Duck Eggs

Ask me right now if I know what I’m doing, and I’ll tell you right away that I don’t have a slightest clue on how to start this one. Surely, it’s easy to tell a story, we do it every day, to our friends, our pets, to that elderly lady at the bus stop. Heck, we tell stories of our adventures like we earn from it, we are, as we would always say, professional story weavers, we add, deduct, depending on how we think people would view us after we say “the end.”

Our stories would usually change, depending on who we are telling it to, my wrist for example, I broke it while I was trying to save a kid from being run over by a huge truck transporting hungry lions, wrapped with barbed wires and sticks of dynamite, while all along dodging rabid bears and landmines on my longboard. But of course, this story is only for friends, truth is, I crashed while trying to downhill a busy intersection, I wiped because I still have yet to learn how to do a stopping slide. If I told you the latter story, then you know where you stand.

But I digress, what I am  really trying to say is: telling a story by mouth is different from writing it down, and because of that, we are here…which is really more like: here I am, having my evening tea with nothing to do. Sure I can play Skyrim, we all know those dragons wont slay themselves, but I chose to do this instead, to sit down and recall from memory a story from my childhood and write it down for my friends. That’s you guys.

But of course, read along only if you have the time, if you don’t but you’re still quite interested, you can always like this post and just hunt it again in your favorites when you got your free time, if you’re not interested at all, you can always skip this. Like I said, it’s just a story, you won’t learn from it, perhaps get a few laughs but really, it’s just a story, about, duck eggs.

Wow, I just realized my introduction is a bit long, still here? I told you I dont have the slightest clue to what I’m doing.

umn…

…to the story then!

Back when I was around six years old, my mom and I will spend our vacation at my grandparent’s farm, and by mom and I, I mean just me by lonesome because she’d always have somewhere to be, it’s not like she doesn’t love me or anything, or that she’s not qualified to be a mom, you have to understand, she was studying back then, a studying single parent. My father did not leave us behind, well…technically you can say he did, but hey, that’s for a different story and time, right now, the important thing to know is, my dad did not leave my mom and I (by choice), and that my mom loves me…and that this story starts with me adventuring around my grandparent’s farm while my mom was away.

My grandparent’s farm is located in the center of an agricultural university. The farm is surrounded by several farms used by the schools to teach students how to…well…farm. You can only imagine what this set up is like to a six years old, it is the very equivalent of Tolkien’s world to LoTR geeks, or perhaps, like Bethesda’s Skyrim or Fallout. What I’m trying to say is, there is always an important point of interest on your every turn. For example, right in front of our house is a catfish pond, beside our house is a pig farm, in front of that is a wide stretch of rice field and behind the rice field is a pineapple plantation, beyond that is the forbidden land, a sugarcane farm (full of snakes my grandmama would say, so stay away or else you’ll be dead before you know it, you’ll be dead like your dead, she’d say).

I keep my distance from the sugarcane field, back then I didnt want to be deader than dead. But of course, I didn’t know better, I was six. If I knew how tasty those sugarcane sticks are, well…fuck snakes and death, hello tooth decay.

Now like I said, this story is about duck eggs.

You see, around the farm are free roaming poultry animals: chickens, geese, those fucking turkeys which for a six year old adventurer, are the equivalent of Urukhai (you know, those badass orcs that were chasing Aragon, Gimli and Legolas in LoTR Fellowship of the Ring movie) and the moment they puff up their feathers, ah well, you know you’re about to be chased, and if they catch you, murdered.

Anyway, besides the gobbling feathered Urukhai warriors were ducks.

The thing with these free roaming poultry animals is that they would make their nest wherever they think is convenient, ducks especially. I think it’s a duck thing… to just make their nest wherever they feel like it. I will have to do some scientific research to back this theory up but yeah, that farm was just full of duck nests. If you find a nest under a tree beside a pond, well, that for sure is a duck’s nest. If you find a nest between a mound of clay and a boulder that is within a throwing distance from a pond, duck’s nest. If you find a nest under a moldy couch full of toadstool behind your house, you dont even have to think about it, it’s a duck’s nest…or snakes, depending on your luck.

