February 2026
Magnolia Jenkins Cracks an Egg
Fiction by Ruby Davis
Magnolia Jenkins boarded the A-Train before the dinosaurs were reborn, and even longer before the Blue Ridge Mountains grew back as tall and pointed as thorns. She sat down by the window to watch the strands of wheat slowly disappear into golden hills.
As the train clamored down the iron tracks, she thought about how Ritz Crackers and God were essentially opposites of one another. Ritz Crackers were made from taking nothing and turning it into a circle, while God was made from taking everything and molding it into the shape of an egg. If she’d been born a few centuries earlier, she’d think the Earth was the yolk and the empty lifeless rest of the universe was the egg white. But she was alive now, and she trusted the scientists who swore they’d cracked open the egg of God and found no architect for the universe but time itself.
After about fifteen minutes of picturing the train tracks curling up into circles and dipping themselves into jam made from lakes, the train sputtered and slowed to let on a group of people waiting on a concrete platform. Magnolia watched an older man walk down the aisles, huff loudly, and collapse into the seat across from her. He had a thick moustache that, if she squinted, looked like a rat. She imagined it growing a tail and launching itself off of the man’s upper lip to scurry around the train.
The man stared at Magnolia for a moment, then peered down at his tweed jacket and started to fiddle with one of the buttons. Magnolia’s eyes bored into the plaid, all the tiny furs and threads whirling out of the fabric. Her skin started to itch just thinking about it.
“Where are you off to?” she asked, just to break the silence.
The man’s eyes leapt off his jacket. “Me?”
Magnolia nodded.
“Business,” he said, pulling a tiny leatherback book from his pocket.
“What business?”
“Just business,” he muttered, then began to pet his mustache while reading his book. Magnolia imagined it purring like a cat and nuzzling into his pointer finger. Being outside of her imagination reminded Magnolia of how much she hated small talk. She slumped over her seat and, in her best boring old man impression, said, “Sounds interesting.” He didn’t look up.
The train whirred past big boxy suburban houses, past highways lined with roadkill, and massive grocery stores that would give Magnolia a panic attack if she stayed in them too long. After three more stops, she got off. She didn’t tell the rat-moustached man to have a good day. She didn’t tell him anything.
When she got back to her apartment, she didn’t put her clothes away or make herself dinner. She threw her suitcase on her couch and collapsed onto her bed. When she closed her eyes, the memory foam mattress swallowed her whole.
That night, she called a girl she’d met up with from a dating app a few times before. She ordered Thai food, then they had sex that felt about as interesting to Magnolia as her conversation with the rat-moustached man. During, Magnolia imagined the girl’s legs wrapped around her waist exploding into hummingbirds, then hovering over her like angels in stories about prophets.
“How was your trip?” Jenna, 23, biology student and lover of zombie movies, said afterwards, with her arm tucked under Magnolia’s neck.
“It was fine. Lots of hills out there,” Magnolia replied.
“Was it some sort of work thing?”
Magnolia had neglected to mention to Jenna that she was in between formal jobs and had been making all her money selling her childhood stuffed animals and clothes on Etsy. The truth was, the only reason she’d left that day at all was to go to someone’s basement art show about mystics, but then just decided to use money from savings to get a one night motel; she was afraid to be honest because Jenna would probably say something about how that’s a one way ticket to get murdered by some crazy guy trying to lure girls into his basement. Which, in defense of Jenna’s imaginary words, was probably true, just not true enough to shake Magnolia’s fascination with the idea that some things were meant to happen, were always going to happen, and only some people got to hear about them before they actually did. Magnolia was jealous of the mystics. Of their crystal balls and saints and predictions that came to life.
“No,” Magnolia replied. “Sometimes I just like to leave for a few days.”
Jenna laughed and uncurled her hand from Magnolia’s hair. She stood up and got dressed quickly, a grey skirt and blue blouse. “Wish I could do that,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to go to the beach lately, but I’ve got no days off.”
“I used to live at the beach,” Magnolia said, which was half true. She sat up and rested her back on her headboard.
“When?” Jenna slid a pair of Mary-Janes over her ruffled socks.
“I was a kid,” Magnolia started. “My mom was a business woman, going door to door and stuff. So we never stayed anywhere too long, but once we were at that beach for a whole summer.”
“Good for your mom,” Jenna said. “When I was a kid I always wanted to be a marine biologist, but I sucked at math.”
Magnolia got out of bed. “My mom lives in Santa Fe now, I think.”
“You think?” asked Jenna.
“We haven’t talked in a while.” Magnolia wished she could say that was because of some big falling out or real reason at all, but it wasn’t. They just stopped calling. Magnolia found herself thinking like a child again: that every gust of wind or stray flower petal was her real family and that her child self was still somewhere within her, and she had a reason to feel so out of place at every dinner table. That she’d been right, and had known something no one else could.
“I’m sorry.” The apprehension was thick in Jenna’s voice. She pulled her purse off of Magnolia’s night stand. “I’ve got to get going.”
“Do you believe in God?” Magnolia asked. The question came out faster than she could think it, and she was painfully aware that it was much too intimate.
Jenna blinked. She was silent for a second. “Sometimes. I think I did as a kid, but it faded.”
“Why’d it fade?”
Jenna’s hand hovered over the doorknob to the studio apartment. “Dunno. I grew up Baptist and then I just wasn’t.”
Magnolia nodded. “I was never religious growing up.”
Jenna just laughed. “I’m sorry I can’t stay the night. We can talk about religion some other time, okay?” She looked at Magnolia almost like she felt sorry for her.
