Bad Eggs

April 20^th, present time

Claudio was scratching his shaven head, thinking that the expanding pool of goo looked a lot like those pools of blood below recently dead characters in movies. It was a dark moonless night, so the transparent white of the eggs over the paving could pass as blood, but the yellow and the bits of white shell were there, reminding him this was not a movie. He was old enough to remember a time where such pools of blood only appeared in gore movies, but movies nowadays were not as wholesome as they used to be, everything had grown more twisted and gratuitous, more immoral, and impure. What used to be relegated to a near secret and shameful corner of Blockbuster, was now all over the Internet. His thoughts were interrupted by a shrill voice:

“Stupid idiot, you wasted another egg, what are you waiting for, give me the next one, and this time do it carefully! or do I need to explain to you what ‘one’ means?” said Rodrigo, the guy to his left.

Rodrigo was waiting with his hand extended, thick eyebrows in a frown, barely visible in the dim neon light casting an almost nautical shifting pattern of darkness and soft light over his bearded face, it made him look simian in a threatening and primal way. He was the largest of the trio. All of them were dressed in black, wearing bomber jackets and military boots, hiding in the shadow of the trees of the park, across the street from their target. José Tomás, a gaunt looking skinhead, gave Rodrigo another egg, who then took it and placed it in an empty carton, and asked in an over-the-top whisper:

“Now, give me another bit of tape.”

José Tomás peeled and teared a piece of duct tape and presented it, middle finger extended with one bit sticking to it, towards Rodrigo. Rodrigo took it, his frown not softening one bit and tore it in two. He stuck one piece over the top of the egg and turned it round and stuck the other piece on the opposite side. He then took a drawing pin and made a hole with it through both taped ends. He used his pocketknife to make one of the holes a lot bigger and turned the egg around and blew the egg out of his shell and onto the ground.

“Not my shoe again fucktard!” said José Tomás, moving his black boot out of the way of the second pool of goo at their feet, injecting unnecessary drama into his movements.

“I think we should remember who the fucktard here is,” said Claudio, his voice a deliberate and well pronounced menacing monotone, his deep blue eyes either side of an aquiline nose piercing with hate. José Tomás looked like he was about to retort, but Claudio’s unhinged expression was enough to stop the words forming in his brain. Claudio kept talking:

“Remind me who is the one unable to understand what a dozen is…”

“It´s twelve” José Tomás interrupted.

“No José Tomás, the answer to that question is not twelve, it´s ‘I am’, you are the one that brough six instead of twelve eggs when asked for a dozen, so unless you want me to make you eat those eggs, shell and all- he said whilst pointing at the broken eggs on the ground- you are going to stop arguing and you are going to get on with your task, because I think it is entirely reasonable for me to make you eat those eggs if you are going to behave like a brain damaged child.”

Claudio wondered how he ended up with such idiots as comrades. He sometimes thought they were not even aware of what their mission was. The eggs were his idea. The previous year, on the anniversary of the death of the bearded communist degenerate whose house sized mural they came to correct, they had thrown bottles full of paint at it. Not only were they very drunk by the time they decided to do it, so naturally their aim was less than ideal, but one of the two paint filled bottles they used bounced off the wall, and exploded in a pool of white on the pavement instead. The one bottle that made contact did not even touch the face of the communist icon he hated so much. To add insult to injury, by the time they came back in the day, to look at the result of their act of freedom and justice, the white stain was almost not visible and a kid on a ladder was painting over the faint white splurge along the left shoulder of the red terrorist.

Claudio was 30 years old, significantly older than Rodrigo´s 20 and José´s 18.  He saw them as their disciples and worried they were not intelligent enough or aware enough of how important their mission was. He had thought that they would get more chances to hit the face of the communist butcher if they used paint filled eggs, an idea he got after finding some painted eggshells his uncle had made when he was younger, and that his mother kept in an egg carton stuffed with shredded paper she brought out every Christmas to hang on the tree with the rest of the decorations. He had also changed the date of their symbolic attack for a more glorious one.

Rodrigo gave Claudio the empty shell, an almost sheepishly comical expression on his face, like the one a dog makes when he wants food or attention from his master. Claudio stuck another bit of tape over the smaller hole and carefully poured the white paint into the eggshell through the larger hole and then placed it back in the carton.

Twenty years earlier

An old man sat at the edge of a low-lying wall, the strong midday sun casting the tiny shadow of the edge of the cap on his head over his eyes. He was looking across the street with his one functioning eye at the park that one day he had only seen in his imagination. When he had first arrived in this neighbourhood many years ago, it was nothing but a barren hill used as makeshift landfill by illegal dumpers, but with hard work, determination, the help of friends and family and an unwavering desire to live in a better place for everyone, he had turned the waste dump into a park.

The paint over the white wall behind him made a faint cracking sound and a large piece of it fell to the ground, he turned round and saw something that stirred his memory. He went inside the house and searched through picture albums and old manila envelopes until he found what he was looking for. He stood in front of the wall and looked at the picture and then the wall, going from picture to wall and vice versa. Twenty five years before he had sat at the wooden bench in the park looking at his sons working on their homage to their hero, the picture of their work, now in his hands.

