#a short story by Haruki Murakami | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

alittleghostwhoeatsbread · 5 months

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Eggy-Preg

Michael got back well after Terry had gone to bed- so late the sky was caught in a state of embarrassed indecision, holding the pinkish purple colour of a pigeon’s breast across its expanse like a blush to the cheeks- and, after hanging up his clothes and stretching, followed suit, falling straight into bed himself with the same form he’d had since the age of twenty-two, which was the tall and tubular one of a cardio-centric green bean. The following day, waking up around two in the afternoon as wet with sweat as a horse in lather, upon his first attempt at sitting up, he found to his surprise that he couldn’t with his usual ease because his usual form had been replaced by one with a belly as bloated as a hot air balloon filled with too much fire and at the point of popping, the pain of it when attempting to bend like a fire had been lit inside him too.

He could hear Terry in the kitchen humming to himself, the tuneless buzzing of a bumblepheliac drawing a colony to him for the purpose of honey themed sex, signifying that he hadn’t noticed upon waking the extended belly of Michael, this signification being made more apparent when, after getting up from the bed as gently and painlessly as he could, each lurch making him feel off balance, as if he could fall onto his lump at any moment, Michael walked into the kitchen and revealed it to him, the humming immediately becoming the strangled half-whistle of a mockingbird being throttled, Terry immediately running over and clasping the lump of his belly in his hands, lifting it slightly as he did and causing an unconscious moan of relief to come from Michael's mouth.

“Michael, what the hell is this? You look pregnant.”

“Don't be stupid. Pregnant. I’m just swollen. But it hurts.”

Terry lifted the extended pyjama shirt of Michael and gazed at the belly that when exposed had the look of a particularly angry acne spot on the verge of doing a Vesuvius, little purple lines running down the sides of it like static images of lightning minimised, his face when gazing the face of an astronaut after getting completely and utterly untethered in the depths of space, his mouth coiling like a snake waiting to strike while, hit by a sudden wave of emotion, his eyes becoming as wet as they would if waves of emotion were actually waves on the ocean, Michael started weeping and wailing of his pain.

The nearest hospital was tiled on the outside, the white and grey combination of new and old false teeth all jumbled up together, and they had to wait in a waiting room made up of stray church hall chairs surrounded by people with a variety of wacky ailments- fake udders superglued to chests, eye balls being held, nails and forks stuck through or into various body parts, etcetera- for a long ol’ time before finally being called in by a small doctor whose nametag said Stephanie. Stephanie was around 5 foot tall, but her white coat trailed on the ground as if it’d been stolen from a much taller doctor by two children who’d decided to play hospital and stacked themselves on top of each other beneath its buttoned up buttons, her face not suggesting otherwise, having the appearance of a ruddy and privately educated twelve tear old on the verge of divorcing their nanny.

She led the two, Michael, whose new weight made him shuffle like a mummy adrift without bandages, trying to lean on Terry but getting nowhere because Terry was too busy patting his own belly to make sure it hadn’t grown, into a small office made of cloth partitions rather than walls and containing just a dusty chest of drawers, a bed, and two rose red chairs that had the scent of many an ass hovering above them and exuding.

“What seems to be the problem?” she asked after waving Michael to sit on the side of the bed, as blank faced as a plate until that plate met a Greek wedding and broke. “I'm joking! You're clearly pregnant. What a surprise that is. You're male, biologically, am I right?... Just as I suspected. One doesn't like to assume such things though. Now, how long has your stomach been like this?”

“Since this morning. I woke up and it was like this, swollen, large. I was fine yesterday. I went for a run, drank a bottle of wine out with colleagues. I was everything but pregnant.”

“He can’t be pregnant,” Terry interrupted with a stamp of the foot. “I mean, where the hell is a baby going to come out of?”

