All night, I dreamed of eggs and chicks. Brown eggs in a deep metal basin, a dish towel placed above and another below the eggs, forming an unhatched egg sandwich. The towels were clean initially, but in the basin, cradling eggs, they became a little dirty, started to smell. When the eggs hatched, only one chick lived, its feathers damp from a birth I thought would have been less messy. How wet can the inside of a shell be? Pretty wet, it turns out, at least outside the waking world.
It fluttered and shivered in my right palm, like a heartbeat with sticky feet and claws and a beak that nips. I did not want her seeing the landscape of death below, her less fortunate siblings and cousins laying lifeless in the same basin she had just emerged healthily from, all reeking of ammonia. Even asleep, I worry about things like that, other people’s agony and grief, baby chickens included. My insular agonies are nonsensical, set beside the grief of dream-phantasm poultry. Every living being she could have known, dead.
I wrapped her heartbeat body up in paper towels, three, and cleaned the damp from her, the spray of eggshell on the crown of her fragile head, the tears splashed on her heaving little belly, my tears, making her salty as well as wet. She kept close to me. With all her might, she chirped, not a lot of might either, a teaspoonful of might. She must have assumed I was something important to her, mother or a fleshy supreme being to be worshipped. I am neither, is what I told the chick. Nothing must worship me, or expect miracles from my magicless hands, not even fictitious chicks.
She did a poo in her paper towel swaddle and this really upset her, and why wouldn’t it? Who wants to steep in their own filth? Pigs, maybe. But she was no pig. I had only just ripped three new sheets free from the spool of paper towels when the dream started to dissolve, everything going cottony in my mind, the chick and its shit encrusted behind, the bowl of dead newborn birds, the smell of birth and of decay. Poof. And once again, I was awake, in bed with my still slumbering spouse and the youngest of our children. I looked over at them, tucked together in a love cocoon, mother and child, both warmer than a lit furnace it felt like, and the radiating heat chased stiffness out of me. My jaw, my fists, my toes relaxed, the tension inside my navel slackened. I wept quietly, soaking my pillowcase and one corner of my wife’s in snot and tears.
♤
What do you suppose it all means? My wife doesn’t know how to answer this, itches a bug bite going red on her bare calf with the foot of her other leg. I’m not sure, she says. We are outside in our swimsuits, drinking warm bottled beer and eating pepitas from a saucer, flinging the rotten ones out of sight. For the squirrels, we chant, when this rotten pepita or that is thrown, knowing we do not have any squirrels in our neck of the woods. It is just something to say while we litter. But is it littering? Not quite. The seeds will decompose.
Some beer spills out of the bottles, out of our mouths as we chat away and throw seeds. I recognize our overindulgence for what it is, decide not to do any more indulging after this bottle. Another bottle, a seventh, will catapult me into dangerous territory, self-loathing, convoluted passion that will coagulate heavily in me, unattended to. My wife cannot make love under alcohol’s slushy influence. It brings to mind her younger days of recklessness, the men before me, the sex that preceded ours, unforgettably rancid.
Overhead, the sun swells, and we feel every inch of its swell on our exposed skin, tacky from the sunblock we smeared on meticulously before heading outdoors. Ear tips, noses, shoulders, the tops of her breasts. There is no cloud cover today. I like seeing all the blue and then the blazing dot of yellowish white. I do not enjoy the feel of it, this invisible, robust heat, yet it must be felt. This is how to get the most of the season, pain and sunstroke be damned.
Our two-story house looms behind, its whitewashed walls attracting all manner of bugs. The crawling and creeping and flying kinds. And I see hand stains, child-sized palm prints by the door, some green from the grass our children must have rolled in before groping the poor house, ruining a recent paint job that cost more than I’d initially expected. I will have to re-stain every surface of it when summer gives way to autumn in two months. Thinking of all the work that must be done exhausts me in advance, the ladder I will climb alone, my fear of heights, the buckets of whitewash I must purchase on one deflating salary, mine.
