Egg

For the fourth time that day, Dana woke up. Her rolling and writhing had gone on since she’d returned home yesterday. Now a rare moment of clarity washed the fog from her mind and gave her the inspiration to sit up. Propping herself against the bedrest, she swept off her sweaty blanket and exposed her bare legs to the room. With knees angled off the edge, her feet swivelled towards the floor.

Her pivot was interrupted mid-turn. A cramp at the centre of her lower abdomen jammed her hips to a grinding halt. Wincing at the unexpected obstacle, her head jerked downwards to source her pain. The ripples of her loose t-shirt swelled in a dune towards the hem. Chin doubled against her chest, her right fingertips pinched the fabric and slid it up slowly. The wrinkle was no illusion. A round silhouette emerged over the line of her pants, until she unveiled a shape below the crease of her stomach.

A lump, the size of a child’s fist, bulged out her skin, laced like a present with thin blue veins.

Her eyes bulged with it and the message was transmitted to her nerves, whose reflex was to send out a stream of shivers that radiated up her arm and down her whole body. Supporting her back, her left arm took the extreme end of the shakes. It shuddered with cartoonish strength until her elbow buckled. Disused abdominal muscles spasmed into action to suspend her torso but, on colliding with the lump, they recoiled, collapsing her back onto the mattress. Then her groin and stomach started to convulse. Through gritted teeth, she absorbed the pain and squeezed her eyelids shut, as if to burst her eyeballs. Horizontal and frozen, her arms regained control. Eyes still closed, her right hand crawled across her hip, and her index finger approached first. Curiously, reluctantly, her fingertip made a single prod towards the object and contacted it.

Her finger bounced back upon its very solid and real form. It was rubbery and robust, though the relief it would not burst rapidly evolved to dread. Sitting no deeper than her thin layer of puppy fat, the obtrusion had found its home in the once-concave dip between her hips. Her left hand then moved in to probe the elastic hardness, which stretched the skin taut under her stomach. It curved out smoothly, and as she cupped it in the round of her palm, it exuded an uncanny warmth, calming and disgusting her simultaneously. She pressed it firmly and felt it beat back with a pulse slightly ahead of her own. She nudged it, and it rolled.

Her body accepted it faster than her mind. As her muscles slowly ceased spasming, the realisation of her predicament flooded in, and all she wished to do was cry. Yet she knew better than to call for help. She resisted, and her tears slid down silently. What would her family think? She didn’t know what she thought herself, but their reaction would be somehow worse.

Downstairs, she heard her parents failing to whisper. She had clearly made enough noise to rouse their suspicions. Their murmurs vibrated her walls and turned into footsteps. She swiped the cover back over her. One foot landed decisively outside her door, paused, and with a creak of the floorboard, released to head off again. Nestled under the covers, Dana exhaled, and the duvet deflated across her middle, though now with an extra round peak. Her bedroom door was not breached – for now, at least.All she needed was for it to disappear. A plan to push it out and flush it down the toilet rose and fell from reality as fast as she wished the lump would. Trips outside the bedroom risked a run-in with her little sister, who sniffed out awkwardness and found its root like a truffle hunter. Her mother would not even respect the bathroom and treated open nudity between females of the family as sacrosanct. Hiding it under clothes would be no good. Hence, she resolved to remain hermetically sealed. It wasn’t going anywhere for now, and neither was she. So, she lay like a stone, static and hard on the

round of her back, arms stiff at her side.

A creak on the hinge, opening no further than the bend of a hairpin, woke her in an instant. She’d managed to doze off somehow, but not for too long as the remains of daylight leaked amber from the crack between her curtains. Her reflexes pricked up and shocked her from suspended animation.

“Are you awake? Can we come in?” Her father’s voice faltered. “Please.”

A ‘No’ left her throat with such expulsive force it seemed to slam the door shut.

A huff, muffled from the other side, preceded footsteps stomping away.

Safe, but now sitting up on alert, any remaining state of fatigue exited her soul. Her bleary eyes adjusted to the lurid yellow of her walls, surprising her. Without asking, her dad had painted her room while she was away and she could still smell the residual fumes. Yellow was the colour of madness, she recalled, but whatever her father’s intentions, the canary signalled a lack of air.Then, a beat pulsed against her organs, and an unlikely reality struck her again:

It was still there.

It throbbed so hard she pressed back against the growth to suppress it. Instead, she felt its bounce had gone; in just those few hours, it had hardened.

