Wednesday, March 14, 2012

OccupyEggs1

OccupyEggs0

She'd cracked the first egg on the edge of the frying pan, but as she'd held it over the oil it had fallen out of her hands when she'd tried to pry it apart. It had been a bitch to get all the pieces of shell out of the hot oil, but it had been worth it just for the idea that had occurred to her – to deep-fry the egg, whole, in its shell. Of course it had cracked in the hot oil, but what oozed out of the crack coagulated and sealed the rest of the egg. She'd let it fry, rolling it around for about a minute before taking it out. Now, with the shell cool enough to touch, she tried to peel it, but that pesky inner membrane stuck fast to both the shell and the egg. So she lopped off the top and scooped the egg out with a spoon, holding the egg in her hand, just as she used to do with soft boiled eggs as a school child. Of course, she'd known even before tasting it that the white would be rubbery, egg proteins have to cook slowly to avoid that texture. But she liked her eggs best that way – unevenly cooked, the outer part of the white rubbery, the inner part runny and the yolk warmed but silkily fluid. It handily beat the fried-egg sandwich Hemingway ate over the course of a paragraph in a bar in Florida. She couldn't fish, couldn't play a bull, and her mountaineering days were long past, but she'd outdone him, Old Hem, at last. If she could only avoid sticking a double barreled shotgun in her mouth, she would outdo him forever, outlast.

Why she liked Hemingway, DWM, misogynist because of all the women he'd loved who hadn't loved him back the way the rivers and seas and mountains did, she couldn't even begin to explain why she liked Hemingway. She'd never read him in school, none of the girls from school had, only certain and very few geeky and wannabe macho guys she knew had read him in school. In the Women's Studies course in college, he was their first assignment, and it was painfully easy to do a feminist deconstruction, and it was all over in a few seconds. Yet there were certain passages that had become ingrained in her brain, and fried eggs were forever associated with Hemingway the way rainbows were forever associated with Rutherford.
OccupyEggs2

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