Amber Child

When the salt hens lay eggs, children of the island dive to collect the infertile ones that lie abandoned in the shallows. We storm to the coast and fit as many as we can in homemade baskets, linen aprons, and trouser pockets. The hens—swimming to catch pinkie-long fish, or hobbling on the rocks, beaks searching the insides of shells—do not bother us. Unless we get too close to their good eggs and then their beaks are quick to close around sheens and prying fingers. We’re used to it.

On the shingle, the elders boil the eggs in water stained with beetroot, onion peels, or grape juice, their chant a whisper like the waves that dig the rocks. They press sea lilies and daisies on the still-wet makeshift paint to give them patterns, reds and blues and yellows.

Young couples dance to the rhythm of the chanting. A handful of toddlers follow in coarse imitation, sloshing about in the green-blue shallows. In our corner of the world, babies learn to swim before they can walk.

We cool the eggs down in seawater. Children gather in a circle. Bumping elbows and knees, each picks an egg. As synchronised as the waves, every child chooses a partner; a best friend, or sometimes a seaweed-bitter rival. They tap the tips of their eggs together, a sound like sandaled feet crashing the empty seashells at low tide. Cracked eggs are out of the game. The losing parties sit on rocks to peel the rest of the egg and gorge it in a bite or two. No need for salt. Not when salt hens drink naught but the ocean.

Owners of unbroken eggs are quick to find another partner. Another and another, until only two contestants stand. By then, the eggshells on the sand are as many as the seashells. We gather them up to the last one. One of the elders, most often my grandmother, spills them in a mortar and beats them into powder, mingled as they are with grains of sand and the exoskeletons of creatures that didn’t survive the low tide.

The two final children measure one another with half-closed eyes. Should they use the thinner tip, or the egg’s bottom? What is the perfect distance to hit from? At this point, a bunch or broken lip aren’t uncommon. We’re used to that, too. Not that it matters. There’s no science or magic to the winning egg.

Lucky child, they call the last one standing. Amber child.

The winner is seated at the head of their table during the feast. They get to try the choicest roasts first. But not their own uncracked egg. My grandmother puts this in a bowl where she has mixed seawater with her powder of eggshells. She locks the bowl behind a glass showcase with the winning child’s name carved on a wooden slate next to it.

Unbroken sea eggs are a promise; but there will be much erosion in these salt-eaten rocks before any good can come of this promise. It takes a generation for the hardboiled yolk to turn into amber.

The year I become an amber child is also the year my grandmother dies.

With her showcase key hanging from my neck, I watch the sea-wood boat that carries her to where the ocean meets the sky. Lukewarm water is tickling my knees. Strong winds give me goosebumps as they dry droplets from my arms and legs. On my hand, an egg that bears not my name, but hers, unbroken still after fifty years. The longer you keep it, the dearer the amber will be. My people haven’t broken a single one as long as she lived.

Years ago, I had asked her, What shall we do with so much amber? We have all we need.

She’d smiled crookedly. You need something sturdier than yolk to eat in the other world, at the bottom of the sea.

When the boat is no longer visible, I don’t put her egg back in the showcase.

The first year it’s my turn to colour and decorate eggs, and take the egg from the newer amber child, I’m desperate for guidance. Our shore is no longer our own, the salt hens are dwindling, soon there won’t be enough eggs for every child. 

I hold my grandmother’s egg once more, looking to the direction where the waves gently carried her away. I squat in the shallows and touch the tip of the egg to the moss-carpeted rock where she used to stand. A mere touch, at first. Then a tap, strong as in my egg-beating days.

The shell has grown brittle after all this time. It gives away without complaint.

Years have worn the egg white away. Before I can take a proper look at the petrified yolk, see if it’s as precious as the elders promised, a sudden wave, stirred, perhaps, by a foreign ship nearby, slaps me in the face. What remains of the egg slip from my hand, into the water’s cold embrace.

Lucky child, the bitter, salty wind greets me, bearing a trace of my grandmother’s voice. Amber child.