Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66904 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 335(@200wpm)___ 268(@250wpm)___ 223(@300wpm)
I don’t dare tell Shan this. He’s obsessed with the egg. He tends to it almost as if it were actually a baby. He cleans it and he turns it and he makes sure it is not too warm and not too cold. He has all the instincts necessary to care for a saurian egg, while I have none.
I feel like a failure, somehow. As if my feelings are wrong and my body is wrong. In spite of my feelings, I do try very hard to bond with the thing, but it doesn’t seem like a baby in any respect. It just seems like an object to me, though I know that people are capable of bonding with objects if they have to. There is ancient Earth lore about a man marooned on an island who became best friends with a bloodied handprint on a sports ball. Thinking of that old legend makes me think. Maybe I’d be able to bond with the egg if it had a face? How is anybody supposed to have an emotional reaction to a smooth, caramel-shaded egg?
I decide to take matters into my own hands. I can’t sit here in this shack in the middle of nowhere for months on end while watching my mate dote on an egg I feel nothing for. I have to do something for the sake of our… family? It does feel strange calling this rag tag group of creatures — one saurian, one human, one egg — a family. I think I just need to make it look more people like. That will help.
I wait until Shan has gone out to hunt to try the experiment. He doesn’t really like me touching the egg. I think he is afraid I will break it. He knows very well that I don’t have the same feelings he does about the whole thing.
Deciding to be careful, I sneak up to the egg.
“Shhh,” I say. “Don’t tell anybody.”
He’s going to know as soon as he sees it, of course, but I have to do this for me. I get a little of the char from the fire, and I start dabbing circles and lines on the face of the egg. I give it two little eyes first, well, big eyes. Well, two differently sized eyes because drawing is actually hard. Then I draw a big smily mouth. It doesn’t look great, but I think maybe it does look better than before. Am I starting to feel something?
“What are you doing, Lettie!?”
Shan’s voice is shocked and stern enough to make me pause, a smudge of charcoal on my nose from the little piece I took from the embers in my hand.
“Nothing?”
“You’re drawing on our egg,” he says, distinctly unimpressed.
I turn back to the egg, where, yes, I have drawn on it.
“I’m just trying to get to know it.”
“Lettie, you cannot draw on the egg,” he growls, taking a scrap of fabric woven from the fibre of nearby trees, dipping it in a clay bowl of water, and then carefully dabbing my marks away. “It is sensitive. You could hurt it.”
I birthed the damn egg, and now I have to look at it every day, but apparently I’m not allowed to interact with it. Only the great daddy Shan is allowed to do that. What a fucking…
“Fine. You deal with it then. It likes you better anyway!”
I spin on my heel and storm out of the shack. I am in a high temper and a foul mood. I didn’t think I was ready to be a mother, but I also didn’t know that a fucking egg could make me feel so incompetent and broken on the inside just by existing.
Shan doesn’t come after me. He is too busy tending to the egg, turning it, making sure I haven’t done any inept human damage to it, I suppose. Am I jealous of my own egg? No. That would be ridiculous — but also, yes. I used to matter. Now the egg matters. Will I ever matter again? Maybe if I lay another egg. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve outlived my usefulness.
I think I’m going to run away. I’m going to get back to the damn city, and find my damn crew, and…
“Where do you think you are going?”
Shan’s voice comes to me as I leave the line of sticks that make a fence around our little encampment. I’m not really supposed to ever set foot outside them, but I figure it doesn’t really matter now that my procreative journey is done. He’s got what he wanted from me.
“YOU HAVE YOUR DAMN EGG! YOU DON’T NEED ME ANYMORE!”
I finish climbing the fence before I turn around and reply to him at high volume. He is standing outside the cottage, his arms folded over his chest, an expression of outright disapproval on his handsome, mature, all-too-saurian face. He doesn’t need to comment on the fact that I’ve just disobeyed him for the first time in a long time. We both know it. I don’t even feel bad about it. I’m glad I’ve done something wrong. Wrong things make so much more sense right now than right.