Holding up a medically trained finger, Stephanie gestured for Terry to shut up and help her help Michael, who began sweating excessively again from a hot flush while desperately rubbing his stomach like it was a lamp a genie had recently vacated, off the edge of and onto the centre of the bed, their hands collectively laying him back but only Stephanie’s remaining to fondle and caress the extended belly. She did this fondlement for a while, feeling the skin of the belly in different areas as if trying to find the exact spot she wanted, until, with an, ‘aha!’, cry, she picked up her scalpel and a nearby syringe- already loaded with a sky blue liquid- and, without word or question of permission, injected Michael with it, him falling deeper into the bed and pulling the face of no pain, and her immediately setting about slicing straight down the centre of his stomach with the scalpel.

“Hey!” Terry screamed, reaching for the doctor and the scalpel before being stopped in his tracks by the appearance of not guts and giblets, but a bloody but otherwise very white and large egg- the size really of a bigger than average newborn- which lay in the split skin folds with the innocence eggs always have.

Even though feeling no pain, Michael felt a little something else at the moment of release, a groan of relief bigger than any groan he'd ever groaned before emanating from him and stretching around like elastic as the skin that'd been containing the egg receded back to its normal place, sewing itself back together as if nothing had happened.

“I knew it!” Stephanie whooped. “There are only a few male based pregnancies known and this, an eggy-preg as we called it off the cuff in medical school, is the rarest. There we have it. Your egg.”

“What’s in the egg?” Michael slurred, Terry shouting the same simultaneously.

“In there? What is? Oh, just something. You'll see. Maybe,” with this, she span and gathered a pamphlet that was strung to the chest of drawers with oddly thick cobwebs, blowing dust from it that flew off in a cartoonish grey cloud and floated several metres through the air before gathering like a rain cloud over Terry’s face until he dissipated it with a wave of the hands; the pamphlet was a perfect square rather than the usual rectangle with a green background and a single image as the foreground of an eggshell white egg with one long lightning shaped crack running down its front, the side of a yellow smiley face sticking out that crack like a slowly emerging, oddly coloured- not to mention shaped- piece of caca. “Read this. It’ll explain everything I can tell you and more.”

With that, Stephanie, with a doctorly flick of the hair, vanished, moving between the curtain partitions separating offices with the ease of a ghost lacking a sheet, losing them, and possibly herself, easily, the them, Michael-the-still-groaning-in-relief and Terry-the-what-the-hell-is-going-on, looking around as if they could find her again and also possibly a way to escape the cage of worry that’d been constructed around themselves. After ten minutes of them looking in a circle without a word, an orderly, who spied them through a crack in the partition, waved a hand at them and, rather forcibly considering the egg in their possession, removed them from the hospital, the egg lying in Michael’s arms as they left but never kept still, being jostled back and forth for comfort purposes as it’d begun growing at a steady pace since its removal from the belly. The egg was the size of a medium sized dog by the time they began their short walk home, though much lighter, and Michael held had to hold it sideways, hands clutching top and bottom, the curve of it blocking most of his forward vision and forcing him to trust Terry, who kept looking at the egg and shaking his head with sighs of annoyance, to direct him in the right direction.

“We’re going to be parents, Terry,” Michael said after a while, the happiness growing in his recently vacated stomach coming out in his voice, making it breathy and wispy as if attempting to vocally impersonate a feather duster. “Parents!”

“Parents. Parents,” Terry repeated every few steps, his face the face of someone doing their best not to impersonate an egg cracker but failing miserably.

Their house had a living room and that living room was large and oval with a slight dip right in the centre of it where a below foundation sink hole the council didn’t want to fix had pulled the pine flooring down from beneath, the egg, which Michael placed to the floor as gently as you would imagine a swan plants their keister on their own eggs, fitting in that slight dip with the perfection of a penis/testicle set in a groin protection cup of a regulation cricketer. Standing back and sitting heavily on the settee, Michael- while Terry ventured to the kitchen with clenched fists – watched the egg continue to expand and began to read the pamphlet, which had only two pages covered in bold text.

YOUR EGG AND YOU: a guide

Page 1 (Introduction): Congratulations, it looks like it’s happened, you’re a proud parent of what at the moment is still just an egg. Am I right to guess you’re worried? That you have no familial attachment to this thing that sprouted in your belly overnight and was then cut from you/emerged naturally from your behind/ vagina?

