SHELLS

They started appearing all over the place, the eggshells.  Growing up the walls of my house like indoor ivy and covering the window ledges.  They weren’t like boring brown supermarket eggs; they were all different colours, bright white, greenish blue, pink, cream and speckled beige, deceptively pretty.

Any attempt at moving the eggshells resulted in breakage, so I crept carefully around the house without touching them.  I avoided the walls where they grew and didn’t open windows in case the breeze blew them off the ledges.  My friends, when they visited did the same, sitting in the furthest points of the room from the egg shells, glancing at them furtively, but never mentioning them.

I had to adapt to further restrictions when they started growing on the furniture.  I could no longer sit in my favourite armchair and the presence of shells in the kitchen cupboards made the removal of pans for cooking impossible.  I ate microwave meals.  When the first shells appeared in the tub, those long relaxing baths I loved became out of the question, I had to take showers instead.

My sister arrived one day, squeezing through the front door which I could only partially open due to the presence of shells on the hinges.  She walked carefully along the hall and sat gingerly on the arm of the sofa.  She stared at the egg shells on top of the television, on the closed curtains that I could no longer draw to let light in, on the music system.  We chatted about her neighbour’s new baby, our father’s illness, her husband’s job and of our mother.  Then suddenly, she whispered; “You can’t live like this.”

I shook my head at her, but it was too late, the shells on the wall in front of us juddered and one fell onto the carpet, breaking in two.  We stared transfixed at the gap in the wall it left.  Eyes glared through and there was a low menacing snarl.
“You can’t come around here again,” I told her sadly.

We kissed goodbye in the hall.  The door opened enough to let her out, but when I closed it, shells spread across the aperture and I knew I would never open it again.  I sat on the floor of the living room, holding the broken eggshell in my hand, weeping.