The Egg Baby

Lena was late, and unconcerned by this fact until she reached the conference room, laptop and phones stacked precariously in her arms, and saw that every other woman in the office had managed to be on time. The meeting had been so obscurely titled, “Women’s Interest Conversation,” that she’d failed to take it seriously. Edging around the conference table, trying not to step on toes as she approached the last available seat, she became aware of how out of step she was with her colleagues. 

At the head of the table, a man circled his laser pen over a photograph of a woman’s bulbous stomach. “The maternal instinct!” he exclaimed as Lena bent to stack her devices beneath the chair. “Whether you think you feel it, it’s in you.”

Next to Lena sat Mattie: also a Consultant, probably a year behind her on the promotion track, therefore a friendly relationship. “Thought you weren’t going to make it,” Mattie whispered.

Lena shrugged. As the man spoke, she gazed past her colleagues, through the glass wall into the kitchen where Wyatt, her manager-slash-boyfriend was doing calf raises next to the microwave station. He cocked his head, seemed about to laugh.

“Your bodies are designed as perfect vessels,” the man said. A flutter of light drew Lena’s attention back to the screen: he had clicked too far forward and now couldn’t find his way back. “Anyway,” he said, before a baby posed in a cabbage leaf, “childbearing women report, on average, 150% more life satisfaction than non-childbearing women. Any woman delivering a baby in 2046 will receive a $5000 tax credit. So, there is even more life satisfaction for you!”

Lena glanced back to the kitchen. Wyatt was gone, and with him the brief sense of their connection, the thought that after work he would pull her onto his lap, laughing, and whisper the PSA that now preceded all her free yoga videos. “This act is vital, our bodies join in potential, it’s our time to put America back on the top of the world…!” The conference room door squeaked open, a man backed into the room with a trolley, she lost the thought.

“Who even approved this?” she asked Mattie as the trolley squeezed toward the front of the room, women exhaling and edging their chairs closer to the table. The boxes were too small to contain a good lunch, but perhaps a hummus wrap. One of those soggy disappointments, turning to glue in her stomach, that would save her thirty minutes in line at the build-your-own-salad outpost.

“It’s a week off project work, so.”

“What’s a week?” A box appeared on Lena’s lap. She slid her thumb beneath its flap as the presenter clicked his laser pointer to no effect. The box revealed not a wrap but a single hardboiled egg, brown and speckled, a black square attached to its crown.  

Mattie’s hand clamped over Lena’s. “Close it—not yet—”

The sweating man spoke. “You’re now holding your charges for the next week. Equipped with the highest-grade sensors to track your care, and to issue some of the same rewards you will feel as a mother.”

Lena looked around the room, into the kitchen where a deliveryman was stacking boxes of the squeezable, nutritionally complete meals that had recently grown popular with the Associates, seeking anywhere a single gaze that reflected this absurdity back at her. Even Mattie, though, faced the speaker, nodding, her legs crossed primly at the ankle. 

“Pay attention now!” cried the man. “This first moment is important. The imprinting stage—I want you to open your boxes carefully, gaze down and remain with your gaze down until I tell you to look up—now—open!”

Lena raised a tentative hand (had she already erred, by opening her box?) but the speaker was gazing intently at the table, at all the painted nails now slipping beneath tape, under cardboard tabs. For the second time she opened her box. She blinked at the egg, which looked like the type she would buy when she wished to feel virtuous, supportive of old-style agriculture with its dirt-encrusted produce, its organic chemical tinctures. The black cap must be fitted with minute cameras or visual sensors, and so she blinked at the cap rather than the egg. It felt possible or even likely that the presenter would soon break character and laugh at this room of women struggling to be recognized by objects better fit for omeleting than mothering.

“I think,” Mattie whispered, “I’m feeling a connection.”

Lena snorted. She reached a finger to her egg and pressed it to the shell. She had expected, she didn’t know, that it might be warm, it might issue a faint pulse to her touch; but the egg was cold, as if it had just been retrieved from a refrigerator.

“One more minute,” called the presenter. “Remember: just as with a, your, real baby—this is the most important phase of mothering—to be identified, recognized, remembered by your spawn—”

Spawn!