My wife is sitting on one of our rattan patio chairs. Dragged it out from the shelter of the covered front steps to the weed infested lawn. I did not help her. She doesn’t like to be helped in that way. I’m sitting beside her, on grass that itches, but the itching reminds me I’m awake, and also that I must do something about this mess of a lawn. Later, I will call someone to trim it and pull up the weeds. Tomorrow.
Did you see anything else in the dream?
Just the chicks and the bowl and the towels. Oh, my hands too.
You must close your mind to all that noise, she says. You’re picking up frequencies that are poisonous. Really, dead chicks? she makes a retching sound, a theatrical one, wiggles her narrow shoulders in disgust.
Yes, you are right.
Did the chick have dark or light feathers?
I think about it. Dark.
Ah.
We sip more beer, slowly, savoring the taste of fermented barley, and throw more seeds. I ruminate on my troubling dream, and she joins in, the two of us trying to make heads or tails of it. The bird shitting frightened me, I say honestly, the sheer volume of fecal matter surging out of a creature so small simultaneously absurd and horrific. She agrees that it must have been upsetting to witness. The thought of ruptured eggshells and dead baby chickens bothers her more than it does me, and when she is bothered, nicotine is the only thing that can smooth out her tangled-up nerves. She pulls a thin cigarette from the waistband of her bikini bottoms, pushes it between her lips. Sighs. Where that cigarette was tucked is a slender, vertical tan line, a stark absence of darker pigment on the skin covering her right hip bone. I will kiss that spot after we are done drinking and eating tasteless seeds, if she is game.
Have you got a lighter, nkem? she asks, rubbing the concave spot between my shoulders with a hand that smells like sunblock and perspiration. I did not bring one out with me. And I don’t want her to stop with the rubbing, the gentle circular motions, untangling my knot of nerves. Who needs nicotine when a hand this glorious exists? It is soothing, feeling her hand on my inflamed peeling skin, although that hand is sweating and the skin, like I’ve said, is rather inflamed. I must have missed a spot. She knows there is no lighter nearby, and I offer reluctantly to find one. In a minute, she says. Let’s sit for a bit. Isn’t this nice? I nod, like an overeager, loyal pup, and she giggles. Forget the dead chickens. Think of how pleasant our summer will be. Will it? I rest my head on her knee, and she continues to rub that spot, coos gently. How pleasant will it be, I wonder, on a deflating income? My stomach twists and again, I battle tears. I cannot unsee the dead chickens in the metal basin, their stink, sweet and foul remains in my mind.
Inside the house that needs superficial attention come autumn, repainting etcetera, I hear our three children, and they are screeching, playing an unseen game. My wife encourages independent play, general mayhem. It is healthy, she says, when I worry about the commotion offending our nearest neighbors. We want to raise healthy children, so they must let out all the ruckus in their bodies, no? I assume she is correct. She has five siblings, and I have none.
The eldest of our children has expensive tastes, wants to go scuba diving this summer, in Mykonos, she tells us, her mother and I, and after that, demands we visit a fishery. She is intrigued by fish, currently, and sustainable farming. It is all the mermaid literature she has been consuming lately, and that book of Hellenic folk tales she cannot seem to put down, I think, literature I myself purchased, so I cannot hold this intrigue against her, can I? When I was twelve, I vacationed modestly, cycling on rented bikes by the seaside with my parents, but my child belongs to a different tribe. Her worldview is larger than mine was, and her mother’s. In August, I will take her to the local aquarium, a small concession. My deflated income will not stretch far enough to cover the expenses of scuba diving, at home or abroad.
The middle child, our son, is an epicure. Seven years old, but in that seven-year-old mouth is the palate of an elitist gastronome. When I grow up, Papa, I will attend the same school Marcus Samuelsson trained at, my son says, daily it seems like. But he doesn’t use the word school, no. Institution is the word he uses. He is very serious about this, has pinned up news clippings of his culinary heroes to his bedroom’s otherwise plain walls. We must fan these flames, my wife says, and she isn’t wrong, is she? The flames must be fanned, and so a savings account has been opened, to stockpile a percentage of my deflating earnings, monthly.
