Eggs - Chris Callaghan

Juggling, Troy’s father had told him, was really just a trick of the mind. You had to convince yourself that you could throw two or five or eight things up in the air and they would stay there long enough for you to move your hands around so fast the audience would be convinced that you were actually juggling.

“Start with simple things,” Big Ed had said. “Fruit is good, oranges or bananas maybe. Best to stay away from things with sharp edges until you get the hang of it.”

So Troy had started with bananas. But juggling is hungry work and by noon he’d eaten one and a half of them. He found that it’s really no use trying to juggle half a banana, so he ate it and moved onto two oranges.

Unfortunately one was a little riper than the other and all he got for his efforts was a large orange stain down the front of his shirt. Every so often Big Ed would wander by and nod approvingly at him. “Good job son, keep practicing,” he’d say.

Now all Troy’s mother’s crockery was in pieces littering the yard and he still hadn’t gotten the gist of juggling. There were knives aplenty in the kitchen drawers, but Troy looked at the bits of pottery and then at his fingers and knew he was no where near to the point of trying with them. He was wracking his brain for something less dangerous to practice with; whatever he picked had to have some weight to it too. He knew for a fact that feathers or blades of grass or the like wouldn’t do.

Just then he heard a squawk and a fluttering of wings from the henhouse at the edge of the yard. “Ah!” he said. “Brilliant!”

He pushed himself up off the overturned bucket he’d sat on to eat the last orange, picked it up and crossed the yard.

If he scattered all his mother’s pots and pans around him while he practiced, he thought, he might be able to make a decent omelet out of the eggs he dropped. Big Ed would be so proud of him, multitasking so to speak. And, that would take care of dinner.