A Quiet Life

A Quiet Life
by Baron WormserScattered Chapters

What a person desires in life is a properly boiled egg.This isn't as easy as it seems.There must be gas and a stove, the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills, banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.There must be a pot, the product of mines and furnaces and factories, of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts, of women in kerchiefs and men with sweat-soaked hair.Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies and God knows what causes it to happen.There seems always too much or too little of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping stations, towers, tanks.And salt-a miracle of the first order, the ace in any argument for God. Only God could have imagined from nothingness the pang of salt.Political peace too. It should be quiet when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and take it out on you, no dictators posing as tribunes.It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain that came from nowhere.
"A Quiet Life" by Baron Wormser, from Scattered Chapters. © Sarabande Books, 2008. Reprinted with permission.