Reliable Supply

A fresh egg has elasticity. A flattened egg has aged. —Bill

Frozen eggs are edible, but you might as well eat shoe leather. —Paul

I am, to my knowledge, one person. My fifteen dozen eggs––compulsive purchase of inherited scarcity––are delivered in blue cardboard honeycomb. One, appearing whole, is suctioned in place by a split at the base of its shell. Whites soak the blue when I pry it out. Calcium crunches. Baby blades.

Can you FREEZE Eggs? Yes!

Lightly scramble your eggs.
Add salt or sugar to your eggs. (Don’t skip this part!!)
Freeze your eggs in a muffin tin.
Your eggs are now good.

She calls me from a small country of surgeries. The pills: a thousand compressed PMSes. The clinic is clean with low lampshades and truffles cradled in gold trays. The doctor prods her interior for pictures of children not yet named. Slides in a duck bill, cranks like a stranger jacking a flat-tired sedan.

Keep your beer in the fridge and your eggs out of it. ––John

Just don’t keep them all in one basket! ––Malcolm

I ask her for numbers. She is a math problem in need of a solution. I understand the solution to a dry-mouthed wine is egg. Therefore, the solution to a [dry, aged, flattened] egg is wine. To be technical, a dozen. It is wise to count backwards.

She can
give in
or re-
main stead-
fast in
her com-
mitment.
Techno-
logy
alters
her si-
tua-
tion. She
feels re-
quired
to of-
fer a
justi-
fica-
tion.

His alter. His give. His require. His needle sucks specks from follicles as she imagines across the ocean a grayed-haired man. I crack eggs on the blade edge of a Tupperware: yellow circles in a syruped sea. Press the lid shut and shake till I can’t see where any one begins.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

Italicized quotes are adapted from The Guardian’s “Nooks and Crannies: Should eggs be stored in the fridge?”; Happy Money Saver’s “Can you FREEZE Eggs?”; and Elizabeth Reis and Samuel Reis Dennis’s “Freezing Eggs and Creating Patients: Moral Risks of Commercialized Fertility” in The Hastings Center Report.

April Yee is a writer and translator published in Newsweek, Ambit, and Ploughshares online. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to London, where she reads for TriQuarterly and mentors for the Refugee Journalism Project at University of the Arts London.

Edited by Emilie Menzel and Anna Fridlis.

The featured image is an excerpt from a collage created specifically for this issue by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

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