Is there no way to puncture the agonizing film keeping us all corralled here?
— “I Gave Birth In Another Era,” Sandra Simonds
A yolk is nutrients. The primary function of the yolk in embryonic development is to supply nourishment to the emerging body. The yolk allows the embryo to develop outside of the hen. It is protoplasm, a space, a room in which one grows.
I bungle the flip and the bottom of the egg (browned and butter-latticed) flips upward. It does not hide the ooze that spills from underneath the sizzling albumen: blood, gleaming yellow.
(Fuck!)
But I hold my tongue—contain the curse. I don’t want to startle my partner or our friend, both seated at the kitchen table.
If I’m among loved ones, is the breakfast really ruined anyway? The two talk about the new variant of COVID at the kitchen table behind me: my partner, cutting her egg (over medium) into smaller fragments, submerging the plate in a swirl of glistening gold against white; our friend taking attentive bites first of egg (hard scrambled) and then toast (lightly buttered), careful to keep them separate. Their chatter and gratitude for a warm breakfast help ease (but do not dissipate) the red words that tingle in my throat.
My toast would have burst the eye anyway. When my egg (over easy) is cooked correctly, the bread becomes both blade and vehicle—the diagonally-cut corner perfect to puncture a wound through which the yolk spews, the Maillard reaction creating a crispy bed that lifts the honeyed cholesterol to my wanting mouth. The crust, of course, becomes a mop—a wipe for the ceramic face of the plate.
The anger that ripples through me at the burst egg, then, must derive from my lack of control, my inability to puncture the yolk on my terms. Just as a traffic jam on your way to the airport might goad the amygdala (that little anxiety almond) into action, so too might a yolk, broken and burnt in the heavy palm of a frying pan. The end product would ultimately still be edible—a flabby puck of protein with a center crumbling like wet sand, sure, but a healthy part of any balanced breakfast nonetheless.
*
Membranes are borders. In a chicken egg, the vitelline membrane (also called a vitelline envelope) acts as a structure that separates the yolk from the albumen. Though thin, this membrane holds the yolk in place and allows an embryo to develop within its nutrient sac. The eggshell membrane, on the other hand, protects the albumen, yolk, and embryo against bacterial infection and prevents liquid from evaporating too quickly from within the fertilized egg.
I worked as a grocery clerk at a Whole Foods in Denver, Colorado through COVID’s first year while my partner and friends locked down. Though I faced the public every day, the social catastrophe of early quarantine cooked my world a cloudy white—the vitelline envelope thickening through the fever of the pandemic. From behind my cash register I watched customers buy potatoes, almonds, beans, diapers, and oat milk in bulk as if they were preparing for the end of the world. Their lips, when we could still see each other’s mouths, crinkled in fear and pressure. Through smeared plexiglass barriers haphazardly hung by wires from the ceiling, I punched produce PLUs into the register with fingers sweaty inside nitrile gloves. I scanned and bagged frustrated people’s panic-bought essentials, smiled with only my eyes as customers complained about our new social-distancing or masking policies. After lockdown sunk its claws into their already deteriorating mental states, they couldn’t help but let it all spill out.
Some threw fists in the aisles, others spat homophobic slurs (F*gg*t!) at the door attendants who managed the line at the entrance, upholding the state-mandated maximum capacity numbers (a cop always stood next to them, who was “only there to deal with major issues”). Those who somehow got in without a mask (or removed it after entering) made sure their smirks were visibly smug as I bagged their kefir and kale. One tore off his already-drooping face mask in a rage to berate me from the other side of my makeshift divider, the long hairs of his beard curling away from his lips, ruffled by the mask’s blue fabric.
You guys don’t have any toilet paper left! What kind of Whole Foods is this? There’s absolutely nothing on the shelves! That was the last fucking thing of eggs!
I lifted the lid of the egg carton (per policy) to scan for fractures and found that three white caps had been crushed in transit, shell and shell membrane floating atop a golden soup. I asked him (per policy) if he would still like his eggs and he spat on my barricade. I said nothing (per policy) and watched his loogie drip down the window as he stormed off without his bags.
In the constant commotion of the check-out aisles, no one had seen the man’s outburst. I sprayed my scanner with a blue disinfectant liquid that reeked of vinegar and wiped away the small bit of albumen that had dripped on my apron. Beside me, the belt clicked on and rolled forward the next customer’s boxes of cereal, acting as it always did, as if nothing had changed.
*
Chalazae are two twisted tissues. Located on opposite sides of the yolk and embedded within the albumen, the tiny spirals attach themselves to the yellow nucleus in order to keep the sac centered.
