Stone Egg Thing

Halfway through dinner he threw up. His microwaved macaroni wasn’t digested, just half-chewed and swimming in orange bile. In amidst the mess was a stone.

It was oval-shaped and grey. When he went to the doctor the next day, they told him it was nothing — similar to a cat throwing up a hairball. It was his food congesting together and ejecting itself. He should throw it away.

He didn’t want to throw it away. He tried, several times, but picked it back out of the bin. It was dry now, and he washed it clean. It was pockmarked and cratered. It was heavy.

It sat on his kitchen table for a month. Every day after he got home from work he checked on it like a mother hen. He lived alone, and he was meticulous in his cleaning. He had always been too strange for other people, but he stopped making the effort to go to after-work drinks or online dates. He didn’t want them to see the egg. He didn’t know how he knew it was an egg, he just knew. He also knew nobody would understand and they would be disgusted by it, or they would accidentally drop it. He had never wanted children, nor had he ever had the urge to look after a pet. But he felt it now. The need to make sure of its safety was dragging on his mind. He thought of names for it, but never settled on anything.

One day when he got home from work it had a crack in it. He panicked, wondering whether someone had broken into his house and dropped it. But when he looked closer, he realised it was hatching. He ripped toilet paper into a cardboard box to cushion it. He had a soft lamp shining on it so it was warm. It took twelve hours to hatch.

It was tiny and naked and sat there crying. He put a droplet of warmed milk on the tip of his finger and it suckled the milk, coughing and burping. Then it went to sleep in the cardboard box. With tweezers he pulled all the sharp eggshell pieces out from around it. He made another box, this time filled with cotton wool. The egg had been filled with a yellowish liquid and the original bed was soaked.

In the middle of the night it cried out to him. It seemed to suckle at his finger, wanting more to drink. He chose something in his fridge, hoping it would be satisfied.

Choose your ending:

(a) Iced Coffee
(b) Orange Juice
(c) Milk
(a) Iced Coffee

The next morning he woke up and checked the box. His little egg child was crawling around, more like an adult than a baby, with long hairy legs. It looked uncannily like him, in miniature. It looked happy.

He transferred it to the new box and threw away the dirty old one. It looked bored, so on his way home from work he stopped by a toy store and bought some doll’s house furniture. He bought a tiny suit which looked like it would fit. It put it on and sat on a tiny plastic chair. He filled its tiny cup with water and its bowl with mac and cheese. They ate together. It looked happy.

After a couple of weeks like this it started to look unhappy. It stopped wanting coffee and food altogether and only drank a little bit of water. It started lying in bed all day, not wanting to get up. It looked very sick.

He gave it small amounts of Panadol crushed from a pill but it still looked sick. It was wasting away from not eating. He took it to the hospital and they rushed it away, telling him to wait in the reception area. A few hours later they told him it was fine now, just resting. They told him to come back tomorrow.

The next day he visited straight from work. They led him to the area where newborn babies were kept in cots. It was lying in the middle, hooked up to a tiny drip. It looked peaceful.

Over the next week he came back every day. Some days it was awake, some not. It smiled at him, but it didn’t look like a real smile. It was the smile his co-workers had when he made a joke. He couldn’t understand why it wasn’t happy to see him.

Then it was gone. He asked the hospital staff and they said it had checked itself out and gone home with a friend. He didn’t know it had any other friends. They didn’t know where it had gone. His house seemed depressingly empty. He’d kept a few of the larger eggshell pieces and they sat on his shelf, painfully reminding him of his loss. He started going out every night, with people from work or just alone. He got wasted and picked fights. He was on the verge of being fired from his job, mostly for turning up drunk. And every night he came home hoping it would be there. There was nothing, not even a note.

One day he saw it out at the supermarket, buying groceries. It was sitting on the shoulder of a good-looking man in a suit. It didn’t look over or acknowledge him. They left together and he stood alone, with a trolley full of instant macaroni packets.

(b) Orange Juice

It had grown up overnight. Not in size — it was still tiny, but it had the body of an adult now; tiny breasts, and an even tinier tuft of pubic hair. He bought it a doll’s dress, and he worshipped it.

