10. Her grandmother had taught her the art of reading egg shells. The secret wasn’t in the shell itself but in the void the shell made, the conjuncture of fractures and alignment of curves. It had everything to do with the person who broke the shell and for whom it was being broken.
Her grandmother could also read tea leaves and smoke exhalations. She could predict weather, walk in the dream, see a person’s aura, tame horses, speak without moving her lips and predict on which side a flipped coin would land. There were many other things her grandmother could do but none of these had been passed down to her. She had only picked up the egg shell reading.
Such things were increasingly looked on with disfavor. They linked her talents to the old times and everyone seemed to want to forget the old and start from absolute scratch.
She sat on a stool in her kitchen cracking egg after egg into a bowl and looking at the shells as she discarded them. She hadn’t seen anything for days. Things were getting worse in the town with poverty, homelessness, illness and no one knew what to do about any of it.
There were murmurs of some kind of a purification of The Company’s proceedings with a more stringent combat against complacency and the disintegration of the town. She also heard that they were putting a layer of cinder blocks over the brick wall. What for, she couldn’t imagine. But murmurs didn’t feed her children. She poured the egg batter onto a frying pan and heard it sizzle as the albumen turned from clear to white. Eggs would fill her children’s belly only a little better than murmurs but at least it was something.
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Her grandmother could also read tea leaves and smoke exhalations. She could predict weather, walk in the dream, see a person’s aura, tame horses, speak without moving her lips and predict on which side a flipped coin would land. There were many other things her grandmother could do but none of these had been passed down to her. She had only picked up the egg shell reading.
Such things were increasingly looked on with disfavor. They linked her talents to the old times and everyone seemed to want to forget the old and start from absolute scratch.
She sat on a stool in her kitchen cracking egg after egg into a bowl and looking at the shells as she discarded them. She hadn’t seen anything for days. Things were getting worse in the town with poverty, homelessness, illness and no one knew what to do about any of it.
There were murmurs of some kind of a purification of The Company’s proceedings with a more stringent combat against complacency and the disintegration of the town. She also heard that they were putting a layer of cinder blocks over the brick wall. What for, she couldn’t imagine. But murmurs didn’t feed her children. She poured the egg batter onto a frying pan and heard it sizzle as the albumen turned from clear to white. Eggs would fill her children’s belly only a little better than murmurs but at least it was something.
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