They had painted the mural during a period when music, culture and art have had a renaissance. Mario, his oldest son was not good at drawing, but he had climbed on a ladder and carefully drawn a grid for his younger, and more artistically inclined brother Ernesto,  to copy the most famous photograph in the world into the wall using charcoal. His sons had then spent a whole week painting it in bold black and white, layer after layer of oil paint until it looked like it was lacquered. A large mural tribute to a revolutionary hero, that Sartre had once called “the most complete human being of our age”.

When the blue-eyed butcher came illegitimately to power, the mural had to be painted over. The soldiers had threatened to fire a tank shell at the house if it wasn’t done. The old man had seen some of his friends thrown in the boisterous sea alive, meat hooks thrusted in their jugulars, chained to rocks and pushed of a helicopter. He had seen his older son turn into a shadow of his former self after weeks of torture and had to say goodbye to his younger son who was exiled. So he was not going to take any chances, he would do as the soldiers said, and he did not protest. The mural was covered in white paint, several coats applied until it completely disappeared, and so it remained until that day.

But like the ideas that had built the park now enjoyed by all, the edge of the left shoulder of Dr Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna was now faintly visible after the large chunk of paint had cracked and fallen from the wall.

Excitedly, the old man almost forgot his age and trotted into the garden, pulled the hose out, set it at the highest pressure and used the powerful water jet to peel more of the flaking paint off, revealing a familiar silhouette that made him smile. Traces of the past were faintly visible for the first time since democracy had returned. He moved in closer to the wall and used his fingers to peel some more of the paint off.

People called them Nazis for wanting a country free of criminals, homosexuals obsessed with perverting the minds of children, and communists demanding everything for free from the taxes paid by hard working, God-fearing, law-abiding people. They wanted a country free from the grasp of international communism, the globalists and the Jews; free from that powerful cabal turning all the men gay; taking women out of their nurturing roles as mothers, nurses, teachers, and carers, forcing them into the workforce; and even financing the media industry to remove all male role models and replace them with “strong women". If wanting a return to the idyllic times they had in the 80s when men were men, and women took care of them was being a Nazi, indeed Nazis they were. But it was only Claudio that thought this way. Rodrigo was just a thug, free riding on the beer and coke Jose Tomás' dad´s money would buy them, and the cheap thrills of beating homeless, trans, and gay people. And Jose Tomás who still did not know what a dozen was, was there only because he wanted to please Claudio so badly, he wanted HIM so much, he would do anything for him, anything.

The eggs were ready. Only 4 remained. They approached the mural and the devil depicted on it. José Tomás took aim first and landed his egg right on the star in the middle of the beret of the bearded degenerate, white streams of paint going down its forehead and into the left eye, white tears of a long dead legend. Rodrigo went next and caught the beard dead centre, doing a little celebratory jump like footballers do.

“Look he is taking it on the face like the gay faggot he his” said José Tomás looking at Claudio with a need for approval that almost spilled out of his chest.

Claudio then aimed straight for the right eye, but he saw in terror how the egg suddenly changed trajectory (he could not conceive a world where he was not an expert marksman) and landed on the left shoulder of the bastard. The egg exploded more violently than the other two and the paint looked strangely glowing like it was under black light.

The old man felt the wall dissolve below his hand. A point of light brighter than the sun and hot, but not burning, expanded from where he was touching the wall. He felt his bad eye was working again and with a white blinding flash of light, he saw himself floating, just barely suspended above the ground  His arms were in a foetal position and his legs pendulated almost like an oscillating praying mantis' peculiar walk. He could move, but only in this strange fashion.

The Neo Nazis saw a dark figure emerge from the glowing splodge. It looked like a mummy and was wearing what appeared to be a flat cap. A single red glowing eye stared at them. The old man saw the three men and knew instantly what they were; he knew you did not debate Nazis; he knew the only way for a tolerant society to exist was by exercising extreme intolerance of the intolerant, extreme prejudice for the extremely prejudiced. He did not think, he just acted. His hand lifted and the tip of his finger opened like it had a built-in lid. A bright blinding hot light emerged from it and vaporised the three men where they stood, leaving nothing but the stench of sulphur, like that of an over boiled hard egg.

The old man woke up, the hose still going and making a mess of his front garden. His wife was looking at him, a worried look on her face, below her perfectly white hair illuminated by the bright sun above.

She said: “You fainted, you should not be out so long in this heat! Thank God I came out just as you fell, and you didn’t hit your head!”

The old man sat up, one hand on the ground and the other holding his wife's hands helping him up. He felt the crackly texture of eggshells as he pushed on the ground to steady himself up.

There were three cracked eggs underneath him.

In the morning of the 21^st of April, the park caretaker did not see any white marks on the mural, but found a single egg on the ground where the Claudio and his two “friends” had stood, perfectly balanced over a mound of ash, intact , filled with still fresh white paint. Hitler had had only one egg after all, or was it a ball?