“This is how it always goes,” said Reb Nosnik, now blind and sweet-smelling. “No egg. Only hunger shaped like memory.” And the people nodded, for once, together.

“You do not know how to eat.” When the day broke, no one spoke of eggs. In fact, eggs were not eaten in Zitmah for seven years, until the child who had cried during the sermon returned from the hills, now grown, carrying a basket of pebbles and asking for salt.

Witnesses claimed the egg did indeed sob, though others said the sound came from the plumbing. A fast was declared, and then immediately broken with pickled fish.

III.
That night, the elders dreamt of enormous yolks circling the moon, and in each dream, a different cousin whispered,

was it not written in the Almelekh Codex? And why, too, did my grandmother die choking on an egg that she claimed was perfect?” To this Reb Ziblun replied, not with words, but by laying a boiled egg upon the bima and staring at it until it wept.

but by pressing it into the memory of the womb.” There was silence, save for one infant who cried from the gut.

II.
A dispute arose, as is foretold in the Soot-Songs of Tante Devela. Reb Nosnik, whose beard was long but uneven, stood and declared: “If this is the True Method, then why

The congregation, though weary of such declarations (there had been thirteen in the last calendar fog), nonetheless stood upright in reverence, as was the custom. “Each egg,” said Reb Ziblun, “must be cracked open with the left hand, shelled with the right foot, and consumed not with the mouth,