Here Michael shook his head at the pamphlet and clutched his heart, which had become swollen and choked with love and familial attachment as he walked with his egg home.

Well, you will do, and soon! Your egg produces a pheromone that will make you and your partner (If you have one, eggs can just as easily be made from masturbation alone) fall slowly but deeply into parental love for it. Isn’t that neat? Now I’m going to guess something else. I’m going to guess that you’re probably also scared. Scared that you won’t be up to scratch or that you’ll do something wrong. But I’m a pamphlet, a trustworthy one at that, and I’m here to reassure you and tell you that it’s all going to be okay. Looking after your egg until it hatches will be as easy as pie. Once you’ve laid, or had your egg removed (a recommended method painwise regardless of gender), and taken it home, settle it somewhere comfortable and warm and wait for it reach approximately twice the height of the hatcher. Before it’s the right height, your egg will simply not respond to the following steps.

Page 2 (Steps):

Step 1: Once your egg is precisely twice the height at the hatcher, wait until the sun goes down. And I mean down! Then wrap a blanket- checkered preferably- around its body. Sit next to it and do the same to your own.

Step 2: Begin to tell your egg a story, any story will do. Existing or made up, make up your own mind! Eventually, provided you tell it right, your egg’s shell will begin to glow with a golden light from within. At this point, continuing to talk, remove the blanket.

Step 3: Once your blanket is removed and your egg glowing, you should be able to see the form growing within it. At this point the form should be the same size as you and floating in or around the centre of the egg. Still telling your story, you should begin rubbing the egg with the palm of your hand until the sun comes up.

Step 4: Continue this process night after night after night until your egg hatches!

Disclaimer: The Eggy-Preg Information (EPI) company is NOT responsible for the time frame in which your egg hatches. Nor any deformations, grotesque natures, or personal growths that may happen to you, the egg, or what comes from it. The information provided is for general informational purposes only. All information is provided in good faith; however, we make no representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied, regarding the accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability, availability, or completeness of any information.

With no pause for consideration, the pamphlet going flying from the hand of Michael and to some dark corner of the room, the mouth of Michael screamed hoarsely, “Terry, tape measure, blankets, checkered, now, get them, two! The pamphlet said.”

Terry, who’d been watching Michael’s reading from the door of the kitchen, a bottle of wine already half drunk in hand and a head filled with thoughts and wonderings about just why exactly he felt so angry and disgusted by the sight of the egg and, by extension, Michael, who before the egg had appeared, he’d loved more than anything and had only felt unconditional feelings for- such as lust and calmness- put his wine bottle down with theatrical slowness once the scream came his way and got the blankets and measure, tossing them at Michael before picking the bottle back up. Not noticing anything wrong with Terry, Not seeing the grinding of the teeth of Terry, the pulsing veins of Terry, barely noticing Terry at all, Michael immediately measured himself- five foot five exactly- and then measured the egg, the expansion of it having seemingly stopped during his reading, with the aid of a nearby armchair which he stood on - exactly 11 feet. Giggling with the glee of a giant baby coming upon a giant mobile in a giant desert, Michael wrapped the larger checkered blanket tight around the bottom half of the eggs width, noting as he did the thick feeling of its shell and the new warmth emanating from it which was akin not to a wide spread fire but the concentrated flame of a match stick, so cosy but intense that when he wrapped his own blanket around his body and huddled close, sweat immediately beaded on his forehead, chest, and groin, and gave himself the feeling of being tucked back in the womb.

“What are you doing? Why did you need them?” Terry finally asked, a two percent fraction of his rage dimming, being replaced by a single percentage of curiosity, a half percent of exclusion, and a final half percent of exclusion induced sadness, the exclusion ad sadness aspects infuriating him so much immediately that they also increased his rage, making his feelings go above 100 percent if you can believe it.

“I have to read it a story now is what the pamphlet says. Now shush, come and sit with us if you’re curious. Try and bond with eggy.”

“I don’t want to bond with any eggy,” Terry muttered around the rim of his wine bottle while going to sit on the settee regardless. “What are you going to tell it.”

