Martha is a writer. She lives in London.  

Email: martha.jane32@live.co.uk 

And in an Eggshell, The End

The end of the world is going to be such a huge event, Avery tells me. It would take at least five people to lift the end of the world – it is so heavy it compresses time, squeezing it into something not dissimilar to a moment but more like an always. Disproportionate against the landscape of all possible occurrences, she says. My sister loves to tell me things.
She says that the end of the world is already happening somewhere, and it is so radiant and formidable that it will be shining back at us here like a second sun.
There exists all sorts of debris from the end of the world scattered throughout time, more and more as you move nearer to the end. Signs and symbols and other various fragments. I begin to look at the content of my days searching for remnants, checking through my mind for particularly heavy thoughts that may be rebounding from the end of things. So far I have found three items that I think might be coming from the back of time;

1. Rocks. There are rocks everywhere.
2. Layers. Everything is on top of something else.
3. Loops. Everything is happening inside itself, turning into something else.

To my last point, Avery suggests that perhaps my own personal end is transmitting back at me also, a smaller eminence of ending within a larger one, which perhaps exists inside an even larger ending, outside of my grasp. Every sentence Avery starts contains clues as to how it will end.
Best not to linger on it, I say hopefully.
Avery solemnly tells me it is about time I consider these kinds of things.
The next morning I awake with my eyes still closed and a knowing that this too is how the day will end.
Are you still thinking about the end of the world? Avery asks from her bed, across the room. We have matching, starchy floral sheets setting us into dark oak frames.
No, I respond with my eyes still closed.
I am actually not thinking of anything, it is amazing.
Inside my brain is a dumb moth fluttering repeatedly into my skull, drawn to the brightness of the light outside like the glow of a dim veranda set around my head.

At breakfast Avery presses her palms into the table, straightening her back away from her chair as if what she is about to say contains a physical lightness that might lift her towards the ceiling. Mum has been up for hours, arranging glass jars full of food, moving them into storage. The kitchen smells like onion and vinegar. Dad will already be in the fields, making holes in the earth.
Harper seems worried, Avery reports.
Fretting? Mum pauses with concern as if this is not a concern that begets fret.
Fretting. Avery agrees.
Wringing her hands, in fact. All of the time, she adds.
My hands are warm and slick as I pass them back and forth between themselves.
I say nothing. As I have recently discovered the absence of saying things. Mum has set out boiled eggs with their tops cracked off, fragments of shell settling on the yolk. Avery sits in silence for a moment, looking at her egg before leaning towards me, reaching out of her seat and resting on her elbows with a finger outstretched. She grins, a large gap nestled between her front teeth creating a constant whistle when speaking with such ardour in such small proximity to my face. On the tip of her finger is a small triangular shard of eggshell.
Do not be despairing, Harper. For in my sleep God appeared to me in an egg, his skin as bright and radiant as this yolk, and in his glory he has revealed to me that your soul is to be entwined with this egg shell, and for as long as this egg shell is safe, so too shall you be.
And she daintily presses the egg shell into the centre of my palm.