“Yeah.”
Jenna kissed Magnolia’s cheek, then stepped out into the hallway, where it was cold and empty, except for the buzz of a radiator.
Magnolia turned from the door, still in her underwear, and started to cry. She sat beside her fridge, held her hands up to the metal to feel the cold. And she pretended it was singing, or that the hum was the ocean waves outside her mother’s old apartment. Once, she’d been there when the news people came to report on a dead whale washed on shore. Magnolia saw it from the third floor apartment window; she and her mother were only a block from the beach for the four and a half months they’d lived there. She watched the news trucks peel onto the shore, her elbows perched on the windowsill and her face pressed against the glass.
The weekend of the whale was the most crowded she’d ever seen the beach. It became a tourist trap, a destination, an omen. A boy in her class told her his father had grounded him for throwing rocks at its belly. Magnolia ran down to see it one night, when the newscasters were gone, and wept. She didn’t tell anyone she’d left. Her mother would’ve thought it was dangerous to go out alone at night, and the few friends she had at school would’ve told her something about diseases, and worse, a smell that leaches into your hair and your clothes.
At first, she’d thought of it floating alone in the open ocean, the waves slowly sweeping it to the shore. Then, she’d imagined herself and her mother living inside of the whale, hanging their photos on its ribs, her mother cooking the krill it swallowed over a makeshift fire. That way, she’d thought, they’d move just as much, but still stay in the same place. If only she could bring the whale back to life. Part of her thought that maybe the whale carcass was just a holding place. Maybe the dead were eggs, holding the living until they were ready for the world.
Something squeaked loudly. Startled, Magnolia wiped her tears and bent down to look under the fridge, using her phone flashlight. Two wide, quivering eyes stared back at her. For a moment, as the mouse looked at her, she genuinely wondered if the man’s rat moustache had jumped off and followed her home. She looked closer, and below the mouse was another one, a baby with two heads, writhing and trembling.
Slowly, Magnolia inched her fingers under the fridge. With her pointer finger, she stroked the baby mouse’s left head. “Shhhhhhhh,” she whispered. The mouse squeaked again, then wriggled its way into her palm.
She placed it with its mother in a cardboard box with a crumpled up pillowcase that had been her mother’s, who’d given it to Magnolia on her seventeenth birthday. It had an illustration from the original Alice in Wonderland on it, the scene where Alice drinks the potion that makes her grow through the roof of the house. As she folded it into the box, she imagined the two headed mouse growing and growing until it burst through her fridge.
Magnolia warmed a dish of milk in her microwave and set it in the box too. Then she kissed her pointer and ring finger, placing one on each of its heads. “Survive the night for me, okay?” she said.
The mouse just wriggled.
Magnolia smiled and wiped a tear from her cheek. She walked into her bedroom, kept the lamp on her bedside table on, and dreamt of dinosaurs growing hands and climbing up magnolia trees.
Magnolia woke up earlier than usual. Dawn was spilling onto her white sheets through her curtains. Her apartment reeked. The smell was close to what the beached whale leaked into the sand.
She walked back to the kitchen, groggily looking for some coffee or a multivitamin. But first, she peered at the cardboard box on the tile floor. The mouse was still. None of its four eyes blinked. Neither of its heads stirred. The only thing that moved was a fly rubbing its fingers over a missing rib, a hole in the fur, a bite. The mother mouse was nowhere to be found. She must’ve climbed over the cardboard walls in the night and scurried away.
“Get off!” Magnolia shouted. She picked up the box and shook it around until the fly buzzed off, landing on the rim of an almost-empty cup of tea. She took the box outside on the landing and walked down the stairs. Behind her apartment complex was a bush of rhododendrons. With a few muttered apologies and tears melted on her cheeks, Magnolia tipped the box over, letting the two headed mouse fall to one of the branches. It fell on its back. Its heads were pointed up looking at the sun.
Magnolia recycled the box and unfolded her pillowcase on the way up the stairs. A smear of blood darkened Alice’s eye. For a moment, Magnolia thought she saw it roll down to the potion bottle. But dried blood doesn’t budge.
After throwing the pillowcase onto her pile of dirty laundry, Magnolia went back to the kitchen. Fur tuft and blood drops looked like a breadcrumb trail out of her fridge door. She would sweep them up later, she decided, and pulled out a carton of eggs.
She doused her pan in cooking oil, salt, and pepper. A trick her mother taught her. She cracked the eggs and fried them. Sunny side up.
Before they started bubbling, she looked under her fridge one last time. The mother mouse was shivering beneath it, gnawing on the baby’s missing rib.
Magnolia started to cry. In her head, all she could see was the rat moustache separating into a mouth and eating the man’s whole upper lip.
“What’re you still doing here? How can you keep getting stuck under a fridge having to eat what’s left of your sons?”
The mouse opened its tiny mouth, and put the whole chunk of rib between its teeth. Magnolia scoffed and wiped a fat pearl of a tear off of her nose. “Whatever. You never listen.”
With a shaky hand, she grabbed a spatula. But before she could flip her egg, she froze. Three bubbles on the yolk popped and oozed into two eyes and a mouth. It blinked at her, then smiled.
“Magnolia Jenkins, what do you know about prophecy?” the egg asked, ready to tell her about the dinosaurs crawling back out of an overeasy earth.
Ruby Davis is an undergraduate student in creative writing and anthropology. You can find their poems and short stories published or upcoming in Same Faces Collective, Ninth Heaven, Scribbled, Quarter Press, and others, or subscribe to their Substack @evenmolluskshaveweddings.