Her breath quickened, and she consoled herself with the possibility she was worrying about nothing. The counterintuitive, almost impossible thought calmed her, and she kept it going. From school, she had been taught that you knew about your body not from living in it, but from learning about it. Her mind rifled through her bank of biology lessons and the single sex ed lecture a few years back where they doled out free tampons that most of the class were too scared to use. Though she had never heard of a lump like this growing, she reached for the nearest sensible explanation. One friend had told her about periods where she was so swollen she couldn’t get out of bed. Since her period was due around now anyway, she vowed to wait for the blood to arrive.

Unfortunately, some other part of her knew what she was hiding. Memories of what had happened just a few days ago were not transparent, or too much so. Moment to moment appeared disconnected, like a flick book with chunks ripped out. Fortunately, someone she met last week had given her a sleeping pill, so she swallowed it with dry spit to cancel the remainder of the day and hoped for the solution to come to her through time, rather than action.

Dana, in her drugged sleep, sensed her whole family’s intrusion, yet her body refused to wake. Paralysed, the sounds of two figures wandering around entered her mind. She twitched as bags were unzipped and flinched as a book slapped to the floor. With the click of the latch, her heartbeat relaxed. Yet seconds later another creak broke in, followed by a lighter set of footsteps right up to her. A damp chocolatey breath landed on her cheek, and she shivered – beyond just feeling cold – as her blanket was torn from her.

On this she rose. A sudden gust from the door cooled her exposed skin. Her body perched upright, though she was far from conscious. Her adjusted eyes gazed around an empty room and absorbed the greyscale silhouettes, lined by the sliver of white light that pierced through the door. Some part of her vision took in newly placed shadows on her drawers; another part acknowledged the absence of an accustomed rectangle: her diary, on her bedside cabinet. And then, a wave of grief swept over her like a nightmare, and her body and mind together remembered that it was not the first time she had been intruded upon that week. Yet, the exact recollection came to her in the form of a broken dream, and in the absence of understanding, she wept in her sleep.

***

Dana awoke to her third day in bed at dawn. Sunlight split straight through the gap in the curtains and penetrated her eyelids like crêpe paper, but the pain of sudden wakefulness subsided immediately to an even worse one.

The lump was moving. She yanked off her sodden t-shirt to see it. Veins struggled to contain it in their blue net, and it revolved and bumped against her pelvic wall. Around it, her skin, like a stormy ocean, rolled in waves.She turned over in panic, doing the only thing she knew how to do: hide it. With her whole body, she pressed her hips into the mattress in the hope it would drive the lump back into her body and go away forever. It worked too well; so well that it submerged deep into her heavily bruised insides, rupturing through the weakest lines in her muscles. The lump was finding its way into her core. She shifted into a foetal position, face downwards and screamed into the pillow to muAle her agony – for however much she was consumed by the object inside her, she could not bear the thought of her family barging in now.

Knees at her chest and bum raised in the air, she wailed deep-bellied sobs. Was this really happening? The ball started to change direction. She felt it begin to roll inside, grind down, forcing its way out of her by callously shoving past bits she never knew existed.

She felt it inches from leaving her. What could be so hard that it didn’t burst or squash? Like weeds through concrete, it penetrated its way through an impossible path. Yet the object itself now felt like concrete. Panting, sweat formed trails off her back and fine locks of hair clung in static streams down her cheeks. She puffed and groaned into her damp pillow, as she felt drips of hot liquid melt down her legs and wet the bed.

It was leaving her. Arriving. With a suction-like cluck, the sound of flesh walls splitting apart echoed from her insides as the mass was compelled out. Each muscular wave hugged the smooth stone as its radius expanded through rings of cartilage and strained in a final ejection. Ear against the pillow, her body released and she heard a single deep beat drop onto the bed. The mattress now held what her body had been so poorly hiding. Relief swept over her like a tidal wave, relaxing her into a thoughtless, tingling blank.

Once again, her arm knew what it had to do. Right forearm reached under her thigh, grabbed its shape, and pulled it out into the open. Holding it next to her face, she saw steam rise off the mottled surface, and smelt its warm, bloody vapour. She fanned her fingers around it and squeezed against its rock hardness with all the strength of her grip, yet it remained intact.

She relaxed and closed her eyes, it resting against her face, and, before she could think

about what to do with it, something within it cracked.