Some Things About Eggs

Mary Pat Mann

She walks through tall grass. Wet seedheads slap bare
legs as eyes move to the branching roots of an oak. A
hand reaching for bits of broken blue. A color called
‘robin’s egg.’ Her fingers trace smooth curved
surfaces, sharp edges. She listens. No sound of nestlings.

She stands outside the back door, on a metal grate set
in the asphalt. Viscous yellow and translucent white
drip down into darkness from a cracked shell. Her palm
is sticky and wet. This is the day care center. She
hasn’t been here for years. This is a dream about what you lose.

A small yellow bowl in a sunlit kitchen. In the bowl,
two eggs. She picks up one, cracks its shell, and
empties albumen and yolk into a blue bowl. If she
throws the shell in too, there will be no difference
in the energy contained in each bowl. To a physicist,
they are the same. What has been broken?

She opens the fridge and puts a tray of hard boiled
eggs, sliced open, inside. The tray balances on top of
two bowls. Each bowl contains a dish of cooked eggs.
This is a dream about what you keep.

She forks sawdust into a wheelbarrow. A sleek black
head pokes up from the pine-yellow dust. A black
racer. The horses won’t like it. She moves the tines
so the snake slides away. Emptying the barrow into a
stall, a flash of white. Paper, she thinks, but
fingers find a soft leathery capsule, unbroken. She
buries it in a handful of sawdust near the fence post.

She stands on a derelict street near an abandoned
church called Notre Dame. A businessman surveys the
area. To his cell phone, he says, “The first thing we
do is change the name.” She remembers: The name of
this street is Egg Street. She thinks, ‘I like the
name the way it is. I won’t let them change it.’
This is a dream about where you go next.

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