Lena thought of the PowerPoint she needed to finish for her meeting at three. She thought of the ExTrX proposal and the quarter-million she might append to it with the addition of field interviews—an idea she had been trying to discuss with Wyatt when he’d reminded her of this session. If she could get the proposal through before promotion conversations began in this same conference room, blinds drawn, next month…

“And that’s our time!” called the presenter, bathed gloriously in the projector’s blue light. As the women stood, he shouted about the distribution of upcoming tasks, the metrics on which their care would be measured. Lena shut her egg’s box, ready to flee to her real work.

The problem, she found upon arriving at her desk, was there was no real work. “We’re supposed to watch the eggs,” Mattie said, trailing her. “They explained at the start of the meeting. We’re fully allocated to the mothering project for the week.”

“It has a project code?”

“I’ll email it to you.”

“But they can’t be taking us all off our regular projects.” On Lena’s desk, the egg’s box rested in a position of dominance atop her electronics. “That’s a quarter of the company not working. It makes no sense.”

“Well,” said Mattie, “we are working. It’s just a different kind.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant. There’s some grant, I think. Wyatt would know.”

Lena nodded as if, of course, she’d already thought of asking Wyatt. Her phone, and Mattie’s, pinged in unison. 

Project BB-0001 read the subject. “That’s the code!” said Mattie, leaning over Lena’s shoulder. The email body noted Lena had been assigned to this project at forty hours a week. She turned away from Mattie, opened her laptop and navigated to the workforce management site to review her assignments.

There was, though, only the single project. While she’d been in the meeting, all her other project allocations had changed to zero weekly hours. Wyatt was her manager on these projects, which meant it had been Wyatt who had updated her hours. She tried to open the ExTrX project drive and received an error message: she did not have permission to access the files. 

She closed her laptop. Mattie had vanished, but in her stead came an email inviting Lena to a Mommy & Me event in the office library, which contained four easy chairs and a half-dozen yellowing books on the business of consulting. She did not want to attend but didn’t know what else to do. Her stomach growled, urging action of some kind. There were five hours left in the business day. So, she would go, she would bide her time, until she could press Wyatt, that night, to explain to her just what the fuck was going on.

§

Did he have answers? He did not have answers, or at least not ones satisfying to Lena. She left the egg baby, nestled in its box (she had added yellow tissue paper during the Mommy & Me) on the kitchen counter. “You need me,” she reminded him. “I’m Gary’s favorite.”

“Everyone’s doing it. He’ll understand. Should you take the baby out, let him breathe?”

“Breathe?” she said. “Him? It’s comfortable in its box.”

“I think you should be connecting with—”

“I thought you’d be happy to spend the night with me,” she said. “Now that it’s the only time we have together.”

“For one week. You make it sound like the world’s ending.”

“Maybe it is.” She sat on the sofa, reached across Wyatt and took his pilsner from the coffee table. “Not for you, though.”

She sipped the beer. She looked at him, but their gazes could not quite connect. She felt drawn to him but in the same moment pressed away, her poles all wrong. “I’m just worried,” she said. “If you’re holding the promotion talks in a month, and I haven’t even been on a real project this week.”

“No one’s going to count that against you.”

She nodded, but already, only three of the Philadelphia office’s nineteen Managers were women. Already, her odds were poor. 

“Take this seriously,” he said, muting the TV. “It’s not part of your normal job, I know, but it’s going to—I mean, you should take this seriously.”

“You just said it wasn’t a real project.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Okay,” she said, “but you didn’t not say it.”

Wyatt leaned forward to fiddle with the apartment console. This was his primary withdrawal strategy: if pressed, he would only claim the temperature needed changing, or the door locks checking.

Lena reached out. She set the beer back on the table, moved Wyatt’s hand. “What did they tell you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing they didn’t tell you.” Again, she had the sense of their gazes grazing off one another. Over his shoulder, the egg box rested on the counter. Sealed and secure.

“Okay,” she said, squeezing Wyatt’s hand. “Okay. I’m the best egg-mother the world’s ever seen. The whole company’s going to hear about my maternal instinct.” And then, and then—promotion, and public acknowledgment of her yearlong relationship, and vindication of every choice she’d made since establishing herself as the “career-oriented” type, ever in pursuit of her next degree, next job, despite the protests of parents-friends-partners.

