Cracked Eggs

by Evan Burkin

Midday light documents each speckle of dust in the storage barn, while the wooden floor mewls with every step. There, there, and there, the wood is warped and pale like a worm’s belly.

My first job is simple: clear out the debris. Against my fingers, the wood complains. Little quills of wood are ready to shed into my skin. I’m gentle as I pick up a broken beam, but still, my middle finger feels a prick.

On the other side, a rusty nail juts out. My mind becomes a production line. I try to recall my last tetanus shot while my OCD assembles a list of infections. Amputation is under consideration as I stare at my skin for a moment, two, three. The tear stays clear, no red line, no blood. The weight of air rushing through my nose and mouth eases the tempo of my heart.

When I ask Christos for gloves, he asks, “Why?”

His face isn’t turned toward me as I explain. He’s looking at the debris. His callused hands, chalked with paint, pick up three beams, which he swivels around for inspection before tucking them against his chest and under his chin. Each movement is swift, careless, as if he’s folding laundry. After he tosses them out, he looks at me. “You’ll go faster with gloves?”

*****

After a train ride from Montenegro to Austria, I was picked up in a black van by Christos. He was a head taller than me and his disappointment greeted me before we even shook hands.

“Evan?” he asked, and I nodded.

His eyes walked over every inch of my body. It wasn’t swift. His head clicked and stopped at a new angle with each passing second. Particular attention was paid to my chest and arms. “Kate said you wanted to try new things. That you wanted to do farmwork. You can lift one hundred pounds?”

“I can.”

He nodded and put out his hand. When we shook, I tightened my fingers against the side of his pinky. It was all I could do to stop his hand from wrapping around mine completely. “From a city, yeah?” he asked, letting my hand go. Before I could answer, his words rivered out. “Parasites all of them. They suck the land dry. What can a city produce but pollution?”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a fan of cities. His voice was kicked gravel. It got everywhere: in my hair, eyes, the neck of my shirt. Because of it, even the silence after chewed on my mind, a pebble in my shoes.  

“Anonymity,” I responded.

His eyes stayed on mine. His lips opened, shut, then opened. “That’s true.”

He led me to the van. The clatter of his words still pricked me, and my chest was hot. Each breath was fanning an anger that made my head churn out ideas of crashing the car or murdering him. I knew it would be better to agree with my OCD, to even outdo it. But it didn’t feel right to sit next to him and enthusiastically invent his death. While my OCD called me a murderer and told me to turn myself in, I kept repeating no. No, I said to grabbing his head and smashing it against the steering wheel. No, I said to taking the pen from my pocket and stabbing his neck.

“That’s the problem, though.” He started the conversation again as the car jumped to life. “Everyone goes to the city to make something of themselves. They think they can chase their dreams and make it big. But they only become a cog. They get assimilated into a machine. I’d know. Spent years in New York City.”

Not even ten minutes into a month-long stay, the thought of the countryside providing some relief was crumbling. The outside world was bleeding into a brown puddle, dark and thick, easy to suffocate in.

Right there were the vineyards, lakes, and curving hilltops that I had wanted to occupy my mind. I tried to focus on them, but all I saw was a scene of stabbing Christos’ eyes and grabbing the wheel to send us off a cliff. Denying that and the rest of my thoughts took priority.

It wasn’t until the minutes turned into an hour that I realized the only way out was to ask for a ride back. Like hell, I would do that. My mind finally settled, knowing that there was nothing I could do. The countryside started to feel beautiful, something to get lost in. Trees were never alone. They were in pockets of hundreds, shaving the sky into different hues of blue. Light spilled into valleys and drew long shadows for herons.

When we arrived at the farm, Christos pointed me toward a camper. “The house for the new family isn’t finished yet, but they come tonight. They’ll need the guest house we said you could use. This is perfect for one person, though.”

*****

Speckled quail eggs and zucchini bread crowd my plate. It’s day three, and I’m at a dining table like a booth with two wooden benches built into the walls of the house. The tabletop, a thick oaken slab, is crusted over with crayon drawings and smudges of old food. At Christos’ suggestion, I’m crammed in with him and his wife Kate to my left and their four children to my right.

The parents chat quietly, heads tilted toward one another as they eat. Every word coming out of the children’s mouths is a scream. All vowels: AAA, EEE, OOO! It triggers thoughts of watching them die horribly. I press my hands against my face and cover my eyes. No no no, I tell myself.

Their voices become thick at moments, followed by the sound of slurping up saliva. Feeling something wet plop on my arm, my hands hide in my pockets, and my eyes glance side to side. The source is easy to spot. Food specks arc from the children’s mouths. I watch their trajectories to make sure nothing gets close to me or my food.

