The Egg That Wasn't

Marigold “Mari” Puddlewhistle had lived her entire life in the town of Peepwillow, a place so obsessed with Easter that they left their pastel bunting up year-round. Their post office smelled faintly of marshmallow, and every address came with an automatic subscription to “The Bunny Bulletin.”

Mari, 31 and a firm believer in socks with sandals, had never quite fit in with the town’s high-energy hop-happy holiday spirit. Her family ran the Puddlewhistle Egg Emporium, the oldest—and weirdest—egg painting shop in the valley. But where her mother and sisters turned out intricate Fabergé-style masterpieces with shimmering pearl gloss, Mari preferred googly eyes, tiny hats, and one particularly controversial egg that was covered entirely in glitter and sported a tiny felt mustache.

It was not… well received.

Peepwillow took its eggs seriously.

Every Easter, the Great Eggstravaganza was held in the town square, with a grand hunt, a judged decorating competition, and the ceremonial crowning of the Egg Regent—a title Mari had never once come close to winning.

She didn't mind. Mostly.

This year, though, was different.

Because this year, a mysterious egg appeared on her windowsill.

And it blinked at her.

Mari stared at the egg.

It sat innocently in a little nest of purple tinsel, its shell a soft robin’s-egg blue speckled with gold flecks. Very pretty. Very normal. Except, of course, for the fact that it had just blinked at her.

“Okay,” Mari said slowly, holding her morning cup of lavender tea like a lifeline. “Either I’ve finally snapped, or you’re a magic egg. Please don’t be cursed. Or a government experiment. Or worse… performance art.”

The egg blinked again. Two tiny eyelids flicked over microscopic black dots that had somehow appeared on the shell.

“Ah,” Mari said, and promptly dropped her tea.

It didn’t break, because she was still in her fuzzy bunny slippers and hadn’t bothered to put the lid on the mug again (she lived alone—there was no judgment in her house). But her heart was racing.

She gingerly reached out and poked the egg. It gave a tiny, high-pitched sneeze.

“Bless you?” she tried.

The egg wobbled on its own, nestled deeper into the tinsel. Then it made a sound.

“Ploink.”

“What,” Mari whispered, “does ‘ploink’ mean?”

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By the time Mari had finished Googling “eggs that sneeze and blink, not a prank,” the mysterious little visitor had started to hum.

That’s right. Hum.

A soft, warbling tune that sounded suspiciously like a kazoo version of “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.”

“Okay,” she muttered, dragging out a shoebox, a tea towel, and the emergency chocolate from behind the sugar canister. “You’re clearly not a normal egg. You might be an alien. Or a cryptid. Or—I don’t know—maybe I’ve been breathing in too much glitter glue.”

The egg hummed louder when she approached, vibrating slightly like a content cat.

“Well, you’re adorable, which makes me suspicious,” Mari said, wrapping the egg carefully in the towel and placing it in the box like a makeshift cradle. “But if you explode into bees or spontaneously grow legs, I will have so many notes.”

She scribbled a label: "DO NOT SCRAMBLE."

---------------

By midmorning, she’d decided two things:

1. She couldn’t tell anyone about the egg yet—especially not her family, who would either want to cook it, paint it, or enter it into the Eggstravaganza.

2. She needed answers. Preferably from someone weird enough not to freak out.

So she knocked on the crooked yellow door of Theodore Bramblepatch, the town’s retired librarian, conspiracy theorist, and unofficial town wizard.

He answered in a bathrobe covered in tiny rubber ducks.

“You’ve brought an unspeakable cosmic force into your home, haven’t you?” he said cheerfully, sipping from a mug that said “Egghead Supreme.”

Mari held up the box. “Possibly. It sneezes.”

“Oh dear,” Theo whispered reverently. “Not again.”

Theo invited her in with all the enthusiasm of someone discovering their favorite soap opera had a surprise twist. His living room was an eclectic museum of oddities: rubber duck chandeliers, a wall of antique spoons, and a taxidermy rabbit wearing a monocle.