It didn’t take long for my partner and me to feel confined in our apartment. We could see the ruts we were digging into the carpet: my line from the front door to the shower to wash myself healthy after a day at my job; her yoga mat-sized rectangle in the carpet behind her desk, where she did home workouts during her remote-working breaks. Though we lived well together, we worried that seeing only each other would shrink our worlds. One of our oldest friends from our teenage years had been out of state for grad school, but had recently moved back to Denver when his program went online for the year; he found a place a block down the road from us, so we formed a small pod.
Though my job at Whole Foods risked exposure, the pod felt necessary to satiate my body’s need for camaraderie, to diversify my spaces. I spent my days off between the two homes, walking the short distance down the empty streets of Denver when I could feel the cabin fever creeping in. My friend had a bigger TV, better taste in movies, and a cat (whom he and I had once shared ownership of, when we were roommates in undergrad). My partner and I had records, games, and a well-stocked kitchen. Her family lived out of state and the thought of visiting mine filled me with dread (if I’m asymptomatic and I visit and they get it and it gets bad and they can’t get a bed at the hospital and it just keeps getting worse then it’ll be all my fault—). Our friend, who also had family in town, felt the same. Each of us was essential to the stabilization of the others.
With our other non-pod friends both in and out of state, my partner and I scheduled morning Zoom meetings to drink our coffee and chat as she worked from home or I had the day off from my essential job. In the evenings after work, we would hop online with a homemade cocktail or dinner to talk about the mundanity of our days. We tried to speak one at a time but stumbled over each other constantly, our little windows glowing blue with our laughter.
As the weather warmed up and the world’s understanding of COVID’s transmission became clearer, we would gather with our other pods of friends and meander through Denver from green space to green space with backpacks full of beer. At each park, the pods would circle up six feet apart, the booze bags (and snacks (a canister of sanitizing wipes)) piled in the middle for easy access. We would congregate in the manicured fields of buffalo grass or within aspen groves to chat and share space in the cool spring air. Since there were few updates about our day-to-day lives, we often reminisced about college when our lives felt raw, less shaped—when we would ooze ourselves from bar to bar every weekend, hitting the same spots over and over. All of us had hardened as of late—and though the pandemic sat a horrifying weight on our minds as we worried about our health and that of our loved ones, the country and the world, these “park crawls” offered a bit of mental wiggle room.
When demonstrators started peacefully assembling in downtown Denver in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (among countless other Black Americans killed months and years and decades before), we marched with them in the streets. The chanting voices we heard around us were passionate and enraged—a flame that fueled the people’s fight for justice, for our communities to exist unruptured. As we shouted along, condensation caught in our masks and dripped down our chins, the summer sun cooking us on the city’s pavements.
*
Eggshells are crystals. More specifically, they are crystallized calcium carbonate. The shell is vital to the survival of a developing embryo not only in its physical protection of its contents, but in its protection against desiccation and microbial contamination. The shell also helps regulate the transfer of gas and water to the embryo, and provides calcium for sufficient embryo development.
Citizens of Aurora, Colorado had been shouting for justice for Elijah McClain since he was killed in 2019. Aggressive interrogation from the police, along with a careless (and illegal) ketamine dosing by paramedics, had led to the twenty-three-year-old’s death the August before COVID—but it wasn’t until the next summer that demonstrations against the incident caught major traction, as part of a wave of social justice movements. While protests against the country-wide epidemic of police violence continued in Denver-proper, many began to gather in the streets of Aurora (a twenty-minute drive from downtown) to demand immediate local action.
During one such protest, an assembly of about one thousand people marched from Aurora city hall onto Interstate 225 in an attempt to clog one of the city’s main arteries. The demonstrators had grown tired of the waning interest in their fight and were executing a time-tested protest strategy to galvanize the apathetic public.
As people spilled onto the interstate from the entrance ramp, a few disparate individuals led the pack onto the interstate while others straggled behind, but the majority of the group remained a core, clustered tight together, chanting No justice? No peace! No justice? No peace! as they filed down the road. From the overpass and neighboring parking lots, people hollered and honked their car horns either in approval or with vitriol.
Most cars had been halted behind a blockade the Aurora police department had set up in anticipation of the march’s route. But a few sat between the barricade and the pack of protestors—a thin amniotic membrane between the vehicle-traffic and the body-traffic.
The crowd made it only a few hundred feet down 225 before a sky-blue Jeep Rubicon (on route to the Denver airport and late for its passengers’ flight) slipped past the roadblock and barreled toward the protestors. As it sped down the highway, a driver in one of the amniotic cars (a white Ford pickup) spotted the approaching Rubicon in their rearview mirror and swerved their truck to collide with it, slowing (but not deterring) the Jeep.