“I don’t think it matters. Just something. I’ll make something up.”

Settling, rubbing his behind on the floor like a bear scratching up against a tree, coughing to clear his throat, Michael gazed directly at the egg, sitting so close his vision was a sea of white so white it resembled the teeth in the prize selection part of the tooth fairy’s tooth collection, and began to speak.

“There was a time when floorboards weren’t just floorboards. When floorboards weren’t just dead planks of wood. When floorboards were… ALIVE! Living breathing planks that had eyes, three of them, and large mouths with even larger tongues. Red or purple tongues that spilled out across their bodies moistly and made it so every footstep on them had the sound of a wet sponge being wrung. Humans lived peacefully with the floorboards. We coexisted. They gave us flooring for our houses and in return we cared for them. Rubbed linseed oil on them, sanded them so they didn’t get splintered, and fed their tongues water every day so they didn’t dry out. It was a perfect arrangement… until it wasn’t! Until the time came when a floorboard appeared that wasn’t the same as the other floorboards. When a floorboard appeared that was strange.”

Here the egg began to glow with the golden light the pamphlet had promised- a blinding light that radiated outwards and got weaker the further it stretched from the egg, like a candle a child was supposed to follow but that moved much faster than their little legs could do- a glow that made Michael squeal before remembering he wasn’t supposed to stop speaking, and a glow that had Terry throw his hands up at the ridiculousness of the entire situation with the result of the top of his head getting splattered with grape blood.

“Ummm, yes, strange! A strange floorboard appeared,” Michael continued, beginning the unwinding of the blanket from around the egg with the gentle movements of someone who’d abandoned childhood emotions unwrapping a surprise gift, revealing the form within before it was fully unwrapped, Michael swiftly tearing the rest of the blanket off as those childhood feelings came roaring back with no memory of abandonment.

The form exposed was a shadowy outlineish thing that looked as if sketched with charcoal floating in the centre of the egg, bobbing slightly up and down and vaguely resembling a giant featherless chicken from waist down, with thin bony legs that ended in three large claw tipped toes, and from the waist up looking more like a standard human with the exception being similar claws at the ends of its fingers and an elephantal shape of the head, a giant trunkish thing stretching out past its chin.

“What the fuck,” Terry spat into his lap while Michael began step 3, rubbing the egg gently with the palm of his hand. “That’s not like us. What is that. It’s disgusting.”

“-unlike the other floorboards with hair covering it and teeth in its mouth too. Sharp teeth, fangs really,” Michael turned and glared at Terry, shushing him with his spare hand. “People suggested that the reason for this floorboard’s odd appearance was the result of it being born rather than made, the result of an inter-species relationship between human and board. This suggested hybrid wasn’t peaceful like the other floorboards. It didn’t want to work with humans. It was angry. Aggressive. It bit feet when they stepped on it and each foot bit made it grow larger. Made it grow different features. Like arms and legs. Like more hair. With these features there was no stopping it from rising from the floor and becoming a moveableboard, one that proceeded, for no reason at all, to start killing humans but not floorboards. How did the humans know it was this moveableboard doing the killing, I bet you’re wondering? Well, I’ll tell you. It left calling cards so that there would be no confusion. Bits of its hair, teeth marks, written notes saying, ‘It was meeeeee, the moveableboard!’ and ‘I hate humans. Boards unite!’. It didn’t take long before the human race decided that they had to do something about this and do something about it fast.”

With the story continuing, Terry, wanting no part in what he was witnessing, not even a small observer one, after standing up with his mouth agape, backed out of the room with unconscious dump truck reversal noises stumbling out of his mouth like drops of dripping water, hands no longer clenching but agape also and wiggling as if signing him off a stage.

“-the hero who’d been chosen, that young bald girl, clutched the plastic spear she’d been given with both hands. She knew that killing the moveableboard would kill all the floorboards too but having lost everything in her journey to reach the spot the moveable board lay sleeping in, she didn’t hesitate. She brought it down. Hitting the sleeping moveableboard right in the middle. Piercing the hair covering the wood and then the wood itself. Splintering the bits that resisted. Sending its acquired arms and legs wild and drying the wet wet eyes of it. Killing not just it, but all floor objects forever. Making them all as they are now, inanimate.”

