Somebody's Easter Present

You didn't touch it when it first showed up on your lawn. You considered calling David briefly (then wondered why you would do such a thing when "briefly" isn't part of his name, or even a very clever nickname, then cracked yourself up with your own lame pun), but decided it wasn't worth bothering him about yet. You would wait and see if it did anything interesting first.

Smooth white eggs the size of basketball players don't show up on lawns every day. It's near Easter, though, and holiday house decorations are popular in the neighborhood; all week people were complimenting you and asking when you were going to paint the egg. You couldn't bear to tell them you didn't dare to touch it because it appeared there out of nowhere one morning with a ring of scorched grass and azaleas around it, so you told them you were still thinking about a design.

Eventually David found out, as you knew he would. He showed up in front of the house in his horrible maroon van with the mismatched doors. His glasses glinted as he measured the egg,  photographed and cross-referenced it, took soundings of its insides with no doubt stolen hospital equipment.

This last action caused him some excitement. "There's a bloody fetus in there," he insisted, even after you poured him several cups of tea and forced Fluffernutter cookies upon him. "It's a real bloody egg, Phyllis, a real live baby-holder, only it's no bloody chickadee in there, Phyllis, it's a bloody anthropoid, it's a person—"

You drove him home and told him to get some rest. The egg, however, seemed to stare at you with a knowing expression when you pulled up in the driveway again.

The next morning there was a crack in the shell.

Inside it was pinkish, as far as you could tell; pinkish and yellowish. David took to camping next to the thing in his elementary school pup tent. Despite your best efforts he kept talking to the neighbors, and before long there was a sizable Egg Watch movement encamped on your front lawn. You thought they looked rather like a cult in waiting for their Divine Spaceship to come and take them away, but you didn't say anything. You've never been sharp-tongued. Besides, by this time you were curious about the thing too.

The crack spread, birthing new ones. Bits of shell fell away and let sunshine in through the transparent membrane underneath. People shrieked about seeing glimpses of what was inside: half of them said feathers, half of them said skin. You said nothing. And when finally the authorities had been convinced to get them off your property for the next three days, you stood in front of the egg that night and watched as the pale hand groped tearing through the membrane and the wet white wings pushed eggshell away until there was nothing but a white bowl for the hatchling to sit in, blinking and gasping, and you looked at the grown man in the eggshell bowl — tall, crimson-haired, with eyes the color of spring — and his dove's wings and his creamy unmarked skin and his rather stunned smile and couldn't help but weep. It was all so certainly, beautifully, sickeningly ridiculous.