The Pip

by Jessie

Onscreen, a large eagle was preparing to take a crap over the edge of her nest. Her brown and white butt feather quivered in anticipation as she dug her talons into the pile of fuzz and twigs she had amassed over the years. I sat transfixed, my shoulders slumped forward so that my nose almost touched the computer monitor.

The eggs were supposed to hatch on Tuesday. It was now Saturday, and the eggs were still intact, and I was still installed at the desk in our bedroom, my pink house slippers rooted firmly to the carpet. If only my family would commend my patience – the sacrifices I’ve had to make – but I can’t expect much from them. Knots of hunger chewed at the edges of my stomach, but I tried to ignore these human problems.

Bill had stopped bringing me meals two days ago. “If you want a hot meal,” he was now saying, “then you can step away from that – that – that fucking thing –” he flung his arm towards the computer – “for thirty minutes so you can join your family – remember us? – at the dining room table for dinner.”

I planned to call a divorce attorney the minute these eagle eggs hatched. If I had known that Bill would go balder than a bald eagle when I’d married him at 23, I probably would have called off the wedding. I wondered if, eleven years later, I could still get an annulment on the grounds of fraud. Hair fraud.

“How can you be so unsupportive of my passions?” I spat back at him. There was no way I was taking my eyes off the screen, but I could picture Bill raking his hands through the place where his hair would be, if he had any.

“Your passions?” Bill laughed. “You’re addicted to The Real Eaglewives of Decorah. Seriously,Connie, this is worse than watching that Kar-Krash-ian show, because at least that show ends after thirty minutes and has commercial breaks for you to use the bathroom. This is just the result of some bird geeks who installed a bunch of cameras on an eagle’s nest and put it on the internet. That’s it. This is why you’ve abandoned your family? We need you.” His voice cracked pathetically.

“Cry me a fucking river and then go drown in it, Bill,” I said. “I worked a shitty job while you were in med school, I raised our babies by myself while you were still in med school, and the second I want to pursue my passion, it’s ‘Connie, you’re abandoning the family, wah wah wah.’ At least I’m here, at home, when the kids need me.”

Bill sighed. “You’ve lost it,Connie,” he said quietly.

“Oh, please. Don’t blame me for your life’s disappointments. I didn’t force you to sell your soul to become a doctor, your overbearing parents did. Now shut up, the mama eagle is about to take a crap over the edge of the nest.”

Bill didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if he was still in the room. I groaned at the pressure in my bladder and twisted my feet uncomfortably. This was my least favorite part. From below the desk, I grabbed what was once a bottle of Pepsi, but was now a liter-sized container with a plastic funnel duct-taped to the opening of the bottle. I hoisted up my bathrobe and peed into the funnel, the warm liquid slowly heating the flimsy plastic contraption.

I could see that the sun was setting inDecorah,Iowa. The three eggs, ivory in themiddaysun, were now the grayish-brown color of rotting teeth. Decorah was one time zone ahead of where I lived, so night would be falling in about an hour here. I had passed the threshold of exhaustion. My eyes felt gritty and wind-whipped inside their sockets. I would be awake until the eagle babies were born.

I signed in to the live chat room posted to the right of the video stream. HawkBaby69 had posted, “I just looooove the sounds of nature <3.” There were others like me, these were my people! I should find them after the eagles hatched. I turned up the volume on my computer and bopped my head to the sound of the wind whistling through the trees. “I wish I were an eagle,” I typed into the chat box under the screen name EagleMomsRock. “I would fly and fly all day…”

I was calming down after the fight with Bill. I didn’t like the negative energy that surrounded him, and I don’t imagine that the eagles appreciated it either. The eagle mama was now staring at the camera. I was convinced that her shiny black eyes could see right through the camera, through all of the internet, through my computer, through my shitty husband, directly into my soul.

“Mommy?” my daughter Kayla squeaked from the doorway. “Can I play with my Barbies in your closet?”

“No, sweetheart,” I said. “Mommy wants you to play another game. It’s called ‘Sneak into the Kitchen and Bring Mommy Some Leftovers.’”

I snuck a half-second glance at Kayla. She shifted uncomfortably on her feet while grabbing her crotch as if she had to pee. “Daddy says I’m not allowed to,” she whispered. “He says you have to eat in the kitchen.”

“Daddy is trying to kill Mommy,” I said. “Do you want Mommy to be dead and gone forever?” I caught myself scowling, then twisted my mouth into a smile so that the little eagle hatchlings wouldn’t sense my aggravation and be afraid to come out of their egg hiding places.