He peered into the shoebox and gasped.

“The Wander-Egg,” he breathed.

Mari blinked. “The what now?”

“The Wander-Egg!” Theo repeated, pacing dramatically as the egg made a pleased little ploink. “An ancient Easter myth. One magical egg is said to appear every century, blinking and sneezing its way into the heart of someone pure and… eccentrically inclined.”

“So... someone weird?” Mari asked flatly.

Theo gave her a solemn nod. “Precisely. Legend says the egg chooses someone to protect it until it hatches. And what it hatches into depends entirely on the love and care it receives.”

Mari blinked. “Like a really emotional Tamagotchi?”

“Exactly!” Theo said, beaming. “But with more potential for spontaneous glitter-based magic.”

Mari stared at the egg. “So, it’s… an Easter creature?”

“Yes. But no one knows what it becomes. Some say a guardian spirit. Others say the real Easter Bunny is just the first Wander-Egg hatchling.”

The egg burped softly and released a single pink bubble that floated up and popped into the shape of a daisy.

Mari sat down.

Hard.

“Well,” she said finally, “I guess I’m parenting an Easter myth now.”

-----------------

Mari tried to go about her day like nothing was different. Which was hard, because:

1. Her shoebox now glowed faintly at night.

2. The egg sang in its sleep.

3. It had started levitating when startled—such as during thunder, sneezes, or when she dropped a spoon.

Still, she tucked it beneath her hoodie and went to help at the shop. Easter week was the busiest time of year for Puddlewhistle Egg Emporium, and she had a quota of thirty decorative eggs to paint by Friday.

But her mind was elsewhere.

As she painted her 12th googly-eyed frog egg, her cousin Prissy (short for Priscilla, but she refused to answer to anything less sparkly) leaned over her workstation.

“You look distracted,” Prissy chirped, her rhinestone bunny-ear headband catching the light. “Is it… love?”

Mari nearly dropped her paintbrush. “What? No! I mean—absolutely not.”

“Shame,” Prissy sighed. “You’d make such a cute couple. You and… mystery.”

Mari blinked. “Mystery?”

“You’ve got a glowy aura this week,” Prissy said. “Very egg-centric.”

Mari clutched her hoodie like it might explode.

“Nothing’s glowing,” she muttered.

But Prissy just smiled, as if she knew.

--------------------

That night, the egg cracked.

Just a little.

A soft golden fracture traced down its side like a delicate lightning bolt. Mari had been humming to it—an old lullaby her grandmother used to sing—and the egg had glowed so warmly it lit up her whole living room like a lantern.

Then: crack.

She froze. “Oh no. Are you okay?”

The egg gave a sleepy little chirrrrp and a puff of glitter erupted from the crack.

Mari panicked.

She texted Theo:

> CRACK ALERT. EGG STATUS: GOLDEN LIGHTNING. ALSO GLITTER. WHAT NOW?

Theo responded immediately:

> DO NOT PANIC. OR BAKE IT. OR SHAKE IT. THIS IS NORMAL. MORE OR LESS.

She placed the egg gently back in its box and whispered, “You’re doing great, little buddy. I believe in you.”

The egg purred.

Mari hadn’t known eggs could purr.

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By Easter Eve, Mari had stopped pretending anything was normal.

The egg now floated freely around her living room, trailing sparkles like confetti. It had developed a personality—curious, mischievous, and sweet. It nudged her when she was sad, bobbed to music, and once turned her entire spice rack into a chorus of tiny singing peppers.

But most of all, it loved stories.

Every night, Mari would sit by the window and read aloud. Fairy tales. Weird poems. A copy of How to Boil Water when she ran out of actual books. The egg glowed with every word, its cracks widening with each tale.

She tried not to think about what would happen once it hatched.

Would it stay? Would it remember her?

Would it… still need her?

