Eli Evans

Two Pregnancies

A crabby woman was pregnant and plenty crabby about it.

         “I hate being pregnant!” she kept on saying. “I wish I could just lay an egg and make him (meaning her husband) sit on it!”

         She wished it so hard that eventually her wish came true: when she gave birth, what slid out was not a human baby, as she and her husband and basically everyone else in the room was expecting, but rather a smooth, shiny egg, approximately 1.5 times the size of an ostrich egg.

         “Great,” said the crabby woman, regarding it. “I really did lay a fucking egg, but I still ended up having to be pregnant for nine months. Anyway, at least I won’t have to start breastfeeding immediately.”

         “I would recommend sitting on it,” said the doctor on call. “I don’t know a ton about eggs, but I know you’re meant to sit on them.”

         “That’s all you,” the crabby woman said to her husband.

         Luckily, the man was more than happy to oblige since he led a very sedentary life to begin with, primarily owing to the fact that he had no legs.

         In this way, several weeks passed during which the crabby woman’s husband sat faithfully on the egg she had laid. Although she was quite crabby about it, the crabby woman brought him his meals and cleared away the dishes when he was finished eating, and at night she propped a few extra pillows behind him so he could get a little sleep. The rest of the time she watched movies, played word games on her mobile phone, and attended exercise classes and various other activities mainly involving other women in her age group and general demographic.

         Then, one otherwise unremarkable day, the man felt something moving inside the egg. And then he heard something – peck, peck, peck. And then he heard something else: craaa-aaack!

         “Honey!” he cried. “It’s hatching!”

         But his wife was off at a Pilates class, or else she might have been at one of those places where you drink wine and do something artistic, like make a painting or throw a ceramic pot, in which case she might have been saying, at the very moment the man was calling out to her: “This is turning out like shit, but at least I’m drunk.”

         Meanwhile, bits and pieces of the egg were flying around the room until at last, a hole had been opened up that was big enough for whatever was inside of it to come crawling out – or, in this case, rolling out, for as it turned out, what had hatched was, of all the things in the world it possibly could have been, none other than a 1978 Ford Bronco with tinted windows. I know what you’re probably thinking at this juncture: a 1978 Ford Bronco with tinted windows actually would have been pretty cool if only that man had had some legs with which to drive it. Well, I’ve got some news for you – I was totally bullshitting earlier when I said he didn’t have any legs. In reality, he had a perfectly functional pair of legs, which he proceeded to put to good use driving his newborn Bronco up and down Main Street all day long, pretty much every day, and usually well into the evening, too. In fact, that was how he eventually met Lola, who was brand new in town and just walking out of the local diner, where she’d applied for a job.

“Cool truck,” she observed as the man cruised on by.

         “Why don’t you come check out the inside of it, in that case?” the man replied.

         No one knows for certain what happened behind those tinted windows, being that you can’t see through them; what we do know, however, is that five months later, in the very same hospital in which his crabby ex-wife had laid an egg, the man's new wife, Lola from the diner, gave birth to a beautiful baby goat. 

Eli S. Evans has recent work in Sublunary Review, Maudlin House, Cowboy Jamboree, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Expat, Misery Tourism (RIP), Queen Mob's Teahouse (RIP), and Berfrois (RIP), among others. A small book of small stories, Obscure & Irregular, was published in 2020 with Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera, and a larger book of mostly smaller stories is forthcoming hopefully in time for National No Pants Day on May 1st.