Egg Man

The man washed the egg. A white, wet egg. 

He cradled it wherever he went the way people do before an egg toss. But the man did not plan on tossing this egg. He planned to protect it for reasons he could not understand.

       It was just an egg from the carton. He had cooked omelets for breakfast and sometimes dinner with the rest of the eggs. This was the last one, and he couldn’t do much with one egg, so he guarded it.

People of the town ridiculed the man.

         “There goes the egg man,” they said under their breath as he walked by.

Some of the boisterous young males shouted things like, “Hey, mother goose!” or “What came first, the man or the egg?”

But the man ignored them.

To him it was just noise in an already noisy world.

“It’s okay,” he whispered to the egg. “I’ve got you.”

He ignored the people for as long as he could. Until one day their mockery turned hostile, and they assembled a posse to get him. 

They carried baseball bats to paint his body with bruises. 

They carried frying pans and burners and spatulas for when they seized the egg. 

They were mad at the man’s nonsense.

“Who keeps an egg like that?” they said. “Doesn’t it rot?”

One day the man was walking to the post-office to mail a letter to his sister when he spotted the posse and began running in the opposite direction. They spotted him just as fast.

“There he goes!” they said, charging after him.

The man had been carrying the envelope in his back pocket so that the egg remained secure between his palms. It was hard running with his hands locked over the egg out in front of himself. Because of this, the townspeople caught up to him, and eventually surrounded him.

“You’ve got nowhere to go, egg man!”

“Just leave me be!” he said.

“Only if you give up that egg!”

“Why do you care? It’s my egg. I bought the carton it came in. I’m not hurting anyone.”

“You’re a nuisance! Nobody in their right mind carries around an egg like that.”

Someone in the back shouted, “I’m hungry. Gee, if only there was something to cook and eat around here!”

“Yeah!” the others cheered.

They raised their bats and pans and burners and spatulas.

“Get the egg! Get the egg!”

The man collapsed to his knees and hunched over the egg to protect it. They yanked his arms and pulled them apart and the egg fell from his grip.

It dropped to the ground. The hard cement.

But it did not break. It spun.

Then someone’s hand shot down and picked it up.

They raised it high while screaming, “I’ve got it! I’ve got the egg!”

The man stood. He jumped to try and reach the egg. But the person threw it to someone else across the group. The egg smacked against the person’s palm. They didn’t bother catching it with a graceful swing of the arms. When the man ran to them, they tossed it back. It soared over his reaching fingers. They played monkey-in-the-middle with the man. Laughing the whole time. Keeping his egg aloft.

This gave a chef-woman enough time to set up a burner. She got the flame going.

“Bring it here!” she said.

Someone brought her the egg.

“Give me a pan!” she ordered.

A pan emerged from the crowd into her outstretched hand.

She set the egg on the ground beside her and placed the pan on the burner to get hot.

“Please,” the man said. “Just let me take it home and you’ll never hear from us again.”

A collective, “No!” rose from the group.

The chef shook her head. “It’s time we taught you a lesson.”

The chef reached down to grab the egg. Her hand paused halfway. 

Everyone looked. The egg had moved.

“Look!” the man gasped. “Did you see that!”

The egg began to wobble. People took a step back.

Then the shell cracked from the inside out, and a small beak emerged through the smooth white surface. They all watched in silence as a yellow chick hatched from the egg.

The chick swiveled its head all around. It shook the last of the shell off its body. And then as newborn things do, it grew. It grew and grew and grew, right before their very eyes. The grip they had on the man loosened, and soon he found himself free of restraint. The chick grew wider and taller. It grew to be the size of a turtle, then a pumpkin, then a bean bag chair, then a washing machine.

Nobody could take their eyes off this anomaly.

The chick looked at the man and jerked its head.

The man climbed aboard the chick’s back. It was unreasonably sturdy for being a chick.

Someone from the mob yelled, “Chicks can’t fly!”

That’s when the chick looked at the doubter and said, “This one can.”

It spread its fuzzy chick wings. Its leathery chick legs lifted off the ground. The man’s stomach dropped as he became weightless. The chick flew up into the sky. The man looked down. The mob on the ground grew smaller and smaller. The warm breeze blew back the man’s hair. His eyes began to water as the wind came hurling at him. He held on tight and smiled.

“Wow,” he said. “What can’t you do?”

“I don’t know,” the chick said. “I’ve only been alive for a minute.”

“Well, thank you for saving my life.”

“Thank you for saving mine.”