Well, that afternoon I found a burlap sack nest, and there were eggs. Duck eggs.

For a six year old, finding a nest full of eggs is like winning the lottery, and the thing about being six is that you think everything you do is right. I was a rocketboy of six, my knowledge about sin was contained within the boundaries of taking extra cookies out the jar and smuggling tadpoles to my room. Serious stuff like stealing was still hazy for me, besides, I didn’t know that the ducks, the nest and the eggs where a property of the school, I just thought the nest and eggs where owned by those damned ducks. So I took the liberty of bringing them home, the eggs, plus the burlap sack nest (I needed a container to contain the eggs, and how convenient was it for them ducks to use a burlap sack as a makeshift nest).

I would usually go home muddy and dusty, once I even went home without my slippers, but that afternoon I was extra muddy, extra dusty, and extra happy. I had eggs.

And boy was my grandmama happy when I offered her those eggs.

In a perfect world.

Too bad our world is far from perfect.

She gave me a spanking (with my own slippers mind you…I was wishing between sobs that I should have lost my slippers that day instead, though I dread the thought of what she would have used if I did lose them), she gave me a spanking so hard that I’m sure as hell when my daughter or son crawls out of my wife they’d be going “WTF WAS THAT SHIT??!! WHY IS MY ASS SORE???” She gave me a spanking so hard that it will be felt by my kids and their kids up to the third rocketman generation, she spank me with my own footwear that the pain I felt that day was imbedded into my DNA, to be felt by people three floors below me in our family tree.

 I never cried so hard in my life.

I didn’t cry because she spank the shit out of me because I stole those eggs, like I said, my knowledge about stealing and sin was still a bit well, behind. I was crying because I didn’t understand why she got mad instead of showering me with kisses when I offered her those well earned treasures (I didn’t steal them, I adventured for them, across ponds, fields, and fucking turkeys). It was a hard concept to grasp, I was confused and a bit sore (in my behind), I was saddened by the reaction that I got, it’s really just that, kids can get hurt really quickly when you give them the wrong reaction, they get confused and fucked in the head, and when you inflict them physical pain, ah well, shit just starts to get crazier and harder to understand.

But you know,

that night,

we had hard boiled duck eggs for dinner.

I never understood grown-ups, and even though I’m already one right now, I still can seem to understand them, especially the ladies…a topic which we will perhaps cover with another story. But yeah, I was spanked that day because I stole those eggs, yet in the end my grandmama prepared them for dinner. Grown-ups are crazy I tell you.

But even though my ass cheeks were still burning that night, I was grinning from ear to ear when I saw those steaming boiled eggs sitting on the bowl all tasty like. I offered my grandmama the first egg for it didn’t feel right for the hero to have the first bite from the loot he earned through adventuring, I had to please my grandmama because of some stuff that I didn’t understand.

I was still smiling when she sucked on the egg. Though not for long, my smile turned to pure dread when I saw her spat out a baby snake.

You see, ducks dont really turn burlap sacks into nests, snakes do that shit.

Fuck you ducks.

And seriously, fuck you snakes.

Do you know how it feels to be spanked on your raw sore ass cheeks all over again? I bet you dont.

I do. And so will three storey of people below me in our family tree.

So yeah, I’m not sure what you earned from reading this particular story, I just hope that you’re not feeling like I just wasted your time. I am finishing my second mug of tea now, and my fingers are already twitching to kill some dragons, so I would like to leave a very short closing remark.

Ask me right now if I know what I’m doing and I’d still tell you that I don’t have the slightest clue on how to start, or end this one. Because before I even punched the first letter, I was already worried about how people might view me after reading my story. I was too worried that my work might turn out to be too lame, or too stupid, or worst, a literary waste of time.

But then I thought, why am I scared?

I’m just telling a friend a story about duck eggs.

The End.