It has been seven months now since the strange egg arrived.
Things have never been quite the same since. I can still clearly remember the
eerie whooshing sound as it manifested itself in the kitchen, a sound like a
drunken man tumbling into a moderate sized puddle of dirty water. After that
the egg did nothing for quite some time, other than cause me to become bemused
and intrigued. Soon however this turned to fear as the egg began to display its
true intent.
Firstly I lost my job as a rubber chicken salesman after a
dispute with a gentleman over the name of the red thing on the top of the
chicken’s head. He said it was a crest, the craven fool. I knew it to be a comb
and made my point to him, clearly and succinctly. When he picked himself up
from the floor, his nose streaming red with what I can only assume was blood, I
considered that perhaps I had overstepped the mark. When the police arrived and
roughly manhandled me into the back of a grimy van I knew that this would not
go down at well with my employers. For one thing I’d been arrested, but I’d
also, in 24 months of ongoing employment, failed to sell a single rubber chicken to
anybody.
Then I fell out of my bedroom window whilst naked. I had
been to the pub over the road, commiserating my poor fortune, and returned
quite late. I could no longer afford my usual kebab so made do with a soft Rich
Tea at the bottom of the biscuit tin and a dead spider in the windowsill. It
was whilst enjoying my arachnid delicacy that I realised that I was too hot and
proceeded to remove my clothes. This temporarily cooled me but I decided I
needed urgent ventilation and clumsily pulled at the sash windows. The window
slid upwards with a sudden jolt and I quickly lost my balance, pitching
slightly backwards. I didn’t wish to fall in that direction as I would most
likely land uncomfortably on the Lego garage I’d spent all afternoon erecting.
To over compensate I forced myself forwards and immediately found myself descending at speed having passed through the window and down the
front of my house.
Somewhere during this freefall I must have rotated slightly so
that I landed uncomfortably on my back into a light patch of gravel. Leaving
behind a strange indentation of my posterior in the gravel I got myself up, the
adrenaline preventing me from realising that I’d broken most of the bones in my
body, and tried to re-enter the house in a conventional manner, via the front
door. This however was not going to be possible. The Yale lock had closed and
locked the door behind me following my return from the pub, and the key to the
door was in my discarded trousers which were now some feet above me.
I flipped open the letter box and looked forlornly inside
for inspiration. It was not forthcoming; the only thing I could see was the
egg, sitting on the kitchen worktop, laughing at me. It was then that I concluded
that the egg must die, shortly before the searing pain engulfed me and I
finally blacked out.
