Egg

I consider my egg; its speckled pattern, its curves, strange weighting and remarkable calcium formation that’s both delicate and robust.

 It hurts but I’m determined. The old hag promised. I put my egg inside me.

***

“Egg” is dedicated to my mum, Veronica Sharma. It’s a very personal and important story to me for a  number of reasons. It’s about the difficulty of wishes. Every wish has a price. We just need to know what   we’re prepared to pay.

 Paula Guran very kindly took this for Once Upon a Time, an anthology of all new fairy tales published by Prime Books.

It was reprinted in Mithila Review and can be read online for free here.

***

Reviews

… a powerful tale of mother love. Plenty of fairytale precedents for this one, but a strongly unique version of it. Lois Tilton for Locus Online 

Last but not least, my recommended starting point for Priya Sharma‘s work is “Egg”, appearing in Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales. The story deals with conflict on very personal level as well, and circles back to the notion of self. Sharma crafts a new fairy tale, built on the bones of old tropes and presenting a unique twist on the mother-daughter relationship and the classic wish for a child. The story is complicated, it portrays the sacrifices one makes becoming a parent in a realistic and brutal manner, but still gives the story the veneer of the fantastic. Here, reality is pushed to the extreme through the lens of fantasy, showing a parent caring for a child that is barely human and wholly incomprehensible. The story is beautiful and brutal, showing the struggle between self and other, between a parent’s desires and the way they can, and possibly must, become subsumed and erased in their life of their child. AC Wise for SF Signal