I was just hiking when I found the little red box sitting at the side of the trail. It was just sitting there in the leaves, looking extremely out of place. I was spending the weekend at a friend’s country house, looking for some time away from my thoughts, my life. I had been obsessing about a recent break-up, couldn’t get this woman out of my mind. She told me she never wanted to see me again. She wanted nothing to do with me. It was over. More than over. It was gone, she said. Never to be anything again. As though we never existed.
The little red box was the first thing in months that evaporated her from my mind. But it wasn’t the box’s incongruous location that truly grabbed me. Yes, it was a little red box like no other. Perhaps the most beautiful little red box that one could even imagine. But it was the box’s contents that truly grabbed me. After I bent down and picked up the box, mesmerized by its impossible hue, I cracked it open and found an egg. A little white egg. Its unremarkable appearance was startling, very much different from its vessel, and I was compelled to cup the egg in my hand and drop the box back into the leaves. My hike was over at that very moment. I turned around and walked back to the cabin, forgetting my plans for the day, cradling the egg.
When I got back, I rolled a kitchen towel into a sort of nest for the egg and put it in a warm place in the cabin where the sun would shine on it in the morning. The egg compelled me to go to bed early, to get a good night’s rest. That night I dreamed of it, the egg, what was inside of it, and what would come out. It was as if my life flashed before my eyes, but only if that life included the future as well. The first and last image in my dream was the egg, and when I woke up, the smell of coffee permeated the house. I was confused, and wondered what the connection was between the coffee, the dream, and the egg. But still, the egg was my singular obsession. That is, until I went back to the towel nest I had made for it.
Standing over the nest, my heart ached at what I saw. The egg was cracked open, lying neatly in two pieces in the towel. It was empty, now only a shell, and there was no trace what may have been inside it. The shell still had a startlingly commonplace appearance in the morning sun, but something in me had changed. I was no longer obsessed with the egg itself. Instead, I now felt the overwhelming need to find out what came out of it. I then realized that it might have something to do with the coffee smell that was still coming from the kitchen. As I slowly followed the scent, images from my dream came rushing back to me. It was like puzzles pieces falling out of the sky into my brain, putting themselves together. When the final piece rained into place, I was standing in the kitchen staring at a face I had hoped to see again under almost any other circumstances than these.
This entry is based on the following prompt:
Write about a character who finds an odd-looking egg in the forest. When they take it home, they never could have predicted what was inside it.
From https://self-publishingschool.com/fiction-creative-writing-prompts/#fantasy