Mowing the lawn yesterday afternoon I ran over an egg that had been abandoned in the yard, slicing the top third off of it with the mower blade. What was inside was, at the very least, comepletely disgusting—whatever animal was in there (I’m assuming a duck, based on the size of the egg and the fact that it was in my yard, and we don’t have much in terms of wild migratory chickens) hadn’t gotten very far in its incubation before being abandoned, and was mostly an animalesque slime of tiny horror-movie proportions.
Still, while being thoroughly digusted , I couldn’t help thinking that an egg is an ovoid, magic version of a Schrödinger box—looking at one from the outside, without the benefit of auditory cues, one cannot determine whether the interior contains slimy gloop that you can turn into scrambled eggs or creme brulee or mayonnaise, or a small animal in some stage of development. It’s wild and amazing that this thing, this perfect little oblong container, is a selt-contained package that you can conceivably heat and turn into a chicken or a duck or a snake or a platypus.
Anyway, I don’t recommend leaving eggs in your yard to perform your own analysis. The results have a way of turning out VERY BADLY.
