Eileen was changing: her breasts swelling, her belly dropping lower, hips and pelvis spreading. Now and then he could see blotches, broken blood vessels in her face. She looked into the mirror with distaste; often she didn’t look into the mirror at all. She was gorgeous. But if he looked only at her belly: the high, tight roundness of it all, he could think only of the eggs filling the landscape around them, and he had to look away as well.
Eileen had gone from asking him about his own health, his own pains and sensations, his own feelings from several times a day to once, to every week or two, to not at all. He thought it just as well. There was painful activity going on inside which his pills only vaguely and intermittently assuaged.
One evening he watched as the dark green tide drifted out of the bay and over the sand, farther than it ever had before, covering the grass and lower rocks, seeping through old abandoned beachfront structures whose torn walls were like shredded wounds, creeping almost all the way up to the access road to their cabin. The next morning he was still there on the deck, watching as the tide rolled out, leaving thousands upon thousands of new eggs behind.
* * *
“I can’t leave. The baby will be here any day,” she said. “I have to get ready.”
“Eileen, look what’s happening here. We have to get out!”
She held on to each side of her belly, swollen like an overripe fruit, extending her palms as if to shield the baby’s ears from the argument. “I don’t know what’s happening here, Scott, and neither do you. I haven’t known what was happening since you got the cancer. A lot of things are happening that are just completely out of our control, things we don’t seem to be able to do one thing about. But I can control how I carry this baby, and I’m not going to risk leaving now. You don’t what those things out there are, anyway.”
“They’re eggs, just like you said in the first place. Huge eggs, an enormous multitude of them. They’ll be filling the roads soon, and then there’ll be no way out of here.”
“All the more reason not to risk the travel. Besides, what makes you think they’ll harm us in any way? They’re eggs, Scott. Just like this baby used to be. And now this big belly of mine is as firm and tight as one of those shells. Maybe you’re feeling you’re not quite ready for this—I can certainly understand that. But this baby is going to happen, Scott.”
They hashed it over a couple more times before he gave up and left. He didn’t want to upset her by pushing too hard. He was already upset enough for the both of them. His pain had increased over the last several days—there was this enormous pressure, and he’d been able to eat hardly a thing. Eileen’s appetite, of course, had grown prodigious. He didn’t think she’d even noticed when he hadn’t touched his own food.
He was running into the little village to find the doctor, hoping maybe he could talk some sense into her. She’d always paid attention to doctors—she’d hung on every word his own doctors had said, treating them as if they were priests. He bounded onto the darkened sidewalk, running full speed into a tall figure in a damp raincoat.
The odour in his face was old and stale. He peered up into the damp face of his landlord, whose nostrils widened at Scott’s proximity. The man’s eyes appeared oddly wide and filmy, and his face had greyed since Scott had seen him last. Flecks of dry skin layered his cheeks. “Eileen,” Scott began anxiously. “My wife, I can’t get her to leave.”
The man’s voice was blubbery, a frothy translation. “No... one... asked you...”
“You’re local, that might have some sort of authority with her. You can tell her about the eggs, what they really are.”
“No... one... asked you... to stay...”
“But our child...”
“But... our... chill... dren...” His landlord pushed away.
The doctor’s office was locked, though through the glass door Scott saw a bare bulb glowing yellow in the waiting room ceiling. Shadows slithered across the back wall that led to the examining rooms. He began to shout, then beat on the pane until it splintered. No response, and the shadows continued their distant dance. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around the room. One had spilled, the cascade of papers left to drift across the centre rug. Ultrasounds. Curved shapes, vague, radiating lines. Faces and almost faces in the thousands.
Scott turned away from the doctor’s door and began beating on the door of the next shop in the row. After almost an hour Scott had been unable to rouse anyone out of any of the dark little shops. If anyone had heard him, they obviously didn’t care to help. As he headed back toward the cabin he had to side-step a number of eggs which had not been in his path before. He kicked one out of the way, just for the hell of it. Heavy as stone. He yelped and stumbled, watching the egg rock back and forth before settling itself onto its broad side. Cloud cover had filled in every gap of sky since his departure. Distant lightning illuminated edges of thunderhead. As far as he could see before him a tide of eggs rose and fell over the hills and pastures, gathering beneath and climbing to the lower boughs of trees. Growing, developing, dividing and complicating in ways unimaginable, a chaos of life uncaring, far beyond anything he might possibly comprehend. Infiltrating carcinoma, diffusely spreading metastases... Sometimes knowing the truth was not better. Sometimes the truth made an irrelevance of our lives.
When it began raining he tried to walk a little faster, but a road to walk on became increasingly rare. Egg pushed against egg until all repositioned and spread from horizon to horizon until half the visible world had been filled in. Lightning flashes showed off the innate lustre of the shells, as increasing downpour made the curves change, lengthen and soften. He stepped up on their backs gingerly at first, going from egg to egg as if crossing a stream on oily round stones.
Then he heard Eileen’s voice calling through the slam of rain and he stepped hard and smashed and pushed forward with shoes caught in the breaking shells. He fell again and again with hands in goo and fierce activity snapping at his fingers but no matter because Eileen was screaming now against the crash of the shores and sky.
Pain ripped through his belly so completely infiltrated now he could not distinguish between stomach and pain, pain and colon and oesophagus in a confusion of cells. Around him seethed an ocean of the newborn, sliding easily through shell wall, eye and claw-foot and tentacle, and all of them different, all of them distinguishable, a thousand faces of the thousand forms.
“Scott!” She screamed and he saw her rise up in tatters, their child but one more child who would never know or understand or care who its parents had been.
But still he ran and smashed and bled to hold these tatters of her in awe. He closed his eyes in a last pathetic attempt to shut out the truth as around him the chaos that was the true face of the world turned and ate of itself again and again, the new bearing but brief witness to the old as their flesh grows thin, thinner still, and dissolves.
FROM CABINET 34, DRAWER 6
by
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
5:46 P.M.
THE OLD THEATRE on Asylum Street smells like stale popcorn and the spilled soft drinks that have soured on the sticky floors, and the woman sitting in the very back row, the woman with the cardboard box open in her lap, shuts her eyes. A precious few seconds free of the ridiculous things on the screen, just the theatre stink and the movie sounds—a scream and a splash, a gunshot—and then the man coughs again. Thin man in his navy-blue fedora and his threadbare gabardine jacket, the man with the name that sounds like an ice-cream flavour, and when she opens her eyes he’s still sitting there in the row in front of her, looking at her expectantly over the back of his seat. The screen becomes a vast rectangular halo about his head, a hundred thousand shades of grey, and “Well,” he says, “there you have it.”