------------------

On Easter morning, Peepwillow was already buzzing by sunrise. People wore egg-shaped hats. There were carrot juice mimosas. The mayor arrived on a unicycle dressed as a seven-foot bunny with sunglasses.

Mari, hoodie zipped to her nose, carried the egg nestled in her arms.

“You sure?” Theo had asked when she called him before dawn. “Once the town sees it, everything changes.”

“I think it’s time,” she said softly. “It chose me. I want to let it… become.”

So she walked into the center of the square, past the food stalls and painted egg displays, and climbed the steps to the Fountain of the First Yolk (a real town monument, unfortunately).

The egg floated from her arms. People gasped.

Gasps turned to silence.

Then the egg began to sing.

---------------

The next moment felt like a dream.

The egg hovered above the fountain, glowing like sunrise. Then, with a gentle crack and a soft chime like wind through bells, it split open—petals of shell curling away.

And out floated…

A creature of light and fluff. Like a bunny, but not quite. Its ears shimmered. Its paws left trails of stardust. Its eyes held galaxies. And on its head, balancing like a crown, was a single golden daisy.

The town stared.

The creature looked down at Mari and wobbled midair like a drunk marshmallow.

Then it leapt into her arms.

The square exploded in cheers.

“EGG REGENT!” someone shouted.

“IT’S THE EGG REGENT!”

The newly-hatched creature nestled into Mari’s arms like it had always belonged there.

It nuzzled her cheek, leaving a soft shimmer of sparkles that smelled faintly of marshmallow and spring rain. Around her, Peepwillow stood in stunned silence before erupting into applause, laughter, and the sound of seventeen bubble wands being activated all at once.

Mayor Bunniford McWhiskers (yes, that was his legal name) pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead, tears streaming down his face.

“It’s the most beautiful Easter miracle I’ve ever seen,” he sobbed, blowing his nose into a napkin shaped like a lamb. “A celestial bunny! Or... possibly a fuzzicorn!”

Theo placed a gentle hand on Mari’s shoulder. “You did it. You gave it love. You let it choose.”

Mari looked down at the creature curled in her arms. It blinked up at her—those same blinking eyes that had first stared out from a speckled shell on her windowsill.

“I didn’t do anything special,” she said, tears prickling her eyes. “I just… let it be what it was.”

“And that,” Theo said with a smile, “is exactly what it needed.”

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For the rest of the day, the town celebrated not just the creature—now dubbed “Eggbert the Ever-Bun” by popular vote—but also Mari.

Children lined up for sparkles and boops from Eggbert.

Parents brought offerings of jellybeans and glitter-glazed donuts.

And Mari? Mari finally felt something she never quite had in Peepwillow.

Not just noticed. Not just tolerated.

Belonged.

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Later that night, after the sun had set and the town square was quiet again, Mari sat on her porch with Eggbert curled beside her in a nest of tinsel.

She gave him a gentle poke. “So… what now? Do you go live in a bunny castle in the stars?”

Eggbert yawned, blinked slowly, and snuggled closer.

Theo sat nearby with a thermos of carrot cider. “The legends were never clear. Maybe it’s not about leaving. Maybe it’s about staying. About choosing someone to share the magic with.”

Mari smiled softly.

“I can live with that.”

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A year later, Peepwillow’s annual Great Eggstravaganza was more spectacular than ever.

The Fountain of the First Yolk had been updated with a statue of a girl in bunny slippers and a glowing creature in her arms.

The Egg Regent’s official duties now included blessing painted eggs with sparkle sneezes and judging glitter beard contests.

And Mari?

Mari still worked at the Emporium, but now her odd eggs were bestsellers.

Googly eyes. Tiny hats. Mustaches galore.

Because, in a town that once only valued perfection, the weird and the wonderful finally had their place.

And every Easter, as the stars came out over Peepwillow, a bunny-shaped constellation could be seen in the sky.

Blinking.

Just once.