He looked at her. “Yeah?”

Not liking the thought of herself in the egg box’s view, she hooked an arm around Wyatt’s shoulder and leaned back, falling herself flat on the sofa and him on top of her. 

“You don’t have to check the baby?”

She wrapped her legs around him. “The egg’s in good shape. Anyway, isn’t this what they want?” Grappling with his belt buckle, tugging at his pants, Lena felt herself losing purchase on the joke as she had imagined it in the conference room: Wyatt regurgitating, in a fit of laughter, the statistics that now narrated her el rides. As he entered her and she pulled him closer, she wondered if it made a difference—whether he was swayed by the duty she’d referenced, or if he only wanted (same as her) to forget the egg, the stories of plummeting birth rates, all of it. If the end result was the same, she told herself, it didn’t matter. She focused on Wyatt. She focused on Wyatt and not on the sleek white box overseeing them.

§

He liked her focus. Her goal orientation, her clear vision for her life, her refusal to diminish her potential for independent wealth creation. If Lena hadn’t thought much of Wyatt when they’d first met (weirdly small teeth, a tendency toward golf shirts as office wear, an insistence on emails written in bullet points rather than paragraphs), his frequently stated appreciations of her soon swayed her to his charms. Their first kiss, in the onion-perfumed air of half-eaten hoagies, strewn in their wrappings across a conference table, came after Wyatt told Lena how capable she was, how he had never once doubted whether he could entrust a project to her care, how he had a skill for predicting who had a future in the organization and she, Lena, had a future in the organization.

Now, though? She woke before dawn, she sat at the kitchen island with her laptop and a coffee, she scrolled through her inbox and found nothing to do. She opened the egg baby’s box and looked at it; again, she brushed a finger across its shell. Then she closed the box. As a child Lena had received high praise for her ability to “self-entertain” during secluded months of pandemic lockdowns. Now, though, she seemed to have lost something of that old skill; she had to resist the urge to return to the bedroom and interrupt the focused whir of Wyatt on his exercise bike. She closed her eyes, hands resting on the egg’s box, and pictured a tiny man curled inside the shell. He resembled Wyatt, in khaki slacks and a pastel button-up that did not match or flatter but communicated great competence; he held his knees in a fetal hug.

Lena released the box. She needed to get to the office. Before Wyatt finished his spin class, she had rinsed her armpits and face in the powder room, applied a protective coating of foundation, smoothed her hair into a bun, zipped into a blouse and pencil skirt that comforted her in their constraint, and taken the elevator down to the street. The egg, balanced in its box on her damp palm, was silent and still as she walked the few blocks separating Wyatt’s apartment from the office. She crossed the street to avoid a food truck backing into position on the sidewalk, and then stepped out of the path of a woman carrying a sack of sugar. Lena stared after her, egg box held tight, and when she turned it was into the path of a woman pushing a stroller. Apologizing, she turned again; she looked into the stroller and for a moment thought it held a baby (not a cat-sized dog, as she’d expected); but then, no, she realized it was a doll, unnerving with its wide eyes and long lashes.

“Good morning!” she said to the security guard when she reached the office, relieved to find him reading his sports pages on the desk’s embedded screen. In his world, she hoped, nothing had changed. “Who’s looking good today?” She swiped through the turnstile without waiting for his answer. 

The office was nearly empty, as expected—it was only half-past-seven—but this, unlike Wyatt’s apartment, was a silence she felt comfortable with, perhaps because here there was less expectation of her comfort. Sitting at her desk, she read Consulting Digest with its findings on the latest industry trends; she reviewed the last emails she’d sent before her project access was stripped away; she opened the last PowerPoints she’d built and admired her evenly aligned circles and cubes, her certainty about how to manage her clients’ expectations. Gary from ExTrX did like her; every email she sent him received an immediate “thanks!” or “appreciate it!” He did not send those emails to everyone on the team—only her. Soon she would be back on the project, and she would find a spin on this week that Wyatt could carry to the promotion meeting, some new and unique knowledge she could offer the firm. An increased ability to consult on fertility-centered projects, which it was reasonable to assume would make up a growing portion of their work in coming years. The firm would need a woman on these projects—it would need her on these projects.

