The Woman Who Laid the Golden Eggs

By

Maureen O’Leary

I’ll tell you how I got this cherry smile scar across my lower belly but please don’t tell anyone.

When I started laying golden eggs on my daughter’s eighteenth birthday, I thought, stranger things have happened. But is there really a stranger thing than a woman who lays golden eggs? Passing gold through my birth canal was an event that required my full attention, though I couldn’t predict when. I would lay three in a row sometimes and then there would be a few days when I was bone dry. On the empty nest days I was kind of relieved and I was also kind of sad.

I started depending on the eggs and that was the problem. I had a great run of six straight weeks of eggs and I got used to having them. So when the next day I didn’t lay one I thought my winning streak was over. And people needed me by that point. I was cutting my eggs into thick coins and giving them out. Nobody knew where they came from but people started seeing me in a new light so I missed the eggs. Every day that went by without one I got lonelier. Then finally after a week and a half I lay one so big that I went into back labor and when the pushing was over I gazed at the golden egg bloody and viscous on my pillow. I cupped the smoothness in two hands and felt a great burden remaining within my womb. I took a knife from the kitchen in order to get my eggs when I wanted because why should I have to wait? The eggs weighed so heavy inside me. I had so much to give. Eking out the gold a little at a time was a miserly way to live. I wanted the most out of life!

I wasn’t an idiot. I knew the risks. I knew that giving myself wholly in one shot would likely end the laying for the rest of my life. I wanted to give forever. But maybe I wanted to stop giving too. Carrying the eggs was a lot to bear. Imagine being constantly pregnant. I was a melon on tendrils, as it were. I wanted to drop the weight.

I imagined a neat incision. I imagined a string of fist-sized golden beads. I would no longer have the stress of uncertainty. I would no longer have to face every day pregnant with a possibility that might or might not be met in gold.

I stood over the bed with the pillow under my belly but the incision was not neat. It was a jump scare of pain, a plunging into water too icy to survive. No eggs dropped from the wound, just blood. Just loneliness and wishing things were different.

There were no golden eggs because there is no such thing as a woman who lays golden eggs, and that’s my secret too.

Bio:

Maureen O’Leary lives in Sacramento, California. Her work appears in Bourbon Penn, The Esopus Reader, Nightmare Magazine, and Tahoma Literary Review among other places. She is the author of physics of weight: collected poems through Bottlecap Press, a Pushcart nominee and a graduate of Ashland MFA.