I see it impresses my wife, the prospect of his glamorous future, our little boy chopping foraged root vegetables and mushrooms under the watchful eyes of Swedish teachers, saturating fragrant herbs in clear broth, pickling aquatic creatures. A taste architect. She buys him cookbooks when she is out and about, shopping for the family in artisanal grocery stores, hunts down magazines with delightful photographs of meals he simply must taste one day. The receipts she leaves crumpled in her car’s cup holder burn infinitesimal holes in my grey matter.
Our youngest is too little to have her older siblings' particular tastes. She stacks soft blocks, knocks them over, chews her plump fingers with tiny teeth. She is only two, primarily interested in hyperactive cartoon creatures and the milk her mother readily provides, but one day she will develop her own particular tastes. Tennis, maybe, or calligraphy. Rhythmic gymnastics. Already, she tumbles from her crib to the carpeted floor beneath it fearlessly, her chubby limbs seemingly shatterproof, so thick are they, like bread rolls, glacé and springy and golden brown. She even smells like pastries, something freshly baked. Will I deny her the pleasures this strange, expensive world has to offer? Will she be starved of decadence that she cannot appreciate as of yet? What kind of father will that make me? And assuming I go that route, depriving her of these exorbitant thrills, depriving the three of them, in a decade or so, will they lay my transgressions at the feet of some underpaid psychotherapist? We are still close, thick as thieves, but how conditional is this closeness? I fear it is more conditional than I would like.
Again, I skim through my nightmare: the lone survivor squirming in one of my hands, the bowl of dead birds, and I start to remember the state of their breathless bodies, feathers matted, a slime-like substance coating every chick, their heads, the tips of their opposable toes dripping blood, mucous, filth. It is difficult to scrub this memory from my mind. The harder I try to erase it, the more vivid it becomes, the colors strengthen, the smells and textures too. I don’t tell my wife what I now remember. She will wilt under the weight of my night terrors, her lungs at risk of nicotine poisoning should I reveal additional details. I cannot burden her this way, nor can I risk poisoning another person’s dreams, a person I love perhaps as much as I enjoy breathing, perhaps more. And it won’t end there, in her dreams. The unpleasantness will infect our last born, not yet weaned, dependent on the precious flow of breast milk she drinks directly from her mother. My nightmare will break down the nutrients in my wife’s milk, flooding something that was good with foulness, and that foulness will seep into our child through her mouth, blackening her tonsils and her spongy gums.
Do you still need that lighter? I kiss the boniest part of my wife’s knee, and she holds me in place, pressing down on the back of my close shaven head with a hand splayed open, with two hands. Again, I kiss that knee, tasting salt and sunblock, a hint of black soap from her bath earlier today, the bath we’d taken together, crammed into our bathtub, her above and me below, hot water cooking off the dead skin cells on our bodies, turning us into spousal soup. After my night terrors, I like to bathe with her, and she coddles me, as if I, not the last born, am the helpless infant, tangles her lanky arms and legs around my own, squeezes like a predatory snake until our bath water sloshes over, puddles on the tiles, and the nightmare fades temporarily, scabs over.
You’re a godsend, she says now, and I hear the smile in her voice. She releases her hold on me, I break free, still kneeling. I look up at her, and she is fiercer than the sun still swelling miles and miles above our bodies, above our house’s grass-stained exoskeleton. I stand, and walk towards the half open front door, towards the sound of our gregarious children playing like bloodthirsty ruffians. When I return, lighter in tow, we will drink the last dregs of our beers, she will smoke her cigarette unconvincingly, just half, tapping the ashes on our now empty pepita saucer and while she smokes, while the nicotine works its wonders, sawing at the knots I have tied in her nerves, I will become better acquainted with her tan lines, my mouth, my fingers. As she comes, in my mouth or my hands, breath hitching in her chest, all ten toes gripping the unkempt grass below us, the nightmare will become colorless and odorless. We will reunite with our children, the trio puncturing alarming gaps in my income, deflating our stockpile of impermanent wealth. My wife, sun drowsy, will feed the lastborn and I will read aloud to the older two, doing my part, staving off the castigation that is to come in a decade or so, my sins laid bare at the feet of some state-funded psychotherapist.
♤
June 21, 2025