For a year, it lived on two percent orange juice and tiny flakes of cereal. He wasn’t an imaginative man and couldn’t cook anything worth eating. It refused his microwave meals and anything too processed. He taught it how to read, though it was mute. It pointed to which books it wanted to read, and he left them open. It was able to turn the huge pages itself, lifting and straining. When he got home from work each night, he would find it lost in reading, or asleep on the page. Sometimes, when he woke up in the middle of the night for the toilet, it would be reading with a lamp on in the living room. It was quite nocturnal, and they only had a few overlapping hours of the day when they were awake together.

He obsessed over it while he was at work. He boasted to all his colleagues about his beautiful girlfriend. When he was at home he did nothing but stare at it and talk to it, rubbing its tiny back with his little finger. It listened to him, but sometimes when he was talking about himself he thought it looked bored. When he told it about the world outside it paid close attention, asking detailed questions about the way things worked.

He told it about how humans live and what humans do. He said that it was his wife. One night, he took it into his room and stripped down, telling it that this is what married people do. It looked at his naked body with a cold, scientific interest. It was too small to do anything but hug his penis like a tree trunk and slide its whole body up and down. When he came, he made sure it wasn’t near it so it wouldn’t drown. He told it he loved it and it looked confused.

One day it brought a website to his attention — a beginner’s guide to sign language. It had already learned how to sign and wanted him to learn too. He was dubious, wondering why it was necessary. He feared change, and had a worrying feeling in the back of his mind. But he learned the basics and they could communicate, if crudely on his part. It seemed excited to finally speak to him. Their conversation went:

‘Finally, my love, we can talk.’

‘Yes father.’

‘No. No, I am not your father. I am your husband.’

‘But you gave birth to me. That is a father.’

He was horrified and lay in bed thinking about it all night. Technically he supposed he was its father, but it wasn’t even a real… It had never been a child. He didn’t know what it was. He’d never thought of it like that. He was disgusted. The next day he spoke to it again.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello father.’

‘I don’t want you to call me father. The things we do, the way we act is not like father and child. We act like spouses. Spouses are not related.’

‘You told me we were married so I thought they could be the same thing.’

‘No, they are never the same thing. That is wrong.’

‘Why don’t we get divorced then?’

‘Because we enjoy being married.’

‘I do not enjoy being married.’

He didn’t sign anything after that. It didn’t look in the least sad about what it had just said. When he didn’t speak for a while, it went back to reading a book.

He taught it to fend for itself in the world and soon it left home. After a while it stopped visiting. He saw it on TV, acting in dramas, and then at an awards show where it won an award. In its acceptance speech, in sign language, it thanked many people he’d never heard of. Lastly, it thanked him for teaching it how to read.

(c) Milk

When he checked the box the next morning, it looked nothing like anything he’d ever seen. It was small, and wet, with four long arm-like things. He gave it more milk, and it gurgled happily. It wouldn’t eat anything solid but didn’t seem to require it either. A week later, it had grown to double its size. It liked to be wet, and so he kept it in the sink in a shallow pool of water. Every night when he came home the water had been absorbed, and he kept refilling it. He watched movies with it in a small tub next to him. It stared intently at the TV and made warbling noises when there were flashes of light.

He was happier than he’d ever been. He no longer craved the type of interaction he could never have with humans. He talked to it, sharing his worries and ideas. It listened, and he knew it was really listening, though it only warbled back. He was content at work and looked forward to each night when he could come home and tell it about everything he’d seen or thought of. When they watched tv, he’d taken to putting his feet in the tub, where it would softly grip his toes.

One night, he awoke to it on his bed, warbling a low warble and rubbing his crotch. He was alarmed to realise he had an erection. He switched on the bedside lamp and told it gently that he didn’t want that, and put it back in its sink. He could tell by its noises and floppy movements that it was sad.

Over the next few weeks it tried to do it again. A couple of times he woke up to it climbing on him, trying to arouse him, and he always gave it a pat before placing it back in the sink. He didn’t want it to think he hated it. Once, while they watched a movie together, it climbed his leg and reached under his shorts. This time, he pretended not to notice while it rubbed its soft arms against his penis. Afterwards, he felt so ashamed of himself that he apologised profusely to it before lying in bed, unable to sleep. He heard it creep into his room, and it climbed into the crook of his neck, where it vibrated pleasantly.

His mother was always sad that he’d never married.

Rebecca Nosiara is a fiction writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. She founded Moss Piglet Journal, a zine anthology of experimental science-fiction, and is currently interning for The Music Magazine, where she writes album reviews and researches creepypastas (amongst other things). When she’s not working, she’s attempting to write her first YA novel and playing in garage bands. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccanosiara