The Hunt

We were in search of eggs. White ones like the moon, and some as big as newborn puppies in the palm. Biking wasn’t smart because you’d miss the little things hiding in the weeds and bushes, placed out there for us wives to find. It was the daddies of our men who told them what to do. And how to hold the eggs. 

Debra, crazy-eyed, found hers first – small and speckled, like a quail egg. She cracked it against the curb at 24th and Mission, and it cried. It cried as we hunched in our large pastel dresses with wicker baskets, also looking. We covered our ears because of the sound and what we were told would be our good and broken hearts. We’d be cracked open and in real love – a love that women who are not mommas just can’t know – like not knowing how big the universe is. 

I didn’t find my egg but stole another’s. I pushed her into the street. A bus was coming. I wanted to see her yolk. I woke in my husband’s arms. I turned onto my side, and he curled around me. Dotted my neck with kisses. I put him inside. 

When I got up, I looked back at our blue sheet with its melted goo. The spot looked like pee. I wondered how much urine a baby would make. My sister’s seven-year-old son still pees in the bed, which seems absurd. 

“You made a puddle,” I said to him, joking. 

In the bathroom, I got the syringe, bent, and my husband did it in my freckled bum. I cried out. Yelp! 

He kissed the part where he poked. His father had done this for his wife. His father is progressive. He is a socialist. He’d taught my husband as a boy about the names of the parts of a vagina that I don’t even know. 

My husband had also done this for his first wife. It had worked – they made a son, then divorced. He tells me every other day how much – how boundlessly – he loves his son. Sometimes, my husband cries telling me this. I hold him for some time. “You will feel this love too when you have a baby,” he says. He is ten years older than me, and I am thirty-three. 

The boy is an annoying child who I am trying to like more, or love. The journey from dislike, to like, to love feels like mountains. 

When the boy enters our home, he hugs me. I pat his silky brown hair. Then he runs in loops around the kitchen, asking to be chased, but he will always win the game. I fear I am becoming a mean-hearted person. Something like rust. 

When the boy is with us, I try motherhood. Then ask silently for childhood when the boy is not. The distance between my childhood and motherhood also feels like mountains. After the shot, I wobbled, wavered, and limped dramatically into the kitchen to heat the water in the kettle. More water on the stove for soft-boiled eggs. Cold water to just drink. It was a quiet Saturday morning with just the two of us. I asked him to dance. It was how we had met. I felt like magic again, like I could conjure the little thing. I used to be good, real good, at Easter egg hunts growing up. I’d always get more than my sister. I ran for the bushes at the edge of the grass and kicked down stones with sayings like Grandfather’s Garden. I knew what was inside the plastic eggs and what they would taste like. I knew how it would better my life. 

“Can I have that?” My young sister had pointed to a small chocolate rabbit in my basket. She had sweat on her forehead. 

“This isn’t Halloween,” I told her. 

My sister is smart now and tells me how dreams have to do with fear. She tells me of the fears she had before her son. Like, what if the baby just had one eye, shouted all the time, turned on you, turned into you, left, told you how you’re shit or didn’t come at all? 

Last week, my husband printed out an article and read it to me in bed. The house was quiet. Near empty. I pushed up against him and then wiggled over the hill of his body, sagging my full weight onto him, and then dropped off the other side. What I remember from the article is how babies are the size of gummy bears when they’ve been in there for a month. He seemed restless. He licked his lips. 

Lying back to look at the ceiling, I thought of what candy I knew, for sure, that I liked, in my basket. Peeps, Robin Eggs, and Jelly Bellies. He put his hand on my empty and mysterious belly and smiled wide, hopeful, and beautifully at me. 

I fell asleep into a hunt, wearing a space suit with a spear, to shish-kabob planets.