Heartbreak is a Myth

We need to give those hens the right idea, but make em think it’s their idea, then she laughed her humming laugh that made a snort and then she double laughed at the way her own laugh sounded. My grandmother gave me a basket with three glass eggs. I  carefully placed a pale blue egg  in each nest box.

The next morning we put on our mud gear to feed and gather. I sprayed the grain over the dirt while frenzied hens pecked the feed off my boots. After, she tells me to go into the dark coop. She stands in the doorway haloed by daylight.  My hand is small. I am small. I push my arm up to the elbow into the dark scratchy nest. I feel a cool orb but no other shape. I pat the moon curve of straw where the hen’s weight has made a circle indentation.

My blind fingers read the straw and grit. No egg, I call out loud, but the old woman says: go back, a bit further in.Her voice, not a whisper, is quiet and true. How she always knows who has an egg.

Ruby or Mavis, usually might, as they are younger hens, but this day its Wendy. She’s the old one that came from someone who didn’t want her anymore. We named her Wendy for Peter Pan so she would feel younger. That’s what the old woman said when she showed me her nest.

My hand closed around a perfect oval. It is neither warm nor cool, alive nor inert. It has no need to qualify its existence or well-known purpose. This memory— the feeling of a found egg, especially after lost hope is the reassurance didn’t know I needed till it arrived.  I have a dream of this day in which I still loved the world. Heartbreak is a myth, a fragile glass egg inside me  breaks  when I remember her. It hurts and I can never say exactly why.

BIO

Annie Fahy is a clinician in bio-behavioral health who integrates creative practice into healing and resilience-building work with individuals and teams. Trained by Pat Schneider in 1998 in the Amherst Writers & Artists method, she continues to use writing as a tool for reflection, transformation, and embodied change.