Pink
by Gareth Fitzgerald
She awoke on her stomach, wearing only his boxers, and before she opened her eyes, Cassie felt there was something in his boxers.
The corners of the fitted sheet, tucked lazily, had sprung free, most of her body touching the mattress. She tugged the duvet off her ass. A pool of blood the size of a ham stained the sheets. Her stomach groaned.
She cringed, so she squeezed and the bit that was still inside her dropped. She touched it through his boxers, hard and warm.
Her head pounding on the pillow, keeping pace with her heart as she prepared to meet the loose problem in his boxers.
Her stomach groaned again, barking under her belly button. She lifted her pelvis, blood dripped. Careful of sitting on the thing, risking pushing it further inside, she lifted her ass. The thing rolled forward and lay at the waistband under her stomach.
She sat up on her knees and watched it weigh down his boxers, cotton, hass avocado printed. (She always hated the way his clothes almost fit her.)
Cassie pulled at the waistband, and let it fall.
Pink, stained from blood, an egg, fell onto the bed.
She sat up fully, it rolled toward the curve in the mattress, and stopped at her knees. She sat back on the dirty soles of her feet. She thought this must be an odd period. Or just a very large clot. But it wasn’t. It was obviously an egg.
She stared at it for a long time. So small she could close her entire hand around it, but wouldn’t dare touch it, she was repulsed. Her body always did this—acted out.
Cassie convinced herself there must be a logical reason why she laid an egg.
Health education was taught for one semester in 9th grade, and of those 15 weeks, one and a half were dedicated to sex education. Everything else Cassie knew about sex, she learned from porn or from men.
The stoic teachers of Our Lady of Lourdes High School were careful how they presented sex, implications of fact were drowned in horror. Mrs. DiMarco showed close-up photographs of genital lice. They watched a video of childbirth, a boy had fainted.
Cassie concluded she must have missed the short unit on women laying eggs, during the classes she skipped for boys who wanted to show her the pattern on their boxers.
One day, Mrs. DiMarco gave each student in Cassie’s class an egg. The egg was to represent the fragile life of a newborn child. If the egg broke, she failed.
Two kids broke their eggs before the end of the school day. The egg always rolled, so by Friday night, Cassie decided to keep it in a small Tupperware container. She had figured it all out. It was easy to take anywhere. In the basket on her bike, in her backpack, in her bed. She felt like Mother of the Year.
By Sunday, she forgot it was there and threw her bag down too hard. She wished she had broken it on Friday. It was an F either way, and now she had wasted a weekend caring.
Monday morning, her best friend told her she cracked and ate her egg as an omelet for breakfast. “Free food,” she said. “An egg was not a baby, obviously,” she also said. Cassie asked her what kind of omelet. “Mushroom and cheese.”
Cassie’s body tried to devour the memory, mushroom and cheese. It had been days since she had eaten something solid. Her body often got the mistaken impression that it has sway, and it begs, mushrooms and cheese, in the same desperate tone she begged the man in hass avocado boxers, hungry and inaudible.
Scrolling on her phone, smearing blood on the glass, reading Google results under a pink smudge, she learned quickly: this was a Cassie Problem.
It was not courage or curiosity that induced her to pick up the egg. She held it with a grudge. Her body had betrayed her again. The bloody slime and the hemoglobin boogers were cold, but the egg, the shell, and whatever was beneath kept itself warm.
Cassie tried to balance herself before she stood. But the hunger, then the hangover, then the shock knocked her down, and she fell on the floor, slowly, like a baby too eager to walk.
Her ass and her elbows hit the floor, roughly cushioned by weeks of dirty laundry. Cupped in her hands, tucked between her breasts, her egg had tricked her—she protected it unconsciously.
It was a problem, not a progeny, she reminded herself.
She slipped the boxers off with her feet, unwilling to free the egg from her hands (more unwilling to admit that). The hass avocados, wet with blood, stained everything they touched.
She always did two loads of laundry anyway, one stained with blood, one not. Her period had disappeared for a long time. But lately, there was always blood. After three dry years, blood looked like life, a reminder of the universe in her veins, a cosmos with a purpose Cassie never jived with.
To not see blood made her proud. She had halted the universe for her own ambitions. But her blood was not cosmic matter, it was tender resignation.
Cassie wrapped herself in a dirty towel and pushed herself up, first onto the bed, until the world stopped spinning, then up all the way. She noted the silence in the house, her roommate was still asleep.
Her towel started to fall, and she let it, wobbling naked, careful not to drop the egg.
Cassie slammed the bathroom door with her foot. She let the water run, making sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold, before remembering she didn’t care—she hated her egg.
She washed it off only to get a better look at it. She cleaned the blood from the egg, and still it was pink. Pink, not from blood, just pink.
The bathroom door swung open.
“Mornin’.” Her roommate didn’t look at naked Cassie or her egg.
“Good morning,” Her roommate sat on the toilet, hardly awake.
The night before, Cassie’s roommate had gone home with a man who wanted Cassie first.
The man stood over Cassie, alone in a pleather booth, as she drank a tequila orange juice. She studied bodies and licked pulp from her glass. She had reached a point in her life where she took more pleasure in watching her friends having a good time with men who wanted her first than in having a good time herself.
Her roommate flinched awake on the toilet.
Cassie didn’t look at her.
“I think I laid an egg.”
Her roommate didn’t flush or wash her hands.
“Yummy.”
Her roommate didn’t close the door behind her, and Cassie was treated to a glimpse of the naked man in her bed.
Hours, days, weeks, months, years spent in a starved hollow, her only concern was to keep going. She simply did not have the energy to stress over her little egg. The hunger pains made her feel crazy. But she worried that if she ate, the severity of the situation would become obvious.
Cassie had never made an omelet before.
She cracked the shell, a fluorescent pink sizzled onto the pan, the albumen sparkled, and the yoke breathed. She didn’t own cheese or mushrooms or anything else meant to go in an omelet. Her egg would be scrambled.
Cassie tried to scramble the egg as an act of hatred, but found herself carefully pulling the egg goop into the center while the delicate edges turned white. She decided she could be careful in her hatred. She had learned that from the man in the hass avocado boxers.
Cassie hated plates. She ate her pinkish-whitish scramble from the pan, not flinching.
She swallowed the last bite, still salivating.
The egg opened up something inside of her.
Cassie held her towel up and surveyed the scarce fridge.
She tried to open a jar of pickles but couldn’t. She got upset, remembering she had no one in her life who could open a jar of pickles for her.
She opened the pantry and shoved handfuls of stale goldfish into her mouth, unwilling to release the pickle jar. Her ambition tangled in saliva, and she swallowed. Feeling stronger from the stale crackers, she gave the jar of pickles her everything. She thought of breaking the jar, picking around the glass.
Chewing on a protein bar, she stood over her roommate’s lover. She shook the man. She held her towel up with the same hand she held the pickles. His eyelids twitched open, and she shoved the jar in his face. He looked her up and down, then took the jar without asking questions.
He opened it as easily as Cassie had cracked the egg. He went back to sleep, draping his arm over her roommate. He hadn’t recognized Cassie. She flushed with embarrassment and ate a pickle about it.
Then she ate a whole jar of pickles about it. And the goldfish, and protein bars, and freezer-burnt pirogies, and a carton of chocolate almond milk. Her stomach moaned and turned over. All that begging and not even a thank you. Her stomach couldn’t take it. But she held it down, fearing what else her body had to give.
Gareth Fitzgerald is a writer based in Troy, NY. Her heart beats for fiction, but she also writes a weekly publication on Substack, From My Head Tomatoes, about food, life and hunger.