some infinities are bigger than others

A bony hand cradles a small blue sphere. The hand is the color of tree bark, the fingers not parallel lines but lightning bolts, the nails sharp yellow fangs. The sphere is an egg, freckled and so fresh that downy feathers stick to its shell, wavering in the cool air.

The hands have held many eggs, but none have felt like this one.

An egg is both cycle and infinity. Eternal geometry, an unbroken chain that defies beginning or end. It encloses potential. To know this potential— to verify what is inside with total certainty — is to destroy it.

The blue egg is placed in a new nest, a wooden bowl lined with soil, salt, and grass. Herbs are sprinkled, and a few drops of fresh cream, precious and powerful, anoint it. Wrinkled lips draw near and dribble out a strand of saliva that clings, shining, to the blue shell.

Now the bony hand grasps a younger hand, a smooth one with dirt packed under bitten nails. The grip is gentle but serious; the hand yearning but afraid. A worn blade is dragged across, and hot red blood drips onto the egg, making the tiny sound of rain. Swirls of blood and spit and cream dye the shell, coating it in slimy life.

Inside the egg is a liquid that might have been a chicken. Remarkably similar to the consistency of the saliva, with the same chemical components as the blood. But this egg will not be a chicken. It will be a wish, part of a spell to grant the young hands something they want with every cell.

The chicken that laid the blue egg and her entire breed will go extinct. No one will remember what they looked like. But the liquid inside her egg will exist for the next two millennia.

Improbable that a chicken egg could grant a wish. But is it more or less improbable that it could remain unbroken for 1,700 years? This egg will do improbable things.

Cradled in its bowl of now-unspeakable muck, the egg is carried to a well, in the haunted dark of a pre-electric night. Stone steps stacked into the ground, muddy earth where green grasses sprout only to be trampled back down again. A cycle, an infinity.

The person holding the magic turns her back to the well. She drags her fingers around the rim of the bowl, another infinity, the geometry of forever. She says something unknowable, the air in her lungs pressed into new shapes, shapes that have been made before by many lips, but never hers.

Air passes through her body and out into the black sky, its shapes finally correct. It cascades over the egg, oxygen and nitrogen bouncing and swirling through their part of this world, a place that no person can see. As she tosses it backwards over her shoulder she resists the urge to look, like most people have failed to do before her. She doesn’t break the spell.

The words on the air surround the egg like an embrace, carrying it through the center of the well, avoiding the stone sides that would have cracked it open in a heartless instant. Grass and salt and soil from the bowl rain down around it like adulterated snow, breaking the surface tension of the water below, making it softer still.

The egg splashes onto a pillow of thick, filthy liquid, for this is not a drinking well but a wishing one.

On this puddle, viscous and dark, floats this egg, even as hundreds like it have cracked and shattered on the way down. Below the surface, shards and shells and stones lie inert. Dead animals and their bones decompose, failing to grant their wishers even the tiniest magic. At the boundary between our world and theirs bobs one surviving wish, swimming in a wretched miasma of wasted hopes and dreams.

As the water evaporates over weeks and years, the blue egg rolls down the pile of wishes. Beyond all probability, a stone missing at the bottom of the well has left an egg-shaped cavern where it nestles. It is protected from subsequent wishes by this cell, their wishers messing up every time, shattering eggs every which way.

Eventually, the blue egg is covered over by sticky mud. The mud is covered over by clay. The clay hardens and dries but the cocoon inside does not ever. It seals out the world and preserves the egg for sixty generations.

People live and die above this egg in staggering numbers. People bleed and rot and scream, tens of thousands of times. They crown kings and assassinate them, over and over, like eventually they’ll get it right. Some people’s whole lives are lived in one day, most get a few thousand.

Sometimes, a person near the well thinks to themselves (with scant evidence) this is the best day of my life.

Over time people wipe out the old ways of believing with new ones. They punish women and witches, but the magic is already done.

All along, the egg is there, suspended in its wet womb, improbably surviving, improbably granting its wisher’s wish. We cannot know what she wished for when she stepped into that ritual. But neither can we dispute its magic. What we got when she wished was the whole world.

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In 2010, an archeological team from Oxford University discovered a 1,700- year-old egg, unbroken, with liquid still inside, at the bottom of an ancient Roman well. In 2024, they announced plans to pierce the egg and drain the liquid for analysis. By the time of this writing, they may already have.