Read Excerpts from The Chaffin Journal

Poetry

"The Creeps "
by Mark Belair

Sophie, the old
egg woman, lived alone
in the sagging farmhouse across
the road from our modest suburban development.

Once a week, sometimes
more, my mother would send me
over to buy still-warm eggs from Sophie,
because she was too creeped out to do it herself.

Sophie’s fingernails
were always broken short and
packed with dirt. Dirt caulked the creases
in her weathered, widowed farmwife’s face too.

Her dark farmhouse was
a hovel—at least what I could see of it,
peeking in—and she wore heavy clothes even
in summer, so she usually didn’t smell too nice either.

But Sophie’s
brown, speckled eggs—
of all different sizes and shades—
tasted, when scrambled in butter, like nectar of life.

Then one morning,
as our family devoured eggs
bought only a few days earlier, my mother told us
that Sophie, two nights before, had passed away in her sleep.

And that the demolition
of her farmhouse, planned around
this long-awaited occasion, would occur
the following month so that a new housing development could go in.

At first, I confess,
I was privately relieved,
as a balky chore had just
been removed from my life.

Then, later that week, my mother
came home from the grocery store with
a carton of cold eggs, all pure white, all the same
size, all lined up like a tasteless suburban development.

Imagine
my surprise
when I found