Lines fine like down.

*

For years the Easter egg lived in the vitrine, on the shelf behind the glass door. It had been 

cooked in onion skin, a pantyhose pressing a clover leaf pressed against its shell, and turned into 

a cosmic latte: the warm beige of the clover impression, Mars yellow and chrome, specks of 

titanium white, cadmium red. One day a line appeared, a thin eyelash. Perhaps there’d been a 

crack before, no one knew.

But the fact remains: the egg had lived on the shelf, behind the glass door.

*

The story goes: A man hauls his wife, his dovecote, and his two children. The mud is slick, and eventually the man’s grip weakens.

He lets go of the dovecote, the wife, and ever so slowly, of his children, hair by single hair.