Hail and Expired Eggs

Egg
photo by switch1.

I was getting ready to head out to the grocery store when the sky opened up and a righteous storm blew into the city. Water streamed so thickly down the windows that I felt like I was in a car that had just dropped off a bridge into the river. Wind hit the glass so hard you could see the reflections bulge, hear the glass crack as it expands and shrinks. Then hail started to fall and I pressed my face up against the glass despite my better sense of judgment so I could see the spectacle of a million pea-sized ice balls dumped from the sky and drop 25 floors into space. First they whisked north in the wind, then they reversed and whisked south. Everything around me roared with the vibration of hail. Ice drifted on the roof of the church and looked like snow. Clumps of ice coagulated in the gutters and swirled around sewer gratings. I heard on the radio that manhole covers had been lifted off their moorings by the pressure of the runoff in the sewers.

It's over now. It's 10:30 at night. I’m usually sleeping by now but I’m baking brownies for when my family visits tomorrow. I couldn’t think of anything to cook and I can’t grill out since I don’t have a balcony and I feel so damn feeble that I have to buy roasted chickens at the grocery store. I must seem like some sad abandoned puppy to the women of my family visiting my apartment with its beef jerky, mixed nuts, and a fridge full of beer and olives and expired eggs. The guys are probably thinking “Awesome! Widescreen plasma TV, beef jerky, mixed nuts, olives…what a life! But you got to throw out those eggs, man.”