Sarahribu

Everyone remembers the first moment of proper human disappointment. When Petite Agustine was a tiny child befitting her name, she lived in a small village (within easy commute from Paris), where her parents were very important people to do with the kind of important task that is very boring. Back then though, they were just Maman and Papa and Agustine, and they were mainly happy.

The village was perfect, the kind of place that is not seen anymore, either appropriated through the decades by commuters or suburbanites or aggressively maintained at its old level of twee with an iron fist. Back then the village was full of characters, but none were so noteworthy as Madame Touillard. She was a thickset woman as tall as a house, who both terrified and entranced all the tiny children, who whispered unimaginatively that she was a witch over their chocolate at break. She carried a large cockerel on her shoulder, which was the most magnificent beast Petite Agustine had seen in the whole of her short, uneventful life.

The first time she saw Madame Touillard in all of her glory it was a Wednesday and Agustine was out with her mother at the market when Madame Touillard swept past in a whirl of skirts and fresh feathers.
“Maman”, lisped Petite Agustine immediately, for she was disgustingly cute and remarkably astute. “Can I have a bird?”
“Why would you want a great dirty bird?” said Maman. “Do you want to grow up to be an old woman with no friends? Anyway, you have Guillaume. You cannot have a bird even if it wasn’t disgusting, because Guillaume would eat it. Which would make you guilty by association. Do you understand, Agustine? Of course you don’t. Why did Eric think that getting a kitten the same week we had a baby would be a good idea?”
Maman had a point, thought Agustine as Maman continued to talk at her, her babble fading into the grey mist of childhood memory. She had been ignoring Guillaume recently. So Agustine resolved to pull herself up by her socks and enjoy her cat and then maybe when Guillaume left home she could get a bird, and train it to sit on her shoulder and caw at people, and maybe take out the eyes of the her enemies. Yes, thought Agustine, it would definitely be worth waiting for her bird.

Later on, it was still a glorious Wednesday afternoon and Maman shooed a fractious Agustine and Guillaume off to play. They ambled amiably through the hazy countryside of the past and Agustine had, in the rush of the beautiful afternoon, forgotten all about her desire for a bird. She stumbled through long grass and kicked up explosions of late-summer dust in her own world, until she saw Guillaume fumbling in the abandoned animal holes with something, but by the time she reached him it was nothing but a delicate filigree of albumen strung around his dusty paws.

She rushed across the path and prodded Guillaume away with a decent amount of force, and bent down in an attempt to rescue what he had ruined. In her hands the remains of the egg were nothing more than a friable relic; it crumbled gooey-disgusting between her clumsy fingers in the echoing silence of her shocked dismay.

She turned and almost stepped on it – the identical brother of the egg-corpse in her hands, sitting untouched by the hateful cat. She slipped into her pocked wrapped in some of the dry grass, grabbed the cat and gripped him tightly all the way home, both grumbling audibly with annoyance.

Once she got home she paused, dropping grumbling Guillaume with a plop, she paused to think. Maman said she could not have a bird, but obviously the egg needed her. Agustine had done the heavily censored basics of life in class and so knew all about mummy-birds and daddy-bees. She climbed silently up the stairs and clicked open the door into her bedroom. After shredding some much hated items with her safety scissors and rescuing a box from the kitchen she had a perfectly serviceable incubator box. She tucked it under the radiator and basked in a job well done.

The box stayed her secret. Every day she would have a peek at it, and then after a few weeks she would leave little bits of food, in case the egg got hungry. But even tiny children know when something is wrong, and one day she decided to see whether the bird inside egg needed some help getting out. Maybe without a mummy bird nearby the baby would have cheerleading, no coaxing to come out into the beautiful, dangerous world. She carefully took it out, and lifting it out. It was so dainty, thin like good china and speckled like good bread. With a firm and decisive crack! she broke the shell, and it shattered to leave nothing more than a whisper of a life that never was. A perfectly empty shell, crumbling into powdered disappointment.

She took it in to Maman, tiny tears running down her tiny face, and Maman took one look at the desiccated shell and swept her up in her big arms, the last of the shell a smear across perfumed silk.

Petit Agustine went to bed early, morose, clutching Guillaume to her chest, so worn out she didn’t hear Maman slip out into the night.

By her breakfast setting in the morning was a pretty blue box. Maman was in the kitchen and so Agustine opened it to find a tiny, perfect chick sitting disgruntled in cotton wool. Maman poked her head round the door and smiled wide.

Agustine named the chick Boc-Boc and over time Agustine grew to be a willowy dark haired girl and Boc-Boc grew to be an almost perfectly sypherical mess of feathers, and they continued to be happy. At least, thought Agustine, if Boc-Boc should ever die, there were plenty more eggs in the fridge.