Some grace is given. The oldest, Nicolas, is twelve and the closest one to me on the bench. He would be the most likely to hit me with spittle, but his shoulders are completely turned away. Food chunks fly from his mouth over the other end of the table. His turned back is a marker of my status as an outlier, but I appreciate the little boy’s role as a wall. The children can keep their spit and snot.

While I begin cracking a thumb-sized egg, their youngest, Aeneas, eats with abandon. A shirt drapes from his shoulders to his belly button, and that’s it for clothes. His hands shovel everything into his face. Only a little goes into his mouth. The rest is spread across his cheeks or falls down his shirt. When he gets up, my shoulders and elbows tuck in. My fingers work fast to remove the shell. He waddles on the bench, between his two sisters, and past his older brother, until he’s staring at me, a few inches from my scrunched-in elbows. My breathing fills up my body quickly. My brain guesses that a deep breath might push my elbows into the boy.

“Hey, Aeneas,” I say after swallowing the saliva lining my throat. “Do you want to get to your mom and dad?”

His little white teeth seem sharp as he laughs and pushes himself onto the table. The only sound now is the clatter of my plate as his hands press against it. Everyone else has stopped talking. His penis is three inches from my food, and his knees are kneading my bread. I close my eyes and force out a laugh. The other conversations start again. When I open my eyes, Aeneas is sucking on his mom’s right nipple. My appetite is gone.

I first put the shelled eggs back into the basket and then break the one I opened into smaller bits with a fork when no one is looking. I focus on this task, hoping to make it look like I ate a few, until Christos stands and stretches. “You ready?” At this, the rest of the family is up, and I can make my way out from the table with ease.

Heading outside, the kids trail ten feet behind me in a little group. They ask Christos what work I’ll be doing. He tells them that I’m making concrete. They then ask if they can play with the new family’s son. With all four of them running to the guest house, different pitches of laughter scramble my thoughts.

For the concrete, I shovel broken rocks and sand from a pit into a wheelbarrow. I pour in some dry cement and water and then use the shovel to churn everything into a rough paste. It all gets dumped into a ditch. Christos says it’s to help insulate one side of his work garage. After three hours, the back of my shirt is soaked through, and I’ve opened two blisters on my hands. It hurts when I straighten my back to drink water. 

At one point, I hear the voice of the new family’s son cross the field without any accompaniment. “Ewww!” It sounds like his stomach is in his throat. “What’s he doing?” I look up from my work to see Aeneas squatting in a plot of dirt. A line of shit falls from his ass into the field. Then another.

That same ass, likely chock-full of shit, was over my food. That same ass has spread its cheeks on the benches I sit on.

“Does he not know how to use a potty?” the boy asks the other siblings.

“Nope,” Nicolas says. “But everything he eats is clean. My dad says it can be used as fertilizer.”

Aeneas turns to see the others standing behind: his siblings in one little group and the other family’s son standing alone. He looks at them while his fingers curl around his backside.

Those hands touch doors, touch his parents’ hands, touch everything. The dots connect. I’ve touched that child’s shit. It’s been on my food, my clothes, everything. My OCD has images of shit embedded in everything. The trees around me, the dirt at my feet, and the shovel in my hands are covered in a layer of it.

My mind cracks. In that opening, nothing. There’s not a single thought left in my head. My OCD has nothing left to say.

I can’t get away. Shit is literally everywhere. Everywhere. It’s on me right now. It’s probably under my nails, in my teeth. What can I do? Hide in the camper? Tell them to send me home? No. There’s absolutely nothing to be done. It’s literally everywhere. When I take off my shoes, change clothes, touch my phone, his shit is there.

My whole body feels light, and the desire to laugh bounces in my chest. I watch as the new kid on the farm runs toward his new home, despite the others asking him to race. “I don’t want to step in poop,” he shouts as his feet carry him through the grass.

My laces are covered in dirt, maybe shit, I think as I bend over to untie my shoes. No, I tell myself, they’re definitely covered in shit. They’ve been covered in shit. I let my hands run over my face after I take off my shoes and walk toward the four siblings. “I’m up for a footrace.”

BIO: Evan Burkin (he/him/his) is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where he serves as an assistant poetry editor for the university’s grad-run literary journal, Fourteen Hills. His work has been published or is forthcoming in New American Writing, THRUSH, Allegory, Birdcoat Quarterly, Colorado Review, 7th-Circle Pyrite, and elsewhere.