Odd Egg by Alex Grass

The man on Mary Allen’s front porch had a head shaped like an egg—one-third taller than normal—and fingers that were long, cold, and bumpy. He introduced himself as Roger, from the Keystone Cooperative Growers Association, and offered her a free carton of eggs. When she asked if this was a religious thing, he replied: “The time will come when the god-filled eggs will feed the sick and the poor until the sick and the poor are no more. That time will be the time of the egg.” Then he sprinted into the woods.

The eggs are not empty

Mary Allen put the eggs in the refrigerator and forgot about them until Saturday morning, when she woke up hungry and found nothing else to eat. She cracked the first egg into a hot skillet—and nothing came out. She cracked another. Same result. She went through eleven eggs that way, feeling the slosh of albumen and yolk inside each shell but getting no contents when she broke them open. The twelfth egg was different. When she cracked it, an egg-shaped human head the size of a fist plopped into the skillet, skittering on six little legs. It sizzled and screeched. She flipped it onto the counter, where it died after a few seconds. Then she noticed that the dead creature had been replaced by a new egg, this one the size of a grapefruit, sitting in the same spot.

The creature grows