“Noooooo,” Kayla moaned. “But Mommy…”

“Maybe your brother wants to play, then. Mikey!” I yelled. No response. I heard Kayla slink out of the bedroom.

It was dark now, and the camera operator had turned on night vision, rendering the eggs an unnatural lime green color. A small crack had appeared in one of the eggs. “Oh my God,” I said out loud.

Before the eagles, I was complacent. Complacency means that if you stop to examine yourself, you will realize that your heart is a hardened sponge and you will be smothered by all of the stagnation. So you don’t stop to examine anything. You are propelled by avoidance and your kids’ soccer games and grocery shopping, and then, I guess, you die.

The crack widened to a small black hole. I was so close to the monitor that my breath was fogging up the screen, but I didn’t dare wipe it. A tiny beak was trying to poke its way out of the hole, chipping away at the crusty shell it had been imprisoned in for the past three months. My entire face tingled with excitement.

Then the video stream cut out, replaced by a message reading, “ERROR: Check your connection.” I repeatedly clicked the ‘Refresh’ button as quickly as my index finger would move. “No oh no oh no oh no oh nooooo,” I moaned. The time for action was now.

I jumped out of my chair and ran downstairs with numb legs. Bill was standing in the kitchen, holding the internet cable in his hands. “You!” I shrieked frantically. Tucking my chin to my chest, I barreled towards him, but he nimbly dashed to the opposite side of the large island implanted in the middle of the kitchen. After five days in the same position, my body wasn’t functioning properly, and Bill seemed ready to take advantage of this as he hopped from foot to foot, taunting me with the limp cable by twirling it above his head like a lasso.

I grabbed the largest kitchen knife we had, the one that I used to cut up chicken and onions with, back when I cooked. I chased Bill in circles around the island, growing exhausted as he continued to remain one step ahead of me. When we were on opposite sides, we stopped.

“Do you think this is funny?” I said, gasping and fuming. He did, apparently, because his eyes were lit up and he was laughing at me.

“Just look at yourself,” he said, “about to murder me over some birds on the computer.”

I screamed, one of those purely animalistic screams that wavers in pitch, but not intensity, and cools the blood of anyone within earshot. With flashing eyes and a burning face, I jumped onto the top of the island and blindly swiped at Bill’s head with the knife. His eyes bulged and his hands clutched at his throat, so I knew that I had narrowly missed him. I probably would have shaved off one side of his hair, if he had any hair.

The kids appeared in the doorway, pajamaed and frightened. Bill blocked them with his body and held the internet cable out to me. “Okay. Okay,” he muttered. I grabbed the cable and a loaf of bread from the counter and stomped past my family, up the stairs.

As the internet was loading, I tried to calm myself with the deep breathing exercises I had practiced for labor. I didn’t want the hatching eagle to pick up on my energy and be frightened back inside his shell.

He wasn’t. When the video loaded, the top half of the shell was gone. A cartoonish fuzzy head had emerged and was peering around nervously, as if overstimulated by the cruel, cold world he had just entered. I gasped as the mama eagle tried to barf some food into his mouth. This was what life was all about! The miracle of life, a majestic eagle being born right before my eyes, a mama barfing into her baby’s mouth, hallelujah!

The mama eagle then sat on top of the newly hatched baby and the two remaining eggs. The show was over. The whole thing was kind of anticlimactic. “Don’t squish them,” I typed into the chat box, then stood up for the second time in five days. I walked over to the window and pushed the curtain aside. Even in the dark, I could tell that the giant oak tree in our backyard had started to blossom while I had been online. Its tiny buds swayed lazily in the wind, supported by a massive trunk that plunged into the soil.

Maybe I didn’t want to be an eagle. Eagles mate for life. That’s so stupid, but their bird brains wouldn’t know any better. I always assumed that whatever large bird was in the nest was the mama eagle, but it was just as likely to have been the daddy. This was their third generation of hatchlings. Their other babies had grown up and flown away from Decorah, but the parents remained – taking turns sitting on the eggs, decorating the nest with new dead things, making their nest-house a nest-home. They would be loyal to each other until the end.

I wouldn’t be able to do the same. I didn’t want to be a disappointment to the eagles, but by instinct they will stay together, while by instinct I will flee. All I had to do was get the words out. This seemed like an insurmountable task. I would have rather sat at the computer and watched the eagles for the rest of my life, until my family forgot about me and I turned into a skeleton wearing a bathrobe and pink house slippers. But for Kayla and Mikey’s sake, I will leave the computer.

I went and found Bill in the kitchen and told him I wanted a divorce.