Alice had not always carried the nest.
Once, she had been wild. Barefoot in the grass, mud streaked on her shins, running after chickens of every color—amber, violet, soot-black, and feathered gold. They were her companions, her kingdom. She knew their secrets, where the worms hid beneath stones, how the air smelled just before the rain, and the way the earth hummed if you pressed your cheek against it.
But the men from the factory came. They wore pressed suits, shoes too shiny for dirt, and clipboards heavy with instructions. At first they told her parents how she should stand when she greeted them. Later, how she should speak. Later still, how she should think. Each year the rules multiplied like weeds.
Her horns, which had once been small and soft as budding twigs, were filed down and covered with silver casings, shining like jewelry but cold as chains. “It is for her own good,” the factory men said. “So she will not grow in the wrong direction.”
By the time she was nearly grown, Alice hardly remembered the chickens. Their colors blurred into memory, feathers fading in the corridors of her mind.
Then came the egg.
The men placed it before her without explanation. “You will carry it,” they said. A nest was woven into her hair, and the egg—smooth, pale, impossibly heavy—was set inside. “Forty-seven years. Incubate it faithfully, and then, only then, you will be free to live as you choose.”
Alice bowed her head under the weight.
In the forest, where trees grew bare and silent against a yellow sky, she walked. The horns beneath their silver casings ached, straining. The egg was warm. Sometimes she thought she heard it stir, whispering faintly, as though alive.
She clutched her hands to her chest, as if holding in a secret. She tried to remember the chickens—how they darted, how they sang. She wondered if the egg dreamed of them too.
Story and art by Damian Smith
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