As the office shaded in around her, Lena ran out of reading. She lunged for her phone when an email pinged, but it was only an invitation to another Mommy & Me, an outing to Rittenhouse Square, “a chance for the eggs to parallel play.” Lena deleted the email. Midmorning, the egg’s cap began to emit a faint and increasing thrum, a sense of unease that she could not relieve by pressing the cap or even holding the egg cupped in the palm of her hand, stroking its shell, counting its faint brown speckles. “Quiet, quiet,” she whispered to the egg baby, and it did not listen. She looked at the neighboring desks, anxious to confirm the egg’s fluorescing hum had gone unnoticed, to find several male colleagues watching her. 

“We’re going,” she hissed at the closest man. “Sorry we’re so much trouble.” She grabbed her bag and the egg’s box, bundling herself back toward the elevator. Lacking other ideas, she walked to Rittenhouse Square, where she hoped the play circle would still be in effect; and it was, the whole park was roiling with women set free from their offices. In its southwest corner her coworkers squatted in a sweltering circle on the dead grass, watching their eggs at rest on a picnic blanket.

“Finally!” said Mattie, inching aside to create space for Lena. “We were just talking about going to the bookstore, Char says they do a children’s reading circle in the afternoons.”

“Wow,” said Lena. She opened her egg’s box. It was quiet, as if it had sensed the ovoid presence of its peers. She scooped a hand around its still-cool shell and settled it on the blanket. “Is that…helpful?”

“They say part of being a mother is ensuring the mental development of your child.” 

Lena nodded. She understood what Mattie left unsaid: that this was ridiculous, and that they shouldn’t say this in earshot of the eggs lest they be captured by a minuscule recording device. “I would love to go to the bookstore,” she said, watching several women cross the park with their baby strollers. The few remaining trees—most had been removed a few years back, victims to a rampaging and incurable fungus—stretched their bare branches across the sidewalk, offering slivers of shade.

“Look,” said one of the Associate Consultants, a 24-year-old Lena now suspected of having been a theater major: her arm outstretched, index finger pointing, trembling, towards the eggs. “I think they’re collaborating!”

Lena collapsed onto her bottom, hiking her skirt toward her hips so she could cross her legs and display her underwear to the world in a gesture of aggressive uncaring. She watched dozens of women, hundreds of women, pass through the park with their temporary charges. None of them knew what to do, she understood. They were all acting, the same as that girl now crouching over the picnic blanket, urging two of the eggs to sit with shells touching. It was only her, Lena, who could not adjust herself to the new “work” (she still could not think of it as work, unquotationed) for this week.

What she could manage was following the group. To brunch, expensed. To a bookstore cramped into one floor of a former rowhome, where she could not even reach the reading circle. Instead, she stood by a wire carousel filled with obscure, slender novels, nudging it around and around until someone deemed the reading complete and she was released. That afternoon, to a conference room where they fashioned strips of fabric into egg-swaddling Baby Björns. Wyatt, when she called him at six o’clock, was too busy to meet for dinner. “Go to your place tonight,” he told her. “I’m completely swamped on ExTrX.”

“I can help,” she said, one hand resting on her egg, nestled at her chest. “I have time.”

“You don’t. You’re fully allocated—it would set a bad example, me pulling you to work on a different project.”

“Then don’t tell anyone.” This would not be so unusual; most people worked seventy, eighty hours a week, but only logged forty to keep project margins in line. 

“You don’t have permission to access—”

“Never mind. I was on the project Monday morning, I’ll be back on it next Monday. Have a great week.”

“Don’t be like that.”

She hung up and left for the elevator bank. Mattie was already waiting, her legs refracted on the gleaming black tiles. “I’m meeting Ainsley for dinner,” said Mattie. “You could come.”