The crunching of the collision alerted the crowd which, within seconds, tore itself apart to either side of the road. Once they reached the shoulders, the protestors turned to throw their water bottles and backpacks and homemade signs that read JUSTICE FOR ELIJAH MCCLAIN or BLACK LIVES MATTER at the Jeep. Adding to the commotion, an armed member of the scattered crowd drew a handgun and fired it at the vehicle but missed, wounding another protestor amidst the bedlam. Further north, people were still unzipping from the protest, running from what their senses told them was a drive-by shooting—the gunman armored behind sky-blue steel.
Everything was scrambled. Some demonstrators leapt over and braced themselves behind the Jersey walls lining the highway, hunkering down to catch their breath. Some watched the Jeep slouch down the now-empty highway, unpursued by the police. Adrenaline still surged through the crowd as the blue dot disappeared into the distant horizon—many people were still fleeing, cowering, or climbing over the barriers, uncertain of their safety. When the heart rates of those behind the Jersey walls stabilized, they turned to extend their hands past the concrete (like pins piercing a film) pulling others from the hot asphalt to the soft, grassy median.
*
The albumen is another layer of protection. The primary purpose of the albumen—like that of the shell that surrounds it—is to protect the dividing cells. Containing over fifty percent of the egg’s total protein, the albumen also provides some nutrients to the embryo. The albumen is often used in cooking and baking, its abundance of protein perfect for the stiff peaks of a meringue or to fluff up the sponge of a cake. Small amounts of egg white have also been used in the preparation of the flu vaccine.
My $10 (after employee discount) egg salad dripped from its stale, whole-grain bread as I sat in the Whole Foods break room, squirming in a plastic chair. A rumor had spread, when they replaced the old chairs, that these new ones were designed to feel uncomfortable after only fifteen minutes of sitting. On a TV hung on the wall, the Executive Director of Something smiled in a slideshow. Essential doesn’t even begin to express what you mean to us. Thank you, Team Members! glowed in dark green text behind him. The next slide provided a bulleted rationale of the upcoming cuts to the Team Member health insurance policy (including why part-time employees would no longer qualify for coverage).
When I checked Twitter, I saw the chaos that had unfolded in Aurora only moments ago and my heart jumped past the mush of egg, mayonnaise, and wheat into my ungulping throat. (What had I missed while I was down at the register, checking out grumpy customers?). As I scrolled for more information, the series of events at the protest unfolded in algorithm-time: first the Jeep drove through the crowd then the crowd entered the highway then the shots went off then the Jeep drove through the crowd then the Jeep drove through the crowd again.
It wasn’t immediately clear what had happened, but from what I could decode on social media, people were safe. Rattled and on-edge, but safe. Relief flooded through me with each new post that alleged the well-being of the group (even the person caught in the handgun’s crossfire seemed to only have been grazed). But when footage of the Jeep from a different angle popped up in one of the posts, that relief twisted itself into uncertainty. Had I misunderstood what I had just seen? Was this footage a more recent development or just Twitter’s chaotic ordering of the events? From the periphery, it was difficult to untangle the mess I saw unfolding before me on the digital timeline.
As the news rolled in, I texted those whom I knew were at the protest for more reassurance that they were okay. When they didn’t respond, I told myself it was because they were still regrouping, collecting their shattered selves—that they had left their phones in their cars. I extended my unpaid lunch break to piece together more of the puzzle, scouring comments on local news sites, YouTube, and Facebook.
Well, don’t walk on highways and this isn’t an issue! – @ronquay
Jeep driver is the true hero! – @JuanIslands
This is jus BS!! Get off the HIGHWAY AND YOUR LIFE WOULD HAVE NOT BEEN IN DANGER!!!!! – @Sittingstraight12
It was overwhelming to see such ire for the community. The exclamation marks were like pins that pierced the thin film holding me together, so that the commentors’ rage oozed in from the puncture points.
The slideshow in the break room had looped, and the Executive Director was smiling down on me again. He had nothing to do with the violence that had occurred in Aurora that day (I don’t even think he lived in Colorado) but I felt the urge to throw something at him, to shatter the screen that held him. I realized that I was fanning the flame of my own anger and anxiety, that I was endlessly scrolling not only out of concern for my loved ones, but to avoid returning to work and dealing with the pandemic-exhausted customers who would bark cruelties at me from under their masks. I needed to get out of the building and back home.
I lied to my boss that I wasn’t able to taste my lunch, and she reluctantly sent me home (per policy). I could see the white of my knucklebones as I gripped the steering wheel. Though the streets were vacant, I watched for any sign of pedestrians, keeping the stereo off to focus better. When I came to a halt at a stop sign or intersection, I could hear the engine rumbling through my car—the hum of the weapon that encased me.
*
The blastodisc is a kernel. Every part of the egg exists to protect it. Once fertilized, the single, white cell in the center of the yolk undergoes a process called discoidal meroblastic cleavage, during which the cell divides and multiplies inside the yolk. Once the embryo has begun its development, when it is held securely in place, it will feed from the yolk and albumen and shell. To think of the egg as an eye, the blastodisc is the pupil—the hole in the iris where light leaks through. It is the convergent point, the singularity, the center of the center of the center.
