Egg
According to the judge, what I did was an abomination that will echo throughout history. Because of my silence in court, the media couldn’t anchor to a stance. Sometimes I was a calculated monster of a man. Other times I was a genius who had made an astute commentary on our doomed planet. But I was something far less grand. Simply fed up and desperate, noticing the cabinet was unlocked.
The Sycamore Gap guys got four years. The women who threw soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers got two years for damaging the frame. A tourist who carved his initials into the Colosseum with his front door key got a fine but no jail time. Their crimes took place at UNESCO sites and world-famous galleries. I got sentenced to seven years, and my crime took place at the Leeds Discovery Centre, where you can do Introduction to Knitting classes, and the carpark is free of charge.
I told my mother during one of her visits, the same nailed-down table dividing us, that the justice system had made an example out of me, that even though I hadn’t personally depleted the number of Siberian tigers and mountain gorillas, I was the scapegoat. Mum sighed and said I was tone deaf, which felt ironic considering I’m a musician. Was a musician. Sort of. I wasn’t a musician like a nurse is a nurse. I’d played at open mic nights and in pubs for cash in hand, before that day with the egg.
It was bigger than my head, about the size of a rugby ball, sat in a glass cabinet. In it had once been the embryo of an elephant bird, a species that had died out about a thousand years ago. I’d expected elephant birds to resemble elephants. Thick legs or flappy ears or a trunk-like beak, but the illustrations in the newspapers showed that they were like large, chunky ostriches with a dinosaur-like quality.
Ash had said we should go to the Leeds Discovery Centre because it was raining, and free, and we didn’t want to think about work the next day, and if we saw things that weren’t a part of Leeds then we might feel like we weren’t a part of Leeds too. But really, by focusing on something else, we could escape what we knew was looming on the horizon: we were going to split up.
I met Ash in a band at school, the kind that meets in the music room at break times to cover Oasis, and has vitriolic rows over creative differences, such as who would sing Noel’s parts and who would sing Liam’s. I played guitar, Ash played drums. One lunchtime, before our bandmates arrived, amongst the mish mash of old music stands and grubby cymbals, I strummed and sang Songbird for Ash, trying to mimic Liam’s rasp, hoping she knew I was singing about her. When I finished, she smiled at me, and it was like I was soaring above clouds.
Then it was first kiss, lost virginity, shared secrets, promises of undying love, poor exam results, crappy retail jobs and renting a flat together above a kebab shop before you could say Gallagher. Our home was too small for drumkits, and our bank accounts too sparse for new guitar strings. Soon, the pigeons on our windowsill seemed more in love as they flapped on top of each other before nesting and snuggling on top of their young.
I stared at the large egg long before noticing the cabinet was open, grateful that I never had to give birth to anything, longing for Ash to come stand next to me, but she was enamored with a stuffed chimpanzee, its mouth open like it was about to speak. Chimps were another population that were really suffering, the media monitoring their numbers falling like watching grains trickle through an hourglass. I’d stopped opening TikTok because I couldn’t stand to see more images of their dark, frail forms hunched amongst felled trees. The information on the egg cabinet said that elephant birds had died out because of hunting and deforestation, and I wondered how we were still getting things so wrong a century later. And even though I wasn’t out there with a chainsaw or a gun, I knew in an inadvertent way I was part of the problem because that’s what I’d been told since childhood, and the guilt was becoming too heavy for me.
When Ash eventually wandered away from the chimp, I held her hand, counting the seconds. One, two, three, four, five. Then she let go.
‘Do you think there’s anything inside it?’ she asked, looking at the egg.
I shrugged. ‘Just a lump of dry stuff now, I guess.’
She looked more closely at it. ‘I wonder whether it’s thick. You know, hard to break.’
Its shell was creamy and mottled, like a planet through a telescope, the idea of it cracking like sending catastrophic chasms and crevasses across an entire magnificent existence. It was exquisite.
She smiled at me, and the glee on her face took me back to Songbird in the music room.
‘Can you imagine it smashing?’ she said. ‘The sound it would make?’ She put a hand on my arm, her grip earnest. Then we heard a tink noise, the glass door lightly rebounding from her elbow knocking it.
The cabinet was open.
She looked around the empty room before opening the cabinet and lifting out the egg, holding it in front of her like a lit birthday cake. When she offered it to me and I took it, she squirmed and giggled. It was lighter than I thought it would be. She hadn’t asked me to break it, but I was so sure she wanted me to. And what the hell did it matter breaking a relic from the natural world if nature was doomed.
When I let go of it, it felt like watching that red balloon of anger we’re taught to picture floating away. But the sound was like a child jerking an unrosined bow across flat strings.
The mess was grimy, and the stench rang of death. Ash shook her head and pressed her hands to her mouth. When the security guard approached, raising his voice, I panicked and started talking about how it was living creatures we needed to focus on instead of old eggs. What I’d done had to mean something as Ash backed away from me.
She never visited me in prison. When she took my things to my parents’ house, she mentioned she was going travelling. I haven’t googled her or searched for her on social media. I might still be like the version of myself from above the kebab shop, or she might still be the Ash who stepped away from me at the Discovery Centre. I want us to be what we were in the music room, so maybe that’s why I’m walking to our old school, hoping to relive old times now that I’ve finished my stint in prison. The school is permanently closed now, apparently due to falling intake and financial strife: another population with problems, but I visit anyway.
I slip through wrecked gates and smashed locks, no doubt broken by the types who wouldn’t go to school when it was open. The place feels like a dream: it’s the same but it’s not. Lockers hanging open, graffiti on the walls, dust dulling the sound of my footsteps. As I approach the music room door, I wonder if maybe I can remember the chords to, well, anything.
When I go in there’s a polyphony of beating wings, piano keys, staccato strings, and cymbals. About a dozen pigeons start fluttering about the beams of sunlight from the windows. Others cock their heads from nests in the bell of a tuba, on top of a keyboard, in a bass drum. A single pale egg has rolled away from the drum, smaller than a golf ball. I pick it up, pigeons still flying. In my palm I can feel its fragility and potential. It’s still warm, so it must’ve rolled out recently, possibly when I entered the room and startled the bird. Gently, slowly, I reach out to put the egg back in the nest, unsure how I’m going to do it. The pigeon shifts nervously, and I manage to return it’s egg without being pecked.
Lying flat on the floor among downy feathers is a guitar with five strings, the high E missing, and I’m sure it’s the one I used to play, the shade of varnished wood chocolaty and familiar. Muscle memory in my fingers find chords, and while I don’t play a particular song, the pigeons start to settle. I watch the mothers and fathers spreading themselves and their warmth over their unborn babies, so much more beautiful than a song, a painting, or anything man could build.
Rebecca Klassen is fiction editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net 2025 nominee from Gloucestershire, England. She has won the London Independent Story Prize and has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Alpine Fellowship, and Laurie Lee Prize. Her stories have featured in Fictive Dream, Mslexia, Flash Frontier, Scribeworth, New Flash Fiction Review, and on BBC radio.