The Egg, Part 2

Image is AI generated. Story is 100% human.

May 31, 2036

1:45 pm

I just got back from Belle Isle. I know I said I was giving up the diary because I figured keeping a diary was more like something a kid would do, and I made up my mind I was done being a kid when I turned 15. Maybe the law says otherwise, but I guess I felt like the law can’t always be one size fits all. Because people are different, you know? You say one thing to one person, and maybe they interpret what you said one kind of way. But then you say that same thing to another person and…

Stop drifting.

Drifting is what I do when I try to keep myself from getting to the point when the point isn’t a comfortable place to land. Drifting is what I do to protect myself from facing the reality of things that I’d rather not accept. Sometimes it’s a good thing; keeps me from just buckling under to things that shouldn’t be a certain way even if they are. But most times, if I’m being honest with myself, it’s just ducking and hiding. Which can be OK for a kid, so I forgive myself.

I’m not a kid anymore.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

1 Corinthians 13:11

That’s that bible verse my father used to quote to me whenever he thought I was spending too much time with my science fiction and fantasy books, imagining other worlds and weird beings not like us. He’d always tell me to come back down to Earth so I could learn more about actual human beings and real life.

“You need to spend more time learning about what is, not what ain’t,” is what he’d say.

Well, Dad, today is the day when what is and what ain’t changed forever. I only wish you could have lived to see it.

I’m writing this, my first diary entry in over a decade, because I just saw something that I could not have seen. Except that everybody else on Belle Isle saw the same thing at the same time. That means a whole bunch of people across the river in Canada saw it too, because it appeared right there above the Detroit River; something that looked like a huge egg made out of mirrors.

I have my favorite spot on Belle Isle, like most Detroiters who visit a lot. It’s an open grassy space about halfway up the drive, near a large tree. What I do is park nearby, grab my folding chair, and then go out and sit facing the river. Sometimes I bring a book, but usually I just sit there in peace, no phone, all by myself. Which is what I was doing today when I saw it happen. It looked at first like the air was splitting open, one long gash as tall as a tower, but there was no sound. Then, real slow, the egg began to force itself through like something being born.

I know. It doesn’t make sense unless you were there. But it’s the only way I know to describe it. Once it was all the way through, the opening sealed itself closed, leaving the mirror egg hovering above the water.

Then that thing with the birds happened.