The egg shell sticks to the centre of my hand with ease and I leave the house with the sharp edge pressing into my skin, becoming increasingly embedded as we walk through paths of long grass and strewn nettles before we reach the school house. Our school is a paling green building on timber stilts, sat to the right of the old stone church amidst peeling sycamore trees. In the lobby, I try to change out of my boots and into my slippers without catching mud on my feet, tenderly holding them in the air in a delicate act of balance as I scramble at the wicker baskets beneath the benches, storing our school slippers.
Olga tells us we must soften our souls for the learning to go in. I brush the soles of my feet with the sleeves of my coat. Soft shoes, soft clothes, soft minds, soft shapes, no printed logos on your T-Shirts, soft hands, soft words. In my bag is a roll of hard wax crayons, with the edges purposefully rounded as not to permit the severity of lines. The crayons lay across my desk, in front of the brass hinges allowing the wood to open just before an unused inkwell. In front of us Olga is writing names on the board in a soft pastel blue chalk, above a wooden candle of the archangel Michael. Behind me Avery has opened her lesson book onto a blank page and has begun building oily layers of crayon across the surface, using her nails to scratch drawings into the multi-colored wax. Above me is an ebb of formless knowledge hoping to condense into a thick fog and settle in through the softest parts of me like mist onto a garden. If the learning is unable to enter through my soles then there is a hardness in me, I suppose starting around my knees. With a cold fear I remember the egg shell, the hardness permeating the palm of my hand. I could be too solid to learn and what is worse, perhaps punctured; the learning must not seep out. Lowering my head to the table I press my lips into my palm and softly tongue God’s shell, my soul, into my mouth, grinding it into a beige paste and swallowing the sediment. The egg shell is still safe, I assure myself, just reformed. Softer and safer, in fact, for now I carry and absorb myself and God within me, slightly to the left of time.
Avery was born on a Tuesday, a summer Tuesday nestled between new familial configuration and harvests of tomatoes as my parents put themselves into the world for the first time. As they are every Tuesday, Avery’s and Solomon’s names are on the board, both of them unified in the expectant stomach of Tuesday. As Tuesday’s children they hold something the same, commencing together in an indefinite line punctuated by each recital of their birthday verse. Avery recites hers first, rocking her heels. As I was born on a Sunday, I read my verse on Mondays.
Mum told me that the first time she cried about me getting older was the minute after the minute in which I was born. The nurses dressed me in a small white vest and suddenly, she told me, I became a clothed thing that belonged not just to her but to the world. I feel a bit bad about belonging to the world, although I suppose I didn’t choose to. Mum tells us we chose her in heaven, but I can’t remember this.
The first time you’re born is when your parents look at each other and think about a baby. They gently extract the characteristics of themselves and place them into something small and tender, like performing a reversed exorcism of the spirit into a limp woodland creature. I could have been born into anything I suppose, in heaven there is one big force of child looking to enter the hands of my parents, and the force fragments through harvests of lambs and beans and carrot tops and Avery and I.
Avery and Solomon walk back to their desks. Avery’s slippers are scuffed and muddy around the edges, trailing dried mud on the faded blue carpet like a dirty slug.
When I was a baby mum would place my fingers into her mouth, pretending to chew the pale skin around my nails. I think that she had wanted to eat me, like Avery’s hamster who we had to spoon yellow lumps of scrambled eggs each morning, so that she would have something better to chew on than her own babies. Perhaps, I think, this is why mum makes eggs each morning, to eat the chicken’s babies, to distract us all from eating each other. A sort of bribe away from such thoughts of being the last to touch us, of preserving us, protecting us from the end of the world and calling us little sauerkraut babies, pickled in stomach juices. Instead of wrinkles we would age into a singular pruned crevice.
I would be too hard to eat now, time has filled me with teeth. Not even a mother would want to eat teeth, I think as I reach my finger into the back of my mouth, tapping all of my molars to check they’re still there. The soft, sprouted body of my edible self has already returned to dust, all of my baby thoughts to the ebb of learning ready to be grasped and known again by another, like hand-me-downs. The first end into the less
palatable.

• I will live forever
• I will try and not think about it
• And if time snaps in the process, you could get stuck here

Olga asks the class if anyone would like to volunteer to recite our eight times table and I stick my arm down so far it could take roots. I make no eye contact, remaining still and silent until Olga asks Maeve, whose arm had shot upwards immediately. Since I learnt about the end of the world I have been trying to speak as little as possible. Avery does so much of it for me anyway and I do prefer to listen. It is important, I think, to be more of my thoughts than words out-loud because then I am more my mum than I am the world. Only a mind can make another mind, I think. The more I try to remain my mum the less I am less born. I don’t think that you can end if you have not been born.
I am certainly the least born in this classroom, I think as I look at the back of Maeve and Solomon’s heads, how hard and round they both are. I imagine myself floating in the ebb of learning, silently swimming suspended a foot above everyone. The end of the world wouldn’t even touch me there. It would pass through me like a ghost stepping through a wall, all of the learning and the thoughts and me would be left after the end of it all encased like bubbles.

At lunch I sit under one of the sycamore trees outside of the classroom. You can peel away their papery skin and fold it into tiny, fragile books. The air feels heavy and damp and the thin bark folds easily without splintering. Avery is pacing around, dragging a long stick through the mud, drawing looping figures of eight. She drops the stick next to me, and squats to sit on the roots of the tree.
Are you still worrying? She asks. Have you been protecting your soul? Her voice curves higher at the end as if forming a question mark.
Yes. I tell her. I have been. I feel good. My soul feels secure like it has slipped into a perfectly fitting sock, a sock with individual toes.
She looks at me and pouts, judging me for just a moment before lunging to take hold of my arm.
She squints into my palm.
You’ve lost the shell.
I look between her and my hand.
I ate it.
You ate it? Why would you eat it?
I can hear Avery telling mum that I am worried and that I have eaten my own soul.
I don’t know, I tell her.
My face feels hot. In the moment it had felt like the right thing to do.
This could be a sign, Avery says, a small line appearing between her eyebrows.
Perhaps, she pauses. Perhaps at the end of the world your body is going to be eaten. Perhaps this is the piece of your own ending that is shining back.