SANDERLINGS

‘I’ve told you before, Jack. Never take an egg from a nest. Think of its mummy and daddy.’ Christine snaps her laptop shut, stands up, walks past her son and flicks the kettle on. The little boy stays on his chair, shoulders slumped, cradling the small speckled blue egg in the slight of his hands.

            ‘But they weren’t there, the mummy and daddy birds. I had to save it.’ Christine spoons three teaspoonfuls of sugar into a hand-thrown black ceramic mug.

            ‘I suppose it’s too late to take it back now,’ she says. She stirs the sugar through the coffee.  ‘Wrap it up in something, and put it in a box in the airing cupboard. You never know, you might be lucky.’

Time passes. A day here, a day there. Mail is dropped through the letter box. The snotty-eared Border terrier is taken for his three daily walks. A neighbour locks herself out and sits in their living room leafing through Home and Garden magazines until her husband gets home from work. There’s a typhoon in the Philippines, a mountain rescue in the Cairngorms, and a fifteen year old osprey called Hannah wins The Great British Bake Off. Jack’s father, Dennis, brings vegan cutlets home to flame on the barbeque. Christine gets through three bottles of seriously good wine. Little Jack hangs around in the hallway listening at the door of the airing cupboard. Behind the door, almost silence. Just the tick tick of the central heating system, the settling in sighs of the crisp folded linen, and the clunk of the dustpan and brush as it swings from its butcher hook when someone steps too heavy in the hall.

            ‘Mummy, Mummy, I can hear it, I can hear it!’ Jack wrenches the handle of the cupboard door and hops from one foot to another. Christine, who has been fussing around the house, writing lists for the cleaning woman, shouting at her absent husband, and heaving the dog off the chaise longue, does not need this now.

            ‘Of course you can’t she says. ‘Get away from that door now.’

            ‘I have to be here just in case,’ he says, his tone close to a whine. Christine is not a lover of whining, nor a lover of a son of hers stealing eggs from the local wood that had a protection order slapped on it by her husband’s tree-hugger friends just three months previously. Then she feels it, the most subtle of shifts in the air. A change in scent or humidity or pressure.

            ‘Don’t you open that door, Jack,’ Christine says, leaning over the back of the kitchen chair and gulping back the dregs of her breakfast coffee.  She wipes her lips with her hands. ‘If it is being born, you don’t want to frighten it to death.’

There are so many condolences cards that the nurse has arranged them in three neat lines along the sill of the large picture window. Christine hasn’t read them yet. Not even one. Reading means accepting. Accepting means agreeing. Agreeing makes it true. Letting it sink in as her mother would say. It was an egg. It was just an egg. She hadn’t bothered to identify it, so many other things to do, but even if she had?

She slides a hand down under the starch of the hospital sheet along the cool bump of her hip then further down her thigh. Stops at the stump. First time she’d done that she’d screamed. Screamed and screamed until a squad of nurses had appeared in convoy, gathered around her bed, shushed her and held her hand and held her down and injected something into the saline drip. The slam of the crush in her chest had loosened, dissipated, subsided into something hazy, gauzed, hidden behind sterile and crepe and words that had yet to be spoken. Now she allows her hand to lie there, the weight of it on the remnant of her limb familiar but not yet reassuring.

Jack is to visit her for the first time. She is four operations in. Does he know, Christine whispers to the nurse who’s fussing about her monitoring system and jotting down numbers on a pad. The nurse shakes her head. Should I tell him, she asks, reaching out to hold the nurse’s hand. The nurse frowns. Perhaps not all of it at once, Mrs Simpson, the nurse says. Maybe start with the amputations. And leave your husband’s passing for another time. Passing. What a strange term. Makes it seem peaceful, ordinary, even preordained. Murdered would be better. Mutilated. Torn from limb to limb. When is the right time to tell your five year old his father was gathered into twenty bin bags, each piece of him measured, weighed and photographed, and a number stuck to the wooden floors of their house to show the range of the carnage. Her feet that aren’t there are too hot and too tight. She pulls the sheet up to give them some air. Looks down at the empty space. Shuts her eyes. The space remains white behind her closed lids.

It has been all over the papers of course. Christine’s mother, Enid, makes sure Christine has access to the lot. Enid brings the fat brown cardboard file in and lays it down on Christine’s bed. Enid has been genuinely unkind to Christine for thirty three years and is not going to change just because of a tragedy. Read them while you’ve got time, she says to her daughter. Once you start on the physiotherapy you’ll have time for nothing else. Mark my words. Christine turns her face to the wall. Enid walks to the window. Lovely cards you’ve got, dear, she says. Lovely cards. Why don’t you take them home, Christine says to the pillow.  You can pretend they’re all for you.

Christine shuffles her buttocks into position on the bed and hauls herself up with the pulley. Her mother has taken the cards and taken her leave. Christine needs to see outside. A flash of yellow catches her eye. A coal tit hops and flutters down the branch of the oak tree outside the window and pecks at the seeds in the bird feeder. Christine opens her palm and studies the fragment of shell she’s been holding loose for the last half hour. It is pale blue, speckled grey with a smear of red, and a grit of dark green stuck to its glossy interior. The doctor had handed it to her in a neat glass specimen jar as she’d sat up for her first meal without her legs. We found this, she’d said. What is it, Christine had asked. Where? The doctor had paused. Between your toes, she’d replied. We thought you’d want to keep it.

Note. I wrote this story from a prompt in my Monday writing group. It was written in 30 minutes and has had one light edit. The prompt was: a person finds an egg in a forest and brings it home, with unexpected results.