Strange Tales About Strange People: Maki and the Egg

Maki found a stone.

            The stone was very round, very white, very speckled, and looked like the egg of a very large bird that lays round, white, speckled eggs.

            But this was not an egg. It was a stone.

            Maki picked up the stone and examined it thoroughly. He stared at it and turned it over and over in his hand. It felt hard and very rough, and a bit of it crumbled into gravel in his hand as he felt at it. He touched one of the speckles and it rubbed off like it was done with paint.

            Maki came to the only logical conclusion: “Whoa, I found an egg!”

            He looked all around for nearby nests. He went down on all fours and crawled around on the ground, looking under rocks and peering into bushes, to see if any had fallen somewhere. When he found none, he climbed every tree that he could find. He found plenty of nests up there: nests with sky blue eggs and nests with smooth grey eggs, nests with dingy brown eggs and nests with tawny yellow eggs. But he did not find any nests with round, white, speckled eggs.

            Maki was disappointed not to have found the egg’s rightful nest, and he knew what he now had to do. He slipped the egg into his jeans pocket, where it would be warm, and clapped his hand over it for extra warmth. He didn’t know the first thing about hatching an egg, but he knew somebody who did: his friend Blaze, who tended a farm and spent each spring hatching chicken and turkey eggs.

            Maki took the round, white speckled egg from his pocket to show it to Blaze. “I need to hatch this egg,” he told her. “Can you tell me how?”

            Blaze gave Maki’s egg a good long look. She took it and turned it over and over in her hand. Finally, she said, “Maki, this is a rock.”

            Maki raised an eyebrow. “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s an egg. It’s some bird’s egg and I need to hatch it.”

            “This is not an egg, Maki,” Blaze said. She handed it to him. “Feel it. It’s too heavy to be an egg, and the texture is way too rough. It looks a bit like an egg, but it’s very obviously a rock.”

            “Blaze,” Maki said, “I know what a rock looks like and I know what an egg looks like. This is not a rock, this is an egg. A bird dropped it and if I don’t hatch it, the chick is going to die. You hatch chicks all the time, Blaze. I know you don’t want a dead chick on your conscience.”

            Blaze shook her head. “My conscience will be clear, because there won’t be any dead chick, because that is not an egg!” 

            “Blaze!” Maki was beginning to grow very impatient with her. “Just tell me how to hatch the freaking egg!”

            “I can’t tell you how to hatch a freaking rock!” Blaze was beginning to grow impatient with Maki as well. “It’s a rock, Maki! It doesn’t hatch! I know what an egg looks like. I’ve worked with eggs all my life. That is a rock. Apparently your head is also a rock, because you just don’t seem to get that!”

            Maki was searching his mind for an insult to throw at Blaze when her youngest sister, Chika, walked by on her way to the barn to milk the cows. “Hi there, Maki!” she said, giving him a big friendly smile that showed all of her teeth. Chika was always smiling. Her smiles were always friendly and always showed all of her pretty white teeth. Seeing Chika smile caused Maki to forget his insult for Blaze. “Hello, Chika,” he said. “Would you like to see the egg I found?”

            Chika jumped up excitably. “You found an egg?”

            “Don’t worry about it, Chika,” Blaze said. “He’s just trying to troll. His ‘egg’ is just an old rock he found on the ground somewhere. It only looks like an egg.”

            “Show me!” Chika cried. “I want to see a rock that looks like an egg!”

            Maki showed Chika the rock. Perhaps Chika would understand that it really was an egg, and not a rock.

            But Chika said, “Oh! That’s a pretty rock! Where did you find it, Maki?”

            Maki sighed in exasperation. “It’s not a rock, Chika,” he told her. “It’s an egg, and your sister won’t tell me how to hatch it because she doesn’t think it’s an egg. And obviously you’re not going to tell me either, because you don’t think it’s an egg either. Whatever, I’ll go look it up on the Internet, then.”

            But Chika said, “Wait. Give the egg to me, and I’ll see if I can hatch it. If it hatches, we’ll know it’s a real egg.”

            Blaze was annoyed. “Feel it, Chika,” she said. “It feels nothing like an egg. It feels like a rock.”

            Chika took the rock from Maki. It really did feel like a rock. “We’ll try it anyway,” she said. “Let me hold on to the rock, and we’ll see if it’s a rock or an egg in a few weeks.”

            “Thank you, Chika!” Maki said, and gratefully patted Chika’s head. “Take really good care of it, all right?”

            “I will!” Chika assured him.

            Maki said goodbye to Blaze and asked her to say hello to her other sister, Ken, for him. Then he walked off, imagining what sort of cool-looking bird would hatch out of his egg.

            Blaze just shook her head.

            Chika set up the egg in an egg incubator.

            Her sister Ken caught her at this. “Chika,” she said, “you know you shouldn’t play with the egg incubator.”

            “I’m not playing with it,” Chika told her. “I’m doing something for Maki. He’s very convinced that this rock is an egg, and I told him if it doesn’t hatch then it must be a rock.”

            But Ken didn’t like this. They might need the egg incubator to tend to a reluctant egg or a sick newborn chick. They couldn’t use it to play with rocks. “You can’t use the egg incubator for that, Chika,” Ken said, removing the rock from the incubator. “You tell Maki to take back his rock.”

            Chika giggled. “All right,” she said. “He was probably just trying to troll anyway.” She asked Ken to drive her to Maki’s to give back the rock.

            “Chika, did you even try to hatch it?”

            Maki was very disappointed in Chika, and in Ken too. He was beginning to feel like the three of them only cared about chickens and turkeys. They didn’t care about the fate of this innocent baby bird that would die without even getting to see the world outside of its egg. Chika giggled. “I’m sorry, Maki, but Ken wouldn’t let me put it in the incubator. She took it out and told me you need to take it back.” 

            Maki put his palm to his forehead. “Do you all even care about any bird that’s not a chicken or a turkey?!”

            “Maki,” Ken said, “you had your fun. It was a funny joke, and you can stop now. Take back your weird looking rock.”

            “I’m not joking!” Maki cried. “It’s not a rock! It’s an egg! An egg! And now whatever is in it is going to die!”

            “You’re insane!” Ken cried. She grabbed the rock and threw it at Maki’s feet…

            …and something went cr-aaaack!

            The three of them jumped. They looked down at Maki’s feet.

            Sitting there with its tiny new wings curled around the tip of Maki’s shoe was a baby phoenix. The gravelly remains of the white, round, speckled rock were sticking to its downy feathers and lying in places near Maki’s feet.

            Phoenixes never die.