The glow of the egg faded when the story finished with the finality of a baby’s eyes closing and Michael, tiptoeing like a ballerina on the verge of being kicked out of the most famed ballet school around if she doesn’t find the strength in her heart to stay on en pointe for longer than forty eight hours, crept from the room with a tired but contented sigh.

The night was filled with the peaceful snores of Michael- who’d kissed the air in the general direction of Terry’s cheek before undressing and going straight to sleep without a glance at or a word direct toward the open mouthed horror held upon, and within, his face- and with the hurried packing sounds of Terry doing just that, tossing all and whatever he could find in the dark into a bag. Followed by the sounds of fleeing, of running away, the front door shutting, the cat flap that’d never been used except for the one time Michael had, for a joke, attempted to crawl through it and gotten stuck, flapping once as the would be father disappear around a bend. Michael dreamt strange dreams whilst this fleeing was taking place, as if he was being gifted new stories to tell, strange dreams of bright colours and moving kitchen appliances that wanted to remove the skin off him and replace it with puff pastry, and when he woke up, early in the morning before the sun had risen but after the moon had vanished, he was cold but had no urge to turn and rub Terry for warmth for he somehow knew without really thinking about it that he was gone, instead he just went to the living room to embrace the egg.

Claiming maternity leave from his work was easy- he simply emailed and sent them a photo of him and his egg in an embrace and they sent back a thumbs up and two heart emojis with a detailed description of his new pay schedule- and the following free from outside obligations days and weeks past in the parental bliss of him sitting before the egg all day every day, thinking up stories for the night, rubbing its shell like it was a mackerel and he a mackerel enthusiast, and staring blank eyed out the window, waiting for the sun do its thing. The need for food or drink had seemingly left him, instead he got his nourishment from the tales he told in the same manner the egg seemed to, the form within the shell, when the golden glow revealed it, growing outwards with each passing day and each passing story until it reached the sides of the egg and then beginning its growing decent downwards towards the base.

The stories flowed from Michael like ripe grapes budding on the vine, being plucked off and dropped onto grassy floors to bounce into the mouths of babes, hitting the ground running and taking with them narratives including flower buds, embers from fires, elephant whispers, karate chop calls, frozen dormice, on fire post officers, little girls with no ears, little girls with too many ears, cassette tapes, sausage rolls, mushrooms with tentacles, potatoes being boiled and mashed and stuck in a stew, afro wearing unicorns, dogs smoking weed, cats injecting heroin, the queen of Arabia doing the fandango, happy endings, no endings, sad endings, bad endings, wicked plants, the stabbing pain of being stabbed, and a centaur being milked. After a while, the form in the egg began to respond to the stories, audibly as well as visually that is, going further than what the pamphlet had said it would do when it said it would simply glow, making a high pitched whining sound when it glowed and growed that was a cross between an electronic buzz and a dog whining for food. The sound, which began small at first, so that for a while Michael thought it was nothing but wind squeezing its way, like a leg into trousers much too small for them or a condom over a hand, through a gap in a window, got louder and changed from night to night, keeping the same base sound but adding buzzes or meeps or beeps depending on what story was being told, and would have been incomprehensible if it hadn’t been for Michael’s acute maternal instincts which swiftly picked up a pattern within them. Sometimes when telling a story, he would slip one of the sounds he’d heard the egg make into it as if it had always meant to be there, like a piece of pie slotting itself back into the whole, and enjoy the way the egg would sort of shake in response, rocking on its base without fear of falling, which Michael noted as a good thing, ‘It’ll be brave!’, went his thoughts, ‘God, I’m proud.’