Lena shook her head. There was only Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, to get through. The elevator dinged. You can do anything for three more days, she told herself, inadvertently channeling the motivational screams of her high school cross-country coach. She left Mattie in the building lobby, walked the two smoggy blocks to the el, sat on a damp plastic seat and folded herself over the egg. At the other end of the car several men vaped, breathing billows of pink-tinged smoke. Would the egg sense that? Would it emit a cry of distress, as it had that morning in the office? Rather than ask the men to stop, she only folded her body closer to the egg as a PSA garbled through the car. …patriotic duty!...satisfaction…financial aid...fertility centers… Five more stops, four more stops, wishing her body into a protection, whether for the egg or herself she was unsure.

§

On Wednesday came an outing to the zoo, and a dense, sweet odor rising from the egg baby’s shell, impossible to define but not unpleasant. On Thursday, a Schuylkill-side picnic: a river that had been, in Lena’s childhood memories, infested with squawking, furious geese, but now offered no wildlife save a lone rower passing in his scull, slicing through brackish water. She tried to rework her thoughts to match the exteriors presented by her colleagues, officious and sure as they handled their eggs. Eating the crusts off a peanut butter sandwich, she imagined the egg as a creature capable of developing specific interests and hobbies. Her colleagues discussed what their egg babies might be when they grew up. Her egg baby might become anyone. An egg actor, an egg consultant, or—this idea she offered to the group—Egg President of the United States. 

“There’s no way,” laughed a woman Lena knew only for her habit of taking phone calls while urinating in the office restroom.

“It’s as likely as any of your ideas,” she said. The image she had been holding, of her little khakied egg man, one hand on a Bible, shattered. 

“More likely he’ll grow up to be a teacher”—the plan for the chattering urinator’s egg—“than a President.”

Lena retrieved her egg from the picnic blanket. “This is ridiculous,” she told the women, all watching her. “All of you. I thought you were professionals.” There was no destination for this thought and she did not bother attempting to complete it. After days of coolness the egg now felt warm in her grasp, with a radiating heat around its wired black cap, as if it had sensed and adopted her mood. She left her sandwich, the central and best bites she had been saving for last, and walked down the trail in the lonely rower’s slender wake. She wished she would turn back and find Mattie jogging to catch her. But then she turned, and no one had followed. 

On Monday, Lena reminded herself, the world would be back as it ought to be. This was harder to imagine, though, than it had been only a few days ago. She hadn’t been to Wyatt’s apartment since that first night. Despite her wishes for Mattie’s pursuit, she had not even talked to her honestly since that meeting when they’d been assigned their eggs. She stopped in the humid, disappointing shade beneath the Girard Avenue Bridge, sat and gently laid the egg baby in the dirt. Things would go back to the way they had been. She would no longer carry this sense of being modestly insane in her inability to accept a truth everyone else seemed so capable of weaving into their lives. Leaning over the egg, breathing him in, she dialed her mother.

“Did you always want children?” she asked, not bothering with the usual pleasantries and feigned interest in her mother’s life in a golf cart community that would, in fifteen years, succumb to an expanding web of sinkholes. Her mother had moved a few years before, informing Lena only after she had settled into what she called her “Florida-style villa.” Her mother’s correct assumption, that Lena would have tried to talk her out of the move if she’d known, should not (in Lena’s view) absolve her of the betrayal.

“That’s a nice greeting,” said her mother. “What’s in you today?”

“Nothing.” Lena wondered if the egg was rotting, and whether this would be a mark for or against her (ongoing care and affection for a rotting baby, versus an inability to stop the baby from rotting in the first place). “I was just wondering. When you were little, did you like to push a doll around in a stroller, those kinds of things?”

“Are you upset now that I didn’t buy you one of those dolls?” Lena did not respond in the offered pause. “I did have a baby that, you would put a bottle in its mouth, and it would drink the milk, and then it came out a different color.”

“Yellow.”

“More blue. All the commercials showed little girls feeding milk to their babies but if you actually did it…God, it smelled awful. I think they took it off the market.”

“Okay,” said Lena. “But you felt a longing for it, even when you were little.”

“Did I? It was just the thing little girls did back then. Everyone’s parents gave them those dolls. We all had these little strollers. We would push them up and down the sidewalk together.”

“I have an egg,” Lena said. “I mean, I think it’s going bad.”

“You’ve got plenty of time.”

She removed herself from the egg’s putrefying atmosphere. “I was just thinking, it would have been easier if I’d been the kind of girl who carried around a little doll.”

