Yolk
BY UYEN DANG
Our dog hatched an egg one golden summer and Ba and I still believe it. It sat on its haunches for months on end and had this terrible whimper that kept Ma up, drove her to tears. Its fur turned white as salt and acquired this weird, fuzzy quality. We knew if we tried petting it, our hands would pass right through and we may or may not learn what a spirit felt like. Unfortunately, it gave a little growl whenever we neared so we didn’t dare test the theory. But we kept observing, intrigued, mystified. Then, one day, sun dripping off leaves and everything, the dog got up and there it was, bald as a head. Ma told us how we shouldn’t always trust our eyes, so Ba and I soaked our tongues in the memory, swished it round our mouths ‘til we coated our teeth in chicken fat yellow. So sweet. So heavy. We told people the story but said it was a shared dream, thought they’d call it nonsense despite the grinning evidence. For years we did so, told the story as our dream. The story as our past. The last thing I remember Ba telling me after he died, I touched it long ago; inside, everything felt like you.
