from work. She must have been terrified. When she burst through the door, her breath panted audibly.

“Oh my God.” Her words fell heavily on the floor between us.

She did not move to gather me in her arms. She did not crouch to comfort me. She stood frozen and flinching in the doorway, locked in shock I could understand, all too well.

She found me perched on the floor on a nest of crumpled towels. When she finally did take a step forward, I felt my hackle swell. She wanted to take my egg. She wanted to destroy it, just like she hated the last one. I could not let her. My neck began to jerk violently as my wings waved aggressively.

My mother released a terrified yowl, as she turned to flee, but my new body was too fast for her. Before she could clear the hallway, I landed on top of her. She rolled over, frantically slapping and batting her arms against me. Somewhere lost at the very edge of what was left of me, I watched my beak peck and plunge into her face and neck until the blood erupted and she stopped moving .

I wanted to cry, yet the punctured version of my mother just seemed to fall farther away, receding into the bloodied backdrop. My thoughts became shorter, simpler. I felt less, in every damning second after. Eventually, I could only think of one thing: my egg. The squawk that escaped my dripping beak almost sounded natural. With a ruffle of my feathers, I hopped up and returned to my perch on top of my precious egg.