The Egg, Part 10: This Is How It Ends
Sunday, June 1, 2037
7:18 am
Day 365
My diary from yesterday:
Today is Day 364. Tomorrow, Day 365, is the day we have been told will be The Opening, when the egg will make itself known to us. One full year to the exact day after its appearance.
We haven’t been told what to expect after Day 365. Or whether we should expect anything at all.
Yesterday was when I was sitting with my friend Gerry in Coco’s Coffee shop over there on 3rd in the Cass Corridor (they’re calling it that again), when he got up and practically ran away from me out the door and down the street. All I did was ask him what he thought about the egg, and that’s all it took. He got this look on his face like maybe I had just cursed God, mumbled something I couldn’t understand, and then took off like a rocket. That’s when I noticed everyone else in the place was staring at me, and the first thing I wondered was how in the hell had they even heard what I said. Then I got pissed.
“Don’t y’all have conversations of your own?” I asked loudly. “You got nothing better to do than judge me for what I said to somebody else you don’t even know and got nothing to do with you ain’t none of your business?”
Real quick they all turned back around and picked up wherever they left off, like nothing happened. The pause button got unpaused.
It was after that when I went home and wrote in my diary, same as I had every day since the egg had shown up. Because by the time I got home it occurred to me why everyone was so much on edge, including Gerry, was because we were all on edge. Everyone in the city, and probably over there in Canada too, because the egg obviously wasn’t just affecting us hovering over the Detroit River for the past year. We all knew that the next day was when it was supposed to happen, The Opening, except that none of us knew any more than that. We didn’t know what that meant, only that it was supposed to be something special.
And special ain’t always good.
7:38 a.m.
Faye’s Lament
That day when the birds came for Simona, and Faye had been rooted to the floor, unable to stop them from taking her baby girl, she screamed for two days straight without sleeping. That first moment, once the birds were gone and her feet were released from whatever invisible anchor had locked them into place, she ran to the sliding doors and torn them open, aiming her screams at an uncaring and unusually beautiful blue sky.
No one ever came by to see what Faye was screaming about. But no one complained either. Her neighbors just closed their windows tighter until the disturbance wore itself out. Those walking by kept looking straight ahead, though sometimes they picked up the pace.
This morning, on Day 365, Faye was on Belle Isle sitting cross-legged on the ground staring upward at the egg. She hadn’t spoken a word since the day her scream faded away, leaving her throat raw with a soreness that lived inside her body as both a guest and reminder.
She was there surrounded by hundreds of other speechless women who were also sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring upward with blank, expressionless eyes at the alien craft that had called to them earlier that morning. The message had been clear, even if broken:
“They return now. Better. Motherlove. Motherlove.”
And at the exact time the egg had promised, the egg opened itself like a large white mouth and the children spilled forth into the open air, seeming to float more than a hundred feet above the river as they made their way awkwardly down what must have been a set of stairs that only they could see. Faye was the first to stand as she squinted her almond-colored eyes at the improbable sight unfolding before her on that clear day when nothing was clear at all.
“Simona…” she whispered. And then, a little louder, “I don’t see Simona.”
Moments later, a heavyset woman with waist-length braids the color of storm clouds who had been seated nearby stood up, raised an arm and pointed an accusing finger at the stumbling procession of small beings that continued to exit the mouth of the egg.
“Those…those aren’t…what are those…?”
Soon the fearful chorus of anxious mothers grew in volume and rage as the egg’s deceit made itself plain. One fled the crowd and dove into the river, determined to deliver her rage directly to the alien craft’s front doorstep, but before she made it more than a few yards something yanked and tossed her backward onto the island like a rag doll. Her breath exited her body in a painful wheeze as the crowd went silent. For the longest moment everyone stared at the woman as she struggled to breathe normally again, and to make sense of what had just happened. And then the message came:
We make them better. Return to you better. Want make everything better. Motherlove.
The thing that had been Simona looked up at her mother through liquid black eyes, took Faye’s hand with long pale brown tentacles, and smiled.
“Home,” it said.