Mr. Whelan's story "Before Our Revolution Comes" is available in the print edition of The Shore.

"EGGS"
by Jensen Whelan

The summer before Alice left for Crete to guard turtles’ eggs she finally made room for me in her bed. At the airport she gave me the keys to her apartment so I could water the plants and collect the mail. She kissed me, said she’d make it worth my while when she got back. Like I tend to do, I interpreted her offer in the loosest possible way and moved in to her place. The day after I was settled into, I went down to Burt’s Pet Emporium and bought a small turtle, which I named Tyron, to commemorate her. When I got home, I filled the aquarium with the rocks that came packaged in a small bag, a dish with some water and set up the heat lamp. I put small branches in with Tyron even though it falls under the heading of General Knowledge that turtles are not interested in climbing.

Tyron and I had fun. In the afternoons, before my shift at the restaurant started, I’d let him out of his aquarium so we could spend an hour or so together, just hanging out. I learned a lot about turtles just by watching Tyron; the way their feet stretch slow and unsure towards every new step. The thing I hadn’t expected about turtles was their speed. One minute we’d be sitting on the couch, Tyron propped up against a pillow on my chest, his head jerking back and forth, and the next minute he’d be gone. It’d usually take me a few minutes to root him out. Some days I’d find him with all his legs and his head retracted into his shell hiding under a chair. Once he’d taken cover beneath the CD-stand by the window. Other days I’d be ready to give up the hunt and go to work when I’d catch a glimpse of him behind one of the cushions on the couch, pushed as hard as he could against the frame. Every time I found him I’d stand there, trying to get into his little turtle-brain and figure out what he was thinking. Try to get just a flash of what made him run away from me all the time.

That’s pretty much how things went until Alice came home in October. I didn’t recognize her with all the sun she’d gotten. Not to mention all the weight she’d put on around the midsection.

When I introduced her to Tyron, she said, “Forget about Tyson the Turtle or whoever for a goddamn second, Steven!” Then slapped me hard across the cheek and told me it was my fault she couldn’t drink retsina with dinner. It took me few seconds to connect the not drinking thing with her being pregnant. I mean, I don’t think it was totally unreasonable for me to have missed such subtle clues. There could have been a thousand reasons she didn’t drink, many of which could have been my fault.

“So,” I said when nothing else came to me, “last week I dropped Tyron in the bath to see if he could swim.”

Alice lost it. She took a piece of stone that she’d chipped of a temple pillar and threw it at me. It smashed against the wall into more tiny pieces than years it was old. Then she started crying and screaming about how it came from the same temple Lord Byron had written so much about. Probably it was valuable, and it had definitely been beautiful. She called me the opposite of both of those things, and wondered pretty loudly what I was still doing at her place. I couldn’t get her to calm down so I took Tyron out of his aquarium hoping he’d try to escape. I figured if we had a task to accomplish together, we could stop fighting for a second and talk it through.

Tyron wasn’t in the mood. He just stood there. Maybe the screaming gave him stage fright because he didn’t move at all. I nudged him with my shoe, and he turned his head up towards Alice, then me. I don’t know if, scientifically speaking, a turtle’s face can express emotion, but Tyron had a seriously defiant scowl plastered across his beak.

The three of us stood there for a long time. Alice and me staring at Tyron, and him back at both of us. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I asked her about her trip. She told me how every night she and the other volunteers would go out with a biologist from the university. They would find the places where the sand had been disrupted a little and where, if they looked hard enough, they could still see tracks heading back to the water. Then they would set up their chairs and sit down. And then, like now, they’d do absolutely nothing but wait for the eggs to hatch.

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Jensen Whelan lives in Stockholm. His writing has appeared in magazines both online and in print and is forthcoming in Hobart, Bullfight Review, and others. More information can be found at his website, jensenwhelan.com. He is currently working on a collection of short fiction.

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