“No,” said her mother, and briefly Lena thought she might finally receive the maternal reassurance she still, hopelessly, wished for when she dialed her number. “You’re better this way. You know Marjorie Neal’s daughter has had a half a dozen miscarriages, but she can’t stop trying, she wants it—”

“Don’t tell me these things. That’s private.”

“It’s just an example. Marjorie has been to six funerals now. Every time, they have to have a little ceremony, even the first trimester. Would you rather be her, or you? You’d rather be you. You have a career and you always land on your feet, whatever’s bothering you.”

Wisdom dispensed, pickleball lesson looming, her mother hung up. “Everything will be alright,” Lena told the egg baby. She considered what other reassurances a mother might offer her child, and gave these all to the egg though not one of them felt true.

§

The egg baby grew larger, larger, larger, not over time but in a single moment, like a blooming time-lapsed flower, shell quivering in its rapid progression. It was in her hand and then it was not in her hand, Lena stood next to the shell, she rested her head against its speckles with no fear of crushing the human curled within. Against her ear, a scritch-scritch-scritch, as if the child sensed her; and the egg grew larger, larger, until she stood in its shadow, until she was made miniscule, stepping backwards as the egg groaned—scritched—grew—

Before the crack raveling its length could break open she was aware of her alarm beep-beep-beeping, her cheek resting in the damp patch left by her gaping nighttime mouth, the egg in its box on her nightstand, its rot no longer a hint but a sure thing, stink lines wavering.

The previous night, after speaking with her mother, she had called Wyatt four, maybe five, times. He had not called her back. But she would see him in the office. Things would be improved. The egg would be handed to someone for disposal. Her project debrief would commence. Hours entered on her timesheet, and then—she wanted to weep thinking of this, as she rubbed a towel across the egg baby’s shell and recentered his dapper black cap, which had come unstuck in the night—Wyatt would return her to her old projects, her ExTrX folder access would return, whatever would happen in the world would happen but for her, Lena, it would be as it ever was.

In a positive sign, she found a seat on the crowded commuting-hour el, where she could hold the egg baby on her lap as strangers jostled. Embedded in the divider before her, a video screen looped a new PSA about healthful eating and conception. Factory-farmed salmon were key. She watched her seatmate surreptitiously photograph an ad inviting men to be tested for the quality of their sperm. “Up to $200 per highly viable donation!” exclaimed the poster, listing an address three blocks east of Lena’s office. She could not figure out if this location was strange, a harbinger of changing times, or if sperm clinics had always been located in such central locations, to better secure the professional strain of semen offered by men in tailored suits and Patagonia vests. 

If that was the case—well, lucky them, she thought as she whiled the hours at her desk, no work to attend to but the plaintive, electronic cries her egg baby issued whenever she let more than thirty minutes pass without a hummed lullaby, a motherish whisper, a reassuring finger stroked on its shell. At five of eleven she carried the egg baby to the conference room, its table covered with baby blankets and painted egg boxes. Several of the eggs possessed wigs of yarn or curling human hair. Why had Lena not thought of this?

“How wonderful!” said the presenter from Monday. “How wonderful to see your dormant maternal instincts awakened. Tell me, please, some of the things you’ve discovered this week.”

Lena watched Mattie, seated on the opposite side of the table. She wore a navy silk egg sling and appeared to be showing her neighbor a photo album commemorating the week. Only a few weeks ago Mattie had coaxed Lena into staying out until the el stopped running, wanting to prove (Lena had thought) that she was not too old for her latest girlfriend, a wasp-waisted senior at Penn who had one of those names that would sound like a joke if it were assigned to a person with less money.

She had misunderstood her friend, Lena guessed. Had they ever discussed their relationships in depth, or their dreams, or their private miseries and uncertainties? There’d always been something else to talk about, something more fun to do, and as she watched Mattie run a finger along her egg baby’s head, Lena felt hollowed out, like she herself was an egg baby—but only the shell, brittle and thin.

She returned her gaze to the man, who was clicking through Monday’s slideshow again. It was time for their individual debriefs, he told them as statistics looped on the projection screen. Men approached the glass door and beckoned. When it was Lena’s turn, she was led to a two-person phone room so small that her chair, drawn out, wedged against the door.

