How I Grew in My Egg

There were two kinds of second graders: the kind who wanted to be in Mrs. Maclure's class because you got to hatch baby chickens, and the kind who didn't, because they were afraid of her. I was the first kind, but I was also afraid.

When the eggs arrived they were already in the incubator. I was worried that the babies had gotten too cold during the drive over, but Mrs. Maclure plugged the incubator in and didn't seem worried, so I tried not to be either. The eggs were different colors. They ranged from white to deep cream to tan. I stood over the incubator without touching it and looked at the eggs. They could have been on display at a grocery store. I walked away from the incubator.

It was hard to do school work the day we got the eggs. I played with my pattern blocks and thought about the babies.

The next morning, the whole class sat on the carpet in the reading corner, surrounded on all sides by the class library, picture books on the shelves behind us, chapter books in front. We watched Mrs. Maclure. We knew she'd talk about the eggs.

"Today," she said, and half the class quieted down. "Today," she said again and some more kids fell silent. "Today," she said a third time, and there was just one boy left, talking to the kid next to him who was saying "Shh." Mrs. Maclure sucked in slightly on the inside of her face like she did when she was mad. "Today," she said a final time," and waited, "I will assign everybody an egg, and that will be your egg to watch and make observations of in your nature journal."

"How do we pick the one that's ours?"

"How do we tell them apart?"

"I want mine to be a girl!"

"Can I have two?"

I was watching Mrs. Maclure. She held up her hand, indicating we were to do the same. "Raise hands, please." She said. "I will assign everyone a letter. Each egg has a letter written on it." Our heads shot to the other side of the room, where the incubator sat on two desks pushed together, against a wall. I wondered who wrote the letters on the eggs. I wondered if whoever did it was scared that the pencil would bust through the shell and stab the baby in the back. What did the eggs feel like in your hand when you picked them up? I had held eggs before. But those were the cold, heavy, vaguely liquid things we kept in the refrigerator, and I knew these didn't feel like that.

Mrs. Maclure had a list in her hand that I hadn't noticed before. "Now I'm going to read your names, and tell you what letter egg is yours," she said. "When I call your name you may go look at your egg and stay until the next person comes to the table. But don't touch the eggs. And please return to the carpet when your turn is over." We watched her as she looked from face to face.

My egg was K. I remember the K better than the egg; it was lower case, and written in pencil. It was not as nice of a K as Mrs. Maclure would write on the board when she was demonstrating letters. It was not even as nice of a K as I would write myself. But I was sure it was much harder to write on an egg than on paper, so I forgave the messy K.

The eggs didn't grow. I hadn't thought they would, but in a way, I must have. They came to us just a little smaller than our own fists, and they stayed that size. But inside, I knew, something was happening.

We were not allowed to touch the eggs. Mrs. Maclure was, but not very often. She touched them to turn them, "Because that's what their mother does," she explained. I can't remember if I wondered about their mother.

I drew the baby in my nature journal. Other kids looked at my drawing and said, "That's so GOOD." I drew the baby many times, with its wings down and with its wings up. I always drew it from the side, but angled slightly towards myself, so you could see both eyes at once. I didn't like profiles because I always drew them too flat.

Mrs. Maclure brought in a book about baby chickens and how they grow. Each page showed a picture of a baby inside the egg. At the beginning it looked like a tiny intestine or piece of brain, like the piles my cats would leave us on the back steps or on the porch. In every picture the tiny organ expanded until it took on the shape of a bird, and eventually filled the shell.

Across the top of a blank page in my nature journal I wrote "How I Grew In My Egg." Then at the bottom of the page I drew a baby chicken, looking up, with its beak pointed straight into the air. Above the baby I drew two straight lines of eggs, all the same size. In each egg I drew a baby, or the beginning of a baby, from piece-of-brain to whole bird.

We knew the babies were going to hatch soon. We kept a check-sheet on the wall in the classroom, and almost all of the boxes were full of checks. One morning in class, Mrs. Maclure told everyone to sit on the carpet. "Today," she said, and waited. I knew it was about the eggs. "Today we are going to get a chance to look at the chicks growing inside the eggs." I had no idea what she meant, but Mrs. Maclure explained that we would look inside the egg with a flashlight, so we could see it growing.

That afternoon, a woman I had never seen before arrived in the classroom. Mrs. Maclure introduced her as the farmer who owned the chickens where our eggs came from. Mrs. Maclure explained the farmer would take us one at a time into the class bathroom because there were no windows there, turn out all the lights and shine a flashlight on our egg.

"I want to go first!" yelled more than one voice.

Mrs. Maclure sucked on the inside of her face. "We'll go in alphabetical order, based on what letter your egg is."

K was eleventh. Everyone waiting for their turn was supposed to go to one of the tables and work on their journal while we waited. I sat on my knees on my chair and drew in my journal, but I couldn't sit still or concentrate on my drawing.

Then Mrs. Maclure called "K."

I did not get to carry the egg from the incubator to the bathroom myself, which I had fantasized about, but at the same time it was a relief to not have to do it. When I entered the tiny space, it was already dark, lit only from the open door behind me. The farmer was sitting on the toilet, which startled me, but her pants were pulled up. She was holding my egg.

"Just close the door there behind ya." She said. I did. "Now let's just wait for your eyes to adjust a little." We waited. The walls around me and the woman in front of me began to materialize. "Alrighty here," said the farmer. "Let's take a look." She turned on the flashlight. It was the small kind, about the width of fat marker, so the beam of light did not cover the whole egg. She held the egg‹my egg‹between her thumb and fingers, which made me nervous. Then she shined the flashlight on the egg.

"Well this one here," she said after a brief pause, "isn't fertilized. Can you see alright?" I was looking closely at the egg. I could only see a murky emptiness. I couldn't see alright.

"The mama bird made this egg, but the daddy bird didn't help. That's what he does: he fertilizes it. But he never got around to this one. Alright?"

I nodded.

"You can send the next person in." She did not hand me my egg. I turned, opened the door, and left into the overly-bright classroom. It hurt my eyes.

"What did yours look like?" someone asked me, excited.

I looked at her. "Mine was dead," I said.

"Yours was dead?" she shrieked. "Dead?"

"Yeah," I said. "Dead."

"Emma's chick is dead!" she called out to no one specifically. It didn't take long for everyone to know.

"Yeah," I just kept repeating when asked. "Dead."

After the chicks were born, we only knew whose was whose for a very short time, and even then we were never sure. After that they blurred together, save one who was the biggest and belonged to a boy named Jared, who had bright red hair. Jared's chick would run through the incubated case and trample the other, smaller babies. But beyond that, the chicks belonged to everyone.

My mom framed "How I Grew In My Egg" and hung it in the study in our house. I didn't mind much, even though it was a reminder: nothing grew in my egg.

"It didn't die," my mom explained to me, when I told her what happened. "It was never alive." My mom pointed to the final few eggs I'd drawn, where the chick filled the entire shell. "If the chick died it would have grown like this and then never been born." She said this gently but it didn't help. I wasn't afraid of a dead chick inside the egg. Things died; my neighbor's dog did. It wasn't that. More, I was afraid of the emptiness. I was afraid of the belief I'd put into that egg, how sure I'd been that it was full of something living. I had felt a presence in that egg. I was sure I did. "The daddy never got around to this one," the farmer had told me, like it was that simple. And it was.

- Emma Tobin