Ethan winced at the tink tap thwack. The first strike stresses the egg. The second sends a thousand webbed fractures streaking through the shell. The third splinters the shell which ruptures the membranes, spilling out its yolk and white. Tink tap thwack.
After cracking the third egg, Josh glanced up. “You never did say how many you wanted.” Josh waited for a response, holding the next egg inches above the rim of the yellow bowl.
Ethan’s gaze lingered on the egg hovering above the metal rim. His eyes slowly wandered to meet Josh’s impatient stare.
“Ethan, how many eggs? One, two?”
Ethan blinked, and upon opening his eyes he once again found them focused on the egg. He began, “That bowl used to belong to my mother. She used to make me an egg sandwich every morning. Even when I told her I wasn’t hungry. Even when I had to leave early for football practice or study groups, she was always there. White and black striped apron and yellow bowl.”
Josh craned his head forward and sideways in that strange manner that asked whathafuckyoutalkinbout? “Ethan, I slept over a million times. I’ve had your mom’s egg sandwich in the morning.” Despite the circumstances of this morning, he couldn’t avoid a small grin.
Ethan continued, “that was her bowl. She gave it to you guys as a housewarming gift. She asked me if she thought it would be ok to give you guys something used. I said I didn’t care.” Ethan raised his hand a bit at the skin on his knuckle. “She bought a new one a few months ago. KitchenAid.” He looked back at Josh. “How the hell can I remember that? I barely remember where I sat for commencement. I have no clue what my locker combination was. I can’t even remember the name of our assistant coach.”
“Could you try and remember how many eggs you wanted?”
Ethan put his hands on his elbows and shook his head. “You remember the first time we did it on the roof of the middle school? That was the day you were telling us about that eighth grade chick from Health class you felt up, what was her name? Lauren. She dropped out from university already.”
Josh ignored Ethan and opened the cabinet in search of salt and pepper.
“You know, when I first saw this place yesterday, it immediately reminded me of your uncle’s flat on the west side. I smoked my first blunt there and I left the bag sitting out and his Labrador ate it. Fucking stoned big ass black dog.”
The salt and pepper were already on the counter, so Josh shut the cabinet and mixed them into the eggs in the yellow bowl. There was an absence of conversation for a moment as Josh poured the eggs into the frying pan.
Then, “Hey Josh. You remember the time the three of us got suspended for the shaving cream prank in the third floor? Kid down the hall at college was telling me he read about it in the paper right when it happ--?”
“What the hell Ethan? How much longer you gonna do this? How could I not forget that? My dad whipped me for three weeks for getting suspended. He still thinks that’s the reason I didn’t get any scholarships. You sat by Jillian Hast at commencement. Clipner was our assistant coach and her name was Lori not Lauren and if you really want me to fucking concentrate, I could probably remember your locker combination. Why do these things matter? We could do this all day. You could do this your whole damned life. It’s the past. Forget about it.”
Ethan quit biting the skin on his knuckles. “How? What about him?”
“Yea sure. Forget it. No, don’t forget him, just stop trying to remember the details. He’s dead.” This part is a bit louder. “He fell off a fucking roof. We were there, I closed my eyes, I opened them, he’s gone. What else can we do? Life goes on.” The eggs are burned and Josh turns around to face the stove. He’s still talking as he scrapes the wasted omelet into the trash but Ethan can only hear a few of his words over the scraping and the clock ticking above the stained cabinets.
“...can’t… roof… jerkin… immature… high school… never… memories…cum…”
Once the frying pan is clean, Josh’s rant slowly came to a halt. He took the eggs out of the refrigerator again but there are only two left. Tink tap thwack. Tink tap thwack. He started slowly whisking again, adding too much salt and pepper for just two eggs.
Josh stops to look at Ethan. “There’s not enough for you now.”
“I touched him.”
There was a silence and a gradual look of revulsion appeared on Josh’s face. “That’s disgusting, man. I can barely look at him, all twisted and smeared. We need to call someone.”
“Jesus, I didn’t touch his body. If I was gonna touch him now I would have at least pulled him out of the trash in the alley. Someone else can touch him when he’s dead.”
“What?” He poured the eggs into the frying pan and started slowly rotating them, the yellow and milky stuff of embryos and fluid swirling like primitive galaxies from which life emerged.
“I touched him. When we were up there.”
“Oh. I thought you touched his, well, body.”
“I did touch his body.”
“Not his dead one though. That’s sick. For all the time I put in these eggs they better be fucking good.” Josh’s back is still turned.
“Why does it matter? You think its wrong to touch people when they are dead and not when they are alive? If I can’t touch him when he’s dead what allows me to touch him while he is alive. It should be the other way around.”
“But you didn’t touch him while he was dead, right? You didn’t even wash your hands.”
“Josh. I touched him while we were up there. I was finishing and it was something about the stars or the night or the breeze and I was busting and I just touched his side. I just touched it and he was so startled he rolled. I touched him and he rolled and then he was gone.”
In the moment of silence that followed, the clock stopped ticking and the eggs stopped sizzling. The tension in the room built and cracked. Tink tap thwack. Josh spun around but before he could spew the things he needed to say he lost his footing, falling, eggs and ankles and pan and elbows flailing in the air. The pan cracked him on the head and before his blood could reach the wound he’s up again.
“You fuck. Oh my god. You killed him. You fucking killed him. I’m here, making you eggs in the bowl your mom gave him in an apartment whose lease has his name on it and you killed him. You fuck, faggot, shit. No. You killed him. It was all your idea.” The blood bubbles out of the gash on his head.
“You started it all those years ago. No, it doesn’t matter who started it. I just wanted to do it again last night.”
“No. You killed him. Shut this. Stop it.”
“I wanted to be with the stars, the traffic, him, you, myself. You’ve never left. You don’t know what its like to leave here, to not have you two around.”
“Yea, you got out. And you came back and killed him. You got your fucking scholarship. You left this place and couldn’t let us keep it. You killed him.”
Ethan cries and Josh bleeds and both yell.
“Was I supposed to throw away my scholarship? Because you two didn’t get one? You know, I really thought you’d be over that by now. I really thought that when I came home for the first time you’d be ok with it now. He got over it just fine.”
“Is that why you touched him?”
“You think I meant for this?”
Josh spat out the blood that ran into his mouth. “Yes. You killed him. You left us here. You came back here from your fucking college and came to stay with us in this shitty apartment, our shitty apartment. You expect us to just be the same – you want us to never change for you so you can always come back to this. You want to stride in here and climb to the rooftop and masturbate together like we used to when we were in middle school.”
The bloody face leering at him disgusted Ethan. He stumbled backwards, his face reflecting nausea, and slumped in a corner, not bothering to wipe away tears.
“Don’t cry for him, you faggot. You touched him, you killed him. Oh my god, he’s dead.” Josh staggered to the door way, ripping through the screen and slamming the glass door.
Ethan is alone in the kitchen of his friends’ apartment. There’s a yellow mixing bowl on the counter. There’s some eggs splattered with blood on the discolored tiled floor. He wants to cry for his dead friend in front of Josh. Friends cry unashamedly in front of friends. Friends share their darkest moments and secrets with friends. Friends aren’t too embarrassed to share that they never feel more free than when they are masturbating alongside each other on rooftops. Friends, true friends, real friends, can share the breeze over their half naked bodies, the distant traffic in their ears, their collective semen that shoots into the slowly spinning milky galaxies of their climaxing universe.
On the other side of the wall, out in the alley, Josh is hunched over a dead body. He stops crying and bleeding long enough to pull his friend’s white briefs and blue jeans up over broken legs and hips.
