Attilification

a meditation to make you closer to attilla the duck

imagine. you are attilla the hun. you die after many glorious decades.

you awake in a room. you look around. you see nothing but the white floor. you are sitting on it, and it squishes slightly under you, reminds you of the material playgrounds began to adopt under their swing sets after various all-American lawsuits.

except for the floor’s supple squelching or if you begin to whistle, it is quiet and still. you get the sense you are closed in, you aren’t so sure you’re in a room: you cannot see walls. you surmise there are walls and a ceiling or a dome or a cloudy atmosphere since all around and above you is white.

the room or whatever it is exactly you are in is warm. warmer than room temperature but not so warm you break out into a sweat. you determine it would not be a good temperature to go jogging in. you like the cold, you remind no one in particular, but cooler weather is best for jogging or generally exerting oneself. 

you look back down at the floor. all around you are cartons of eggs. a dozen in each. light brown cardboard cartons. the ones that are $1.59 (?) at shoprite. two dozen cartons circle you. or, as it were, icositetragon (or icosikaitetragon (or 24-gon)) you. each within arm’s reach. each open, facing you, their creamy white eggs surveying you with their placid, expectant lack-of faces like a bleached terracotta army. the eggs look cool.

you decide it is actually a bit warm in this room. you press your palms against the floor to transfer your heat to it via convection or, wait, was it conduction or maybe something to do with entropy, but anyway the floor does not receive your heat because the floor is approx. the same temperature as your palms, so convention or conception or what have you does not work. 

you look at the eggs again. they look at you. you know what you have to do.

you reach out your right hand and touch the egg in the near row, the row farthest from the seam between the lid and the chassy in the carton that was in-front-of and a bit to-the-right-of you. you touch it with the pads of your index and middle fingers. 

the egg feels cool.

you tap the tip of the egg. it feels sturdy. in fact, the rounded pointyness of the top of the egg suggests a capacity inherent to the egg to tap on the top of you in an aggressive manner, to see how much you like being tapped on. that is one mean egg, you think.

but when you pull the egg out from the carton, you see the egg is not so sturdy. the egg is small. smaller than your hand. you could fit the whole egg in your mouth in one bite. you’re not going to, but you could. you feel a sense of superiority over the egg imagining yourself putting it in your mouth. what more utterly a way to dominate something than to put it in your mouth? you can’t think of a way. your superiority over the egg pleases you.

you tap the sides of the egg. you realise your mistake at referring to any part of the egg as its ‘side’ since  the egg is round, oblong yet undeniably round, so your sense of superiority over the egg fades. but as you tap the part of the egg whose local maxima is not as much of a ‘point’ as it is a gentle hump or curve, you realize how weak the structural integrity of the egg is, so your sense of superiority returns. fetuses, you realize, dismantle eggs. or did the first crack of an egg render a fetal chick into a hatchling? 

you tell yourself to stop with the tomfoolery, and you get back to looking at the egg. feeling the egg. feeling its smooth shell in your hand. feeling its weight. feeling its weight distribution change as the yolk sloshes around inside. babies break this, you think, and i can put it in my mouth. the whole entire thing. 

you let the egg rest in your left hand. you clench your fist around the egg. your left hand might be a baby, but look: it can still break an egg. not so tough are you now, huh, egg? you think. 

the egg replies: cracking noises.

the whites ooze out over your hand, whisking away the slight excessive warmth at the surface of your skin. the part of your hand the white comes into contact with feels refreshed. it feels like a lady just put cucumber slices over its eyes like they do in cartoons but it just so happens that they do that in real life too. 

the yolk follows, and boy, is it yellow. the yolk is also refreshing, but the part of you it is refreshing has already been refreshed, and there are diminishing returns to anything being refreshed. you and any single part of you, you concede, can only get so refreshed.

you take another egg, one from the same carton to the right of the first egg, in your right hand. you crush it. hahaha, you think. stupid, weak egg. its cool innards refresh your right hand. 

there is much left of you to refresh, and there are many more eggs. you become an egg crushing machine. you take an egg, locate an unrefreshed part of your body, then crush the egg over it. as the whites and yolk cool you, you go like “ahhhh” like you have just taken your first sip of lemonade after mowing your entire backyard. you smash egg after egg all over you. you feel like a machine. you feel like you are dancing.

you exhaust your supply of eggs. you feel refreshed. but more than that, you feel like you have grown. matured. you have become a better person after crushing those 288 eggs. after conquering them. you are strong. they are weak. that’s why you are refreshed and they are in a pile on the floor around you.

you lay on the ravaged two-dozen-dozen eggs, reveling in the fact that you are the antipathy of a hen. periodically, you pound your chest like a gorilla. if you didn’t know any better, you would think you had actually gotten bigger.

you hear a sound. it sounds like a battalion of marbles is rolling towards you. the cavalry. of eggs. you get up and you gesture towards the ground around you where their brothers and sisters lay disemboweled around you. it is your duty to warn them, but deep down, you simply want to crush them.

you stomp on the first one that approaches you. it feels cool, but it does not refresh you. but the sound of the shell crushing underfoot refreshes your soul. 

you stomp on every egg that rolls your way. one dozen. two dozen. three dozen, four. you lose count. the eggs keep coming. more eggs are coming. then more. a swarm of eggs.  

the eggs start to come in waves, in clumps. dozens at a time from every angle. they stack on top of each other. conglomerates of eggs as tall as you roll towards you. you punch at them, and you easily crush them, but the sheer number of eggs begins to overwhelm you. a red army of eggs. goliaths of eggs agress you, and you are no david.

they soon knock you down. they soon cover you. you are soon encased in egg.

but you are a grown man. you are a king. you kick. you punch. you bite, and indeed, you can put a whole egg in your mouth. the eggs have numbers, but you have sheer determination.

you claw your way through the mountain of eggs, and soon, you see light. you see the earth as you remembered it with trees and sticks from those trees all over the ground.

you see a man peering over you. his eyes light up. “look, kids, there’s a duckling hatching.” he says.

quack? you think.