You’d watched her do it for years with envy. Turned on the switch that illuminated a dozen eggs scattered about a styrofoam oven. Instead of two neat rows of 70 calories, these misshapen, feather laden, orphans lay dormant in my mother’s 1st grade classroom until they pecked their way through birth only to be “set free” and dead before their 6 year old foster parents started the next school year.
So when I, crossing the farm across the street, stumbled upon a nest without a mother, took it upon my 12 year old self to clutch the only child from its cold next and cradle it within my hoody as I entered my first month of motherhood. I found the incubator, covered in the amniotic fluid of this past year’s open-house-show-stopper, and quietly brought it upstairs to my closet. I plugged it in and placed my single egg within its synthetic worming haunches. A few weeks later, my pubescent closet was filled not only with American Eagle sale items but the warmth of newly hatched killdeer. It was an endangered species. I fed it worms and it died. I felt proud. But now, filled with regret.