Egg Carton Ikebana

Her sweet husband is quietly complicit when it comes to one of her quaint habits, an odd quirk. She likes to balance eggs. Not balance as would a juggler working a routine—would that she could juggle raw eggs. No. This is a different equation, one of extraction. A balanced separation of contained from container whose resulting emptiness creates pattern.

Her favorite works result from an 18-set. There are more variations, exponential combinations really, past those of merely 12, though she admits 12 is the classic number and, were there a test—a qualifier, a board examination for missing-egg arrangers—that 12 would surely be the test given to certify minimum egg-blankspace competency.

She doesn’t cheat and work only in pairs. She’ll try to make a lovely pattern when faced with odd numbers, when complete symmetry is unavoidably unobtainable. There have been those tempting moments, when a casual break of a yolk could mean lightening the carton of that odd egg, when adding cholesterol to the day’s diet would ease a composition. Where compromised unspoken rules result in a readily achieved arrangement. It is then that she thinks of ikebana and the loveliness of asymmetry and she puts it back, in place, just so.

She can tell her husband must enjoy, or at least benignly tolerate, this simple obsession as much as she does. In following his cooking it is clear he, too, creates pleasant emptiness. She is quietly disappointed when friends and their cartons reveal assembly-line leavings.

She wonders what this might reveal about her chosen childlessness. Or how what is left is as important as that taken.