Kalliope 2015 | Page 113

Sheriff Thompson, alarmed, lowered his ear until she seemed to kiss him. “What was that, Mrs. Brown?” “Egg,” she murmured, gripping her icy hands around his jacket sleeves. “It came at me as a clone,” Old Edith told anyone who would listen, years after she recovered from that shivering vigil by the foothills. “Have you ever tried slitting your own throat?” Those words pounded through Sylvie’s head as she opened the bathroom door. A woman stood waiting, dressed much like Sylvie. Her hands were dirty, too; the tops of her nails grinned black with grime. “’Bout time,” she muttered, shouldering her way into the cramped space before Sylvie had fully left. The metal clips of their overalls clicked against each other. Sylvie closed her eyes again as the bathroom door slammed shut. “It came from the sky,” Old Edith insisted when questioned in her hospital bed. “It was an alien.” An alien pulled itself from the metal egg, dressed in a thin cotton nightgown. It raised itself to full height, five feet four inches, back bent slightly from years of hard, backbreaking work. In fact, it mimicked Old Edith in almost every way: pouchy under-eyes, varicose veins like roadmap lines up her shins, sleet-gray hair bound in a fraying bun at the base of its neck. Edith felt she was in a dream when it reached out with hands that looked like her own and tried to touch her face. It was two weeks after her hosp