The cart came before the birds, its wheels whispering over the cobbles and a single lantern swinging from the rear. Nobody ever saw the driver clearly. By sunrise every doorstep in the district held the same delivery: butter wrapped in waxed paper and eggs arranged in a shallow tin lined with straw.
No invoices appeared. No money changed hands. The custom predated the oldest residents, the renumbering of the houses, and apparently the houses themselves. People accepted the food because their grandparents had accepted it, and because there is little incentive to investigate fresh butter that arrives free.
The counting was discovered by accident. An elderly woman who kept household ledgers noticed that every tin contained one egg for each person sleeping beneath that roof. Visitors counted. Infants counted before their mothers had told anyone they were pregnant. A nephew who arrived unexpectedly at three in the morning was accounted for by dawn.
More troubling were the occasions when the cart seemed to know of departures in advance. One household received six eggs on Monday, five on Tuesday, and held a funeral on Friday. After enough such incidents, people stopped discussing the numbers openly.
They developed customs instead. Nobody broke an egg belonging to someone else. Nobody carried a neighbor’s tin indoors. Families with one fewer egg behaved gently toward one another until midnight, though they rarely admitted why.
Some tried sleeping elsewhere when the count dropped. The cart adjusted. Others brought relatives into the house, hoping to confuse whatever arithmetic governed the deliveries. The additional eggs appeared without changing the absence everyone feared.
This morning our tin contained four. Five people slept here last night. I counted the eggs twice, then examined the shallow hollow in the straw where another seemed to have rested before being removed. The butter beside it was unusually warm and folded into a neat parcel with the corners tucked carefully underneath.
Upstairs, the house had begun waking in its ordinary sequence: pipes knocking, floorboards creaking, someone coughing behind a closed door. I counted four sets of movements, then five, then became uncertain whether I had included myself.
By breakfast everyone was present, irritated by my staring and eager to get on with the day. Nobody felt ill. Nobody had plans requiring travel. The fifth egg remained absent.
Near dusk I finally understood what had been bothering me. The cart always came once, before dawn, and continued down the lane without returning. Yet its lantern was standing outside our gate again, perfectly still in the gathering dark. No horse was attached to the shafts, and no driver waited on the seat.
Inside the cart lay a single egg in a nest of straw, still warm, while from somewhere upstairs one of us called down to ask why there were only four plates on the table.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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