After Eggs

by L. S. Popovich

The odor of frying eggs robbed me of an hour’s idle weariness. When I flicked on the bedside lamp, it cast a subtle halo on the ceiling. Flipping back the bedcovers, I turned over and stood up. Subtle warmth and delicious tingling ran down my stiffened legs.

Proceeding through a dark hallway, I entered into the gleaming kitchen. Mary was at the stove in a serious stance, feet wide apart, staring down at the solitary egg yolk in the pan with such intensity I imagined it was being cooked through her sheer effort of will.

The egg’s eye-like consistency must have mesmerized her. The front of her belly hung over her waistband, and her navel was prominent. Each cheek of her buttocks was perfectly outlined in the sheer pyjama bottoms she wore. Her shirt was simply an outward layer, one among many, like the multilayered skin of an onion. If she suddenly cast it off, there would’ve been another, identical one underneath.

I sat at the smooth, circular dining table, inhaling the heavy musk of the sizzling food. The sun was abnormally large, oozing over the horizon with pronounced slowness, defined by a hazy silhouette against runny clouds.

Tilting the pan, she slid the finished product onto my plate, spattering dark oil onto the light wood grain of the table. Cautiously, I sampled my breakfast with the contemplative air of a food critic.

“I felt him kick this morning,” she said, excitement surfacing on her face.

I paused in my chewing, glancing up at her polished face. “When?” I asked.

“When I was on the porcelain throne.”

I gulped down my greasy mouthful. “Is that supposed to happen?”

“He’s alive. In a new sense, I mean.”

“Was it a response to what you were doing on the porcelain throne?” I said, venturing to place another morsel between my teeth.

She grunted. “He’s not aware of my bodily functions. But next time it happens I’ll show you,” she said.

Her eyes were watery, and she was out of breath.

“You should eat something,” I suggested. I nursed a cup of coffee that was quickly growing cold.

The toaster made a noise. She stood and produced a wedge of yellowish toast. Stuffing one side of her mouth, she breathed loudly through her nostrils as she chewed, widening her eyes eerily.

Turning my gaze to the window, I perceived my own reflection in the pane, then managed to pierce beyond it to the wider world. Condensation on the glass rendered the streets shiny under watercolor dawn light.

Across the street an elderly woman rummaged around in a flowerpot. People I didn’t know bustled to work in slow-moving cars. Others hurried down narrow sidewalks.

“I wish you could stay home with me today,” she said.

“Why?”

“I’m painting the baby’s room.”

“What’s the rush?”

“You wouldn’t want him breathing in the fumes, would you?”

“What color?”

“Green.”

“Green?” I repeated the word, failing to visualize the color superimposed upon the far wall.

She smiled. A sprig of parsley partially wrapped one of her eyeteeth. I rearranged the newspaper in front of me and scanned headlines.

A sort of penumbra bled through the edges of the paper and for a moment it lost all weight and substance, became an articulate shadow hovering in front of me. An unexplainable dread crept into my thoughts, latched onto my heart and dragged it down to sullen depths.

For a few minutes we sat in silence. Since the onset of her metamorphosis, she had begun to stare into space regularly, as if building castles in her mind. I envied her cool detachment from the troubles beyond our four walls. Once upon a time I’d escaped into dreamland. But all my schemes were now like phantoms, subordinate to her uncanny joy, her fragile vision of the future.

We experienced a reversal of roles. Her body expanded, and her mentality filled the apartment like a diffuse gas. She put on the mantle of motherhood early, unmanned me with her brilliant decisions and, with her added weight, pushed the scales of our household in her favor.

Another monotonous day lay ahead, and it was my duty to conquer it in my sheepish, bureaucratic way. Soon, I’d be shuffling my feet along that grimy sidewalk, alongside anonymous automatons, sinking into the groove of the metropolis, carving an indelible path through time within the body of a faceless subway train, the enigmatic metal worm which contained in its segmented belly the virulent soul of industry.

Later, lulled into meditation by the roar of public transportation — which roar typically followed me into the office and recurred in the back of my mind as I sat at my desk — I noticed a middle-aged woman with looped earrings and enormous eyes behind thick spectacles. She was holding a raucous toddler on her knees. The unruly grub chortled and whined the whole time, clasping fistfuls of her skirt, content with the limited worldview it possessed: this solitary lap in this vibrating carriage with another world outside the oval window reduced to a recursive blur.

A persistent case of the hiccups lingered with me all day. I performed my work absentmindedly, with abstract efficiency, like a blind man proceeding through a dense fog without losing any assurance, reducing tangible concepts into less tangible overviews advocating progress, while subtle shades of dissatisfaction built up within me like sediment.

