Eggs


 * Eggs ** by Susan Wood

Morning broke like an egg on the kitchen floor and I hated them, too, eggs, how easily they broke and ran, yellow insides spilling out, oozing and staining, the flawed beneath what's beautiful. And I hated my father, the one cock in the henhouse, who laid the plate

on the table and made me eat, who told me not to get up until I was done, every bite. And I hated how I gagged and cried, day

after day, until there was no time left and he'd give in and I'd go off to school like that, again, hungry. But why did I hate eggs

so much? Freud, old banty rooster, who knew a thing or two about such things, might say I hated my self, hated the egg growing in secret deep inside my body,

the secret about to be spilled to the world, and maybe I did. Or maybe it's the way the egg repeats itself again and again, a perfect

oval every time, the way I found myself, furious, standing by my own child's bed holding a belt, and hit, and saw her face dissolve in yolk. But that doesn't say

enough about why we hoard our hurts like golden eggs and foolishly wait for them to hatch, why we faced each other across the table,

my father and I, and fought our battles over eggs and never fought with them, never once picked up those perfect ovals and sent them singing

back and forth across the room, the spell broken like shells, until we were covered with them, our faces golden and laughing, both of us beautiful and flawed.