On her interviewer’s laptop was a graph of alarming, jagged red lines. “And how did you find your assignment?” the man asked.

Lena was unsure. She watched him trace his finger along the graph.

“We can see,” he said, pointing, “that your child experienced elevated stress each morning and evening.”

“That’s the subway.”

“In the evenings”—tap, tap, tap, tap, went his finger on the screen—“we see extreme spikes in stress and abandonment. You were sleeping?”

“Yes?”

“The baby, please.”

Lena slid the box across the desk. She tried to regard it tenderly: that tiny homunculus still inside the egg, slightly curdled. “That’s just how it developed,” she said when the man opened the box, nose twinging. “It’s the natural course of the egg’s life, I think.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That will be all.”

“I can have him back?”

“You can’t improve your score now. Just enter your hours before you leave.”

“I don’t want to improve my score,” she said, though this was untrue: all her projects came with metrics, and she wanted to do well on all of them.

He closed the graph. “Our only goal, in this project, is to awaken dormant instinct. Your performance in this first stage was disappointing, but some women don’t truly awaken to motherhood until they’ve given birth, or even months later.”

“I’m going back to my regular projects, then?”

“You misunderstand me. Back to the conference room, where we’ll discuss the next phase.”

Projects with multiple phases thrilled Lena. The profits were so much higher than in a single phase, when the project team wasted time getting to know the client, new systems, so on and on. But here there was no client, no profit; not even a project subject, as the man had just dropped her egg baby into the trash. 

“You’re dismissed,” he said, and so she was: back into the office, where at every desk sat a buttoned-up man, noise-cancelling headphones clamped over ears, typing. At the desk she had reserved (with great ambitions) for the afternoon sat a man she’d never seen before, gazing out the window. It was her favorite desk, allowing her an uninterrupted view of planes descending to the airport. “You’re in my seat,” she told the man, repeating herself after he removed his headphones. “I reserve this desk every day.”

“I think I reserved it,” he said. “I like the airplanes.”

She watched over his shoulder as he opened a map of the office floor. He was right: he had the desk all day. Lena’s booking had vanished. “I’ll find another,” she told him, and did: an armchair in the entry to the women’s bathroom. This was where Mattie found her an hour later, after the meeting about the baby project’s new phase concluded.

“You have to show up,” Mattie lectured as she guided Lena to the elevator. “You have to at least be there and breathing. I can catch you up over lunch, but I can’t cover for you.”

“I was going to be a manager,” Lena said when they were seated in a restaurant. She had no memory of how they’d arrived there, of agreeing to lunch. 

“Obsessing over it isn’t going to get you back on your extracts—”

“ExTrX.”

“—as I said, project. This can’t go on forever, maybe your promotion is slowed down six months. I think you’ll like next week’s work too, we’re doing PowerPoints on our children’s ideal upbringing.”

“It’s easy for you to adjust. You never had real professional ambitions. You never enjoyed the work.”

“Jesus, Lena. You think any of us wound up there, not really wanting it? You think you’re the only one having a hard time?” Mattie didn’t wait for a response, waved the waiter over so they could order. Without thinking, Lena asked for the goat cheese frittata, earning herself another disgusted glance.

“They threw our egg babies in the garbage,” Lena said. “I’m allowed to eat an egg now.”

“I asked for mine back.”

So it had been a lie, that she couldn’t reclaim the egg. Probably the reviewer had updated her graph after she’d left the room, representing a new low in her mothering instincts. When her frittata arrived, glistening in a tiny cast iron skillet, she no longer wanted it. “Too rich,” she said when Mattie raised a questioning eyebrow, but it was just the thought of all those eggs, innocent shells cracked and discarded. Potential that would never, now, be properly recognized, eggish Presidents who would never, now, come into being. She took a single bite, thinking to break the spell into which she’d fallen, but there was no satisfaction. She could not even swallow.

---

ELLEN RHUDY earned her MFA from Ohio State, where she was Fiction Editor of The Journal. Her stories have appeared in journals including The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Story, and Nimrod. Ellen lives in Philadelphia, where she works as an instructional designer and is revising a novel on the side.

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