Only when I returned to the indefinable softness of my home, as dusk set in, did my mind turn back on, become acute and attentive. The scent of new paint permeated the atmosphere.

Mary was radiant, ensconced in a heated blanket, inches away from the fireplace. Her eye sockets were dry and bleached, but her lips were vibrant and moist when I leaned in to kiss her.

Sitting on the couch, which yielded to my weight like gelatin, I stared into the wavering, flickering flames, emptying out the accumulated day’s exhaustion. A charred piece of broken tile peeled off the back of the fireplace, leaving a glaring white spot. Its fall caused a vivid column of sparks to flutter upward.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Gormless,” I replied, drawing upon a repertoire of crossword puzzle vocabulary. Another day had coated me in a sheen of dried sweat. I glanced at my palms: delicate veins set intricately in transparent porcelain. In the cradle of my lap were two curled creatures with faint pulse beats.

“There’s a jaybird nest in the sycamore tree,” she announced, pointing out the window. She was the queen of the kind of random discoveries that are the highlight and beacons of daily life.

“I’ll have to look tomorrow,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t.

“Your birthday’s coming up,” she said. She had a way of reminding me each year of how much I’d aged. “What shall we do?”

“I’m inclined to do nothing.”

‘There’s nothing wrong with a couch potato day. Let’s have a picnic on the living room rug and drink hot cocoa.”

Looking into her glinting eyes, my gaze traced the curve of her full mouth and fell upon her breasts — one of them glowed in the firelight and the other was sunk in shadow.

“You’ve got the hiccups,” she said, giggling.

I’d long ago tuned them out, grown accustomed to the rhythmic shudder.

Without warning, she pounded my back with her palm and dislodged a bubble of air inside me. When I straightened, my spine popped. “There. I’ve cured you,” she said.

Silence settled over the room. It was broken by an unexpected flurry of snapping cracks from a burning log in the fireplace.

“I think I’ll take a bath,” she said. “I worked up a sweat today.”

Following her, I stared into the mist-smeared bathroom mirror, trimming the minuscule hairs around the borders of my moustache. Mary wallowed in her soapy broth, knees up and shining brilliantly.

“I think I’ll call him Francis,” she muttered as if to herself. I stared at her in disbelief. “Just kidding,” she laughed. “Your reaction was priceless.”

I set down the tiny scissors on the counter.

“Look! It’s kicking again!” she squealed.

I kneeled, craned over the foam on the bulbous hillock of her belly. Examining its naked surface intently, I perceived a gentle throb beneath the skin, like objects shifting in a grocery bag. I cupped the soft nub of her belly button with my cold palm and felt a slow-motion impact, like a goldfish butting the barrier of a fish tank.

“It’s amazing? He’s doing laps.”

“Yes.” I swallowed. A choking sensation clogged my throat, and my heart raced up from a dark recess and thumped my chest cavity. Two tears rolled down either side of my nose.

“There’s a mini-human being in there,” she said. Her teeth were luminous, white, and precious.

I slid my back against the outside wall of the tub and pressed against its smooth outer shell, feeling the clean, patterned tiles on the floor with slippery hands.

Her movements in the water created beautiful sloshings and repetitive drips. What she did next was cup a handful of bubbles and slap them onto the crown of my head.

“You’re being silly,” I scolded.

“Oh?” she pouted, shifting among gathering suds. Lifting herself and arranging the suds across her body, she slid through the effervescence like a serpent. “I’m carrying a hostage,” she said, “You have no bargaining power.”

My eyes and mind fogged over. A long yawn interrupted anything I was about to say, and I stood to towel my hair.

That night, in bed, I awoke intermittently as she shifted her legs alongside me. The blanket jolted off my body. She kicked furiously, launching the blanket onto the floor. The darkness seemed composed of waves, sighing over me and, the more I listened to the surrounding silence and her gentle stirrings, the more I felt layers of darkness enveloping me. My forehead was moist. The room was a cocoon of warmth.

Setting the covers aright, I incubated my nakedness. Our warm bed was a drifting microcosm, a coziness derived from body heat. Beyond the edges of the comforter, I was convinced, lay an unknowable abyss. I must not sleepwalk, I thought, for I might step off into a black ocean and float weightlessly in a void.

In the perfect stillness, the beating of my heart was amplified. Each successive beat impended and crashed against some inner shore contained in my hollow ribcage, bursting and spreading outward, infiltrating every crevice of my being.

Life, the ceaseless motion of my blood, haunted me through the moonlit hours, and I felt an aura condense around me. Like the victim of a high fever, I shivered even as I sweated. A looming shadow of approaching futures descended. A momentary reversion of self, my prior existence pressed in at the window like a love-starved spirit.

Mary kicked, jostling the bed.

Dawn broke over the horizon, disseminating a haze.