The Emerald Egg of the Emu
Amanda brought the emu egg with her for show-and-tell. To a third-grade eye, that egg looked like it were size enough to have been hatched by a Pterodactyl, and then it also looked painted up pretty for an Easter party as well, but that, believe it or not, was the natural color for any emu egg. It was not at all like the puny eggs being mined from the poorly ventilated chicken houses nearby that made whole stretches of our highway smell sharply of shit.
“Where did you find such a thing, Amanda?” the other girls asked when she walked into the classroom with the egg that morning.
“Home,” Amanda said.
Earlier that year, the teacher once had asked how many states each of the kids had visited. They had all sat there to think on the question for a minute, and then groups of them raised their hands when the teacher called out the different possible numbers for the states they’d each gone to. It turned out that Amanda was one of only two, just her and the handicapped kid, Big Dan, who had never left Georgia, or at least had fessed up to that being the case. Why hadn’t she lied in such a situation, in front of everyone there like that? If someone who knew her were to question her about it, if they were paying that much attention, why couldn’t she have just said she had an aunt who would take her to Florida sometimes in the summer so she could look off at the ocean? Kids that afternoon had come up to her at restroom break saying they couldn’t believe she’d never been anywhere besides Georgia. How sad. But this egg she’d carried with her today made all that better, and made that she lived in an actual ghost town better, too. When they built the new Highway 140 ten years back, they bypassed the old town of Folsom entirely, instead of veering down into it like the old road had. Her town, which the other kids for the most part didn’t know existed, would only get in the news so often, when a tornado would come through, inevitably one almost always seem to hit Folsom unlike the highway planners, and blow all the trailer homes up to heaven in a whirlwind. In fact, her own father, a Folsom native, had been found in a tree in nearby Adairsville as an infant, blown over the twelve miles from Folsom in a twister. The day after he told her that true story the first time, he left, and then it was just Amanda and her mother to fend for themselves. Amanda’s home could be the next one to be elevated heavenward in a storm.
In front of the class that afternoon, Amanda held her emerald emu egg up high at the show-and-tell, as much as her scrawny arms would go but still careful not to allow it to fall, trying to be a graceful little thing.
“The emu is the second biggest bird next to the ostrich,” she said facing everyone, not even that nervous anymore. She had her facts handy from the school library. She saw in that moment how she held everyone’s attention.
Her moment, however, seemed to be gone, just like that. The teacher made the call for recess. A cheer swelled much louder than the one they’d given for her introduction. Students started filing past. They were tiny blurs, racing towards the sunshine and to adulthood. Amanda stood where she’d been standing when she’d been presenting, wanting like hell to say something but her mouth was stuck, the emerald egg was hatching right in her hands, and to her what came out was just as beautiful as the glittery shell had been, and just as strange.
Greg Sullivan’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Barely South Review, New World Writing, and elsewhere. He is the founder of Cooper Street.