In marching onto the interstate, the demonstrators in Aurora meant to disrupt (however briefly) the city’s stream of commerce and direct its eyes to the issue at hand. The obstruction of a highway demands attention not only from the people using it, but from the economy that relies on the road’s flow of products into stores, and consumers into cities. In the days following the Aurora protest, local news anchors and journalists muddied that message, focusing instead on the spectacle of the ensuing events. Coverage centered around clips of the Jeep, and the video posted by one of the Jeep’s passengers who defended the driver’s actions. By elevating the fiasco over the goals of the demonstrators, the media reshaped the narrative of the protest.
I do not know what amount of context (if any) could elicit compassion for the protestors traumatized that day. I figured that many of the comments were written by bots programmed to bait outrage and sow discord, but I also recognized the toothy grins and dramatic poses in the profile pictures that accompanied some of the posts—clocked the freckled faces and bleached blond hair of people who had walked with me through the halls of my high school and marched alongside me in its band, who had reached out to reconnect in the early, boring days of the pandemic.
No charges were brought against the driver of the Rubicon, but the protester who fired his gun spent 120 days in jail after his trial. The more time passed, the more the public perception of the protests warped, many writing its participants off as vandals and punks who wanted nothing more than to create disorder. Violent rhetoric against the protests had already taken hold of the country, but several incidents distorted the image further. Only two months after the Aurora protest, a seventeen-year-old from Illinois drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he shot and killed two demonstrators at a protest over the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police. With COVID still surging, fear of being harmed shrank the number of participants at the protests as the summer came to a close.
Years after the routine demonstrations had disbanded, one of the two Aurora police officers involved in the killing of Elijah McClain was convicted of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault and sentenced to fourteen months in jail with work release, avoiding prison. Though both paramedics were also convicted on similar homicide charges, only one received the same sentencing as the police officer. The other was sentenced to five years in prison, only to have his sentence reduced to a four-year probation a few months later. The other officer involved in the killing was acquitted.
The response to the court’s decision was a mixed bag. Some protestors felt a small sense of righteousness about the jailings, but many were aggrieved by the lack of stricter sentencing. Others found the acquittal absurd and harmful—a spit-in-the-face to their tireless efforts that summer and beyond. For those who had believed the first responders were only only doing their jobs, the judicial punishment was largely seen as preposterous and brought about more angry comments online. It seemed that any degree of retribution would spur more outrage from both the protestors (who may have felt that any penalty was not enough) and those defending the police officers and paramedics (who may have felt that any penalty was too much). In the heat of the aftermath, the edges of justice seemed ambiguously unshaped.
*
Without heat, an egg is just an egg, not food or a chick. In order for a fertilized egg to properly incubate, a hen must exhibit broodiness, in which she becomes extremely possessive of her ova. While broody, hens will severely or entirely reduce their consumption of food, focusing all their energy on the incubation process. When approached by other creatures during this stage, the hens will become aggressive and threaten the advancing body: ruffling their feathers and deepening the timbre of their coo-coos. It is easy to confuse these outbursts with anger, but they are simply a biological benevolence for the developing chicks.
My throat still burns when I think about that summer: about the driver and his friends who were not held accountable for their actions, about the Aurora Police Department’s budget increasing in the years after the protests, about the harm that could have come to people within my community. It burns all the way down, as if I’ve swallowed something scalding, a thick syrup of fear’s reduction. It is bitter like something left too long on the heat.
In Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine cleaves hatred from anger, describing the former as “the fury of those who do not share our goals,” whose “object is death and destruction,” and claiming that the latter “is the grief of distortions between peers… its object is change.” Heat, in other words, is essential to any act of making. Handled with care, it can sustain a fight for the betterment of a community, or fry an egg with a yolk perfectly unset.
The satiation of the body, that hungry thing, is found in space warmed by others—standing together for a cause, swaying with a crowd to music, wrapping one’s limbs within another’s. I am lucky, I know, to have not gone hungry during the pandemic, to have had people with whom I could march, laugh and be—over whom I could worry and tend.
I eat alone now. In the years after the protests fizzled out, my friend moved back to complete his graduate degree and my partner and I split, heading toward graduate programs of our own. Though we still keep in touch via Zoom or the occasional phone call, we left our shared apartment and parks behind.
It is lonely, I admit, cracking only two eggs into the oiled pan each morning—lifting any fragment of shell carefully from the translucent edge with a wet finger, and slipping the still-shuddering suns onto a single plate. As I saturate my toast, however, I cannot help but admire the fibrous network that held my breakfast all together before this perfect mess. What savor! What strength! What coalescent gold!