Ever-After

by Beth Hahn

Weirdly, you become an egg. No shell. Hard boiled.

A woman takes you out of the refrigerator and carries you between her breasts. She clucks at your cold yolk. She warms you, rolling and touching. It’s time for the television show about a detective who falls in love with a figure skater. The detective wants to protect her, but he finds her in the ice arena, throat slit. Because you’re an egg, you can’t see or hear the television, but in your fleshy carriage, you can feel the woman’s heart gaining speed.

In the evening, the woman cuts raw meat with a sharp knife. You, the egg, are squeezed each time the knife comes down. Blood pools in the wood of the cutting board. It drips to the floor. The woman’s bare feet slip as she moves back and forth between the counter and refrigerator, always finding more meat. More dead animals in cupboards. A doe’s carcass under floorboards. Always more to cut with cleaver, knife, and saw. It’s impossible to say, after a while, if she’s hacking at the meat or herself.

She takes you from between her breasts, rolls you in slaughter, tenderizing grief. And then she eats you! She eats you up, in one bite. She pops you in her mouth, lips pursed, and swallows. Once. Twice. But you stick in her throat, round and persistent as lost love.

She absorbs animal slick, sucking guts up through her feet. Her legs mottle. Her pelvis pulses. Her face turns hot and pink as it would during sex. Delight and pain. Arousal and anger. She splinters, goes fuchsia — swallowing the sweet, strange egg — and blooms as a dahlia: enormous, open, sharp-petaled, thick stemmed. The egg, the ovule. The egg, the eye. The two fuse to become a single dahlia in the now clean, dark kitchen — only a nightlight illuminating the crimson crown — Egg glowing Kohinoor-like across sepals.

Around the corner, in the lifeless living room, the television is still on, and the show about the detective and the figure skater is on repeat.

In the morgue, the figure skater is cleaned and examined, and soon enough, the mortician and detective see that she isn’t really dead. When the detective kisses her pale mouth, her eyes open. Outside of linear time, the detective and the figure skater have always known one another — if you believe in that sort of thing — and soon enough, they live ever-after, and every day, he visits the arena to see her skate. She wears a high-necked black dress to cover the scar, black tights, and as he watches, he can hardly wait to take these clothes off. At night, when he does, he imagines her skating — the small sounds she makes, her extension and speed, and how, if he asks, she will let him unlace her skate boot as she describes the intimacy of a tongue, the piercing of eyelets, and the sharpness of a blade.

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Beth Hahn (she/her) is the author of the novel The Singing Bone (Regan Arts, 2016) and The City Beneath Her (Regal House, 2025). Her writing has been published in The Chestnut Review, Tiny Molecules, DMQ Review, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, Small Orange Journal, The Common, Milk Candy Review, Fractured Lit, CRAFT, and elsewhere. Find her at beth-hahn.com