Letter from Inside an Egg

You wake up here every day. It has become so familiar that you don’t see it. You don’t see the stains on the floor, the crinkling of the water in the dog bowl when you tap it with your big purple toe, the way that the mould around the ceiling corners merges with the shadows when the sun sinks. You don’t notice the rank stench of cabbage, laced with a lingering hint of uric acid, that is real enough that at first you could feel it on your lips like vinegar.

You wake up here every day without really waking up. Today is different. Today you are awake. You can see, like really see. Your soul recoils in terror from your degraded circumstances. Where the hell is this? What am I doing here? What did I do wrong? I must have done something wrong.

There is a jailer. The face of the jailer is indistinct. In some moments it looks perhaps like your mother, but if you turn your head this way a little it seems to be your father’s face. The jailer is sitting at a rickety table, like the kind they had in school, or like the kind that were in that office where you worked, or anyway, like the sort of desks that judges sit at. It’s hard to be sure.

There are bars, too, although they seem to be shimmering, as though the edges were vibrating. You reach out to touch the bars and your hand passes right through them.

Think fast. What should you do? The jailer is lolling in its chair and you know you can pass right through the bars, what are you waiting for? And look, there is a gun. An actual gun, on the table. A…