The form in the egg stopped growing just before its feet touched the bottom of the shell and there wasn’t enough room for it at all, it didn’t matter that the stories kept coming or that the rubbing didn’t stop, it stayed just as it was, still eating the tales, still making its noises as it heard them- the sounds growing louder even, resounding as they echoed and bounced off the surface of the shell and then the surface of its body- but hearing them, digesting them, as if no longer hungry at all. Michael, as peaceful in heart as an anteater face to face with all the ants it could eat anteater style, didn’t worry and continued to spin his tales, weaving a thread through each night, throwing in more and more of the eggs own noises from his own mouth and just trying to enjoy the extra time he got to spend with the child when it was still just an egg, the nourishment of tales he was receiving from what he gave out giving his skin a shiny milky glow, like a recently waxed surface.

While this was all happening, though not right at any specific moment and rather just in a similar time frame, Terry was sitting on a plastic bench eating a carton of scrambled eggs in front of a petrol station advertising advent calendars in June and beginning to weep, his left hand stretching out towards the empty space to the left of him as if there was someone there to hold it and comfort him, scrambling with it, hitting nothing but net over and over until it finally promoted him to toss the scrambled egg in the manner of a cricketing bowler-hat, where it landed on concrete with the hiss and splatter of whitish lava. Terry had been alone since he’d left Michael and the egg, spending his days, and then weeks, on various benches and in public toilets masturbating over the thought of Michael’s personality before he’d held the egg inside and hating the egg violently for appearing, for getting in the way of things, for being around,, for not having something inside it that looked normal, until the point when the egg flashed through his mind during the climax of one of his masturbation sessions and that hate became for himself. It was that moment of self-hatred that brought Terry to buy scrambled eggs to eat, but it was the pangs of it, like the pangs the sight of a premature rose would prick a fully bloomed rose with, that also made him decide to go back home, deciding that if eating eggs in spite of his hatred for the egg waiting for him at home was enough to bring him to tears then perhaps he could be a parent to whatever the hell kind of creature that was growing in it and, maybe, if he told Michael about his tears and how they’d flowed- probably leaving the part where he’d had to eat egg to find it out- he would forgive him for leaving too.

It took Terry over two days to get home, not because he’d travelled very far at all, having not even left the city, just taking the local bus routes as far they would take him before removing him, but because he was a coward and despite his resolution, he was still afraid that the music he assumed he was bound to face would send its most jagged notes forward to strike his face. When he finally did arrive back, the bus squeaking to a stop at the stop just outside the premises, him- having been poised by the door- flying out as if ejected by the force of its brakeage and snake-strike door opening speed, he stood on the doorstep in the dark for over an hour with a shivering of the lip and a quivering of the leg, staring at the curtained window to the left of the door that would have looked through into the living room if the curtains making it curtained hadn’t been curtained shut. He couldn’t see any possibilities or clues for the type of reception he’d receive through the curtain, no shadows danced on the fabric despite the soft golden light that emanated from within, illuminating them with an ethereal angelic glow that suggested that even the slightest movement from within would have sent some black things WALTZING.

The house wasn’t quiet when he, finally, with a sigh and a shudder and a desperation to ignore the fact that he was wishing with all his might that the egg wasn’t an egg anymore but a normal child, a human looking one at that, and that Michael wasn’t the Michael he’d left but the Michael who made him hard, opened the door. The house was loud, filled with strange noises, whoops and beeps and growls and grunts and whistles and clicks, that didn’t seem to be coming from one direct spot but rather from everywhere all at once and called to his mind, for reasons unknown to him, the comparison of them to the silent screams of a hemlock garden being picked or a cactus being dethorned. The house was dark except for the golden glow that flickered like the tail end of coy candle flame, a door, standing halfway open with the patience of a giant mouth waiting for an unsuspecting traveller to mistake it for a cave, blocked an immediate view into the living room and a sighter of what was causing the brightness, until Terry played the role of an unsuspecting traveller and went in, one arm proffered in a half circle awaiting a hug and the other with the hand extended, palm up and out and waiting to push back whatever ran at him if whatever had hatched. Both of those arms freezing in place as a feeling tickled his fanny to completion and his eyes and ears were confronted with the sight and sound of not one, but two eggs, giant ones at that- filling the room like it was the room itself that was the egg- sitting side by side, glowing their glow and showcasing the decidedly strange forms inside them, filling the air with stories.

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