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Eggs

Melissa Zamora

__________

Fluorescents hum. The dairy case throws damp cold from its open mouth. It settles in the hollow under her throat. List in hand, columns penciled in her handwriting, every category checked but this one.

Same categories. Different week.

She is at the eggs.

Large is easy. Brown or white is not.

Brown on the top shelf. Two dollars more. A pale green band across each label. Pale green is the note her spoon made stirring honey into yogurt. Words cross the green but she does not read them. She already knows. Cage-free. Open pasture. Dry golden straw.

The cardboard is warmer than the case around it. Her finger traces the edge of the lid and the warmth travels up her wrist, up the inside of her arm, across her shoulder. The hair on her forearms lifts. Her nipples tighten under the thin cotton of her shirt.

Her hand stops mid-stroke.

Saliva pools under her tongue. Hot and fast.

Brown eggs are gross. Not her sentence. His. Already hers.

Her brow furrows.

The brown carton goes back. She lines it up flush. Steps to her left.

White cartons are stacked at chest level. Bleach. Styrofoam. The chemical sweetness of cold. The foam is dry against her fingers. A different cold. Dead-cold, not damp.

She lifts a white carton. Opens it.

A hairline crack along the top of the sixth egg. Her head moves once. The carton closes. Sets it back.

The next one. Two cracks, both small, on adjacent eggs in the second row. Her teeth find the inside of her cheek. The carton closes. Sets it back.

The compressor clicks on. The cold deepens. Her fingers slow, stiff. She does not switch hands.

The next carton has a smudge of yolk on one shell. She sets it back

Another. Twelve white shells, smooth, unstamped, unbroken. She closes it and places it in the cart. Her shoulders drop

She does not look at the brown as she pushes the cart away.

__________

Melissa Zamora is a writer in New Orleans. “Eggs” is drawn from Let’s Play House, a memoir-in-essays about instruction, desire, and the households a woman is taught to keep. Her work attends to the body’s knowledge and the machinery of domestic life.

__________

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