How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace

It has been said the hallmark of a great cook is one who can prepare the perfect egg. Eggs are tricky little things, particularly because it seems so simple. Boil   in water. Fry in pan. Fry in pan while vigorously beating the egg about. Whisk in bowl then pour in pan with other delicious ingredients. But eggs are temperamental. Timing matters. The heat of the pan matters. The quality of your ingredients matters. There’s nothing at all easy about eggs. Writing is the same way. If you are literate, you can put some words together and call it writing but for it to make sense, for it to do more than act as words on a page, you have to be a great writer.

The ten stories in Sean Lovelace’s chapbook How Some People Like Their Eggs, winner of the Rose Metal Press Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest, evidence the work of a great writer. Each story is unique in voice but not so different that the stories feel like they’ve been written by different writers.   In many chapbooks, you get the sense you’re reading the same story differently. That was not the case here.

The stories in this collection start as one thing and end up as something completely different. Meteorite begins with a brief narrative about the only recorded meteorite to hit a human but quickly evolves into a story of two people at a restaurant that serves bad food. One of them has been stricken with cancer. The other doesn’t know what to say. There is wonderful subtlety in this story. For example,”Paige eats everything and says her stomach kind of hurts and I say I bet it kind of hurts. She says I’d win that bet and then orders the entire dessert menu, including an ice cream pie called Chocolate to Die For.” There is so much subtext in those two lines given the context of the story. It a masterful choice of words and a brilliant way to make the most of a short short form. Throughout the collection I was impressed by the deliberate use of language.

Charlie Brown’s Diary: Excerpts is clever, charming and unexpected. The tone of it captures Charlie Brown’s melancholic neuroses and while not everyone may read the story this way, I found it terribly moving and more than anything that’s always what I want from stories. I want to be moved. The title story is equally witty and moving, instructing how various figures take their eggs. You may be interested to know Che Guevara likes a bold omelet while Howard Hughes would like his steam-based in an autoclave.

My favorite story in the chapbook is I Love Bocce, about a nurse who loves bocce and yearns to have people understand the depth and earnestness of his feelings. Over an operating table, the doctors and nurses in attendance begin discussing the merits of bocce when an oveerager medical student says, “I played in Haiti, with coconuts, during a tournament. I actually grouped the balls so close that several laws of physics were altered.” His futile statement is ignored and understood for what it is. Surgery continues. It is a perfect moment in a series of perfect moments throughout the story.

Ultimately, this collection is witty, at times tender, at times magical, but always a fine example of how wonderful short short stories are when well-executed. In reading How Some People Like Their Eggs, I was reminded of Mozart and the Marriage of Figaro and how in one scene the score moves from aria to duet to trio to quartet to quintet until twenty voices are singing in perfect harmony. This collection is like that composition. Every word, every sentence, every story work together in perfect harmony.

I am allergic to eggs. When I eat them I get nauseous and itchy and sick in ways you don’t want to read about. When I could eat eggs, I enjoyed them scrambled a bit soft (not hard scrambled, dry and flaky), with a bit of raw salt and pepper. I also enjoyed hard boiled eggs because I liked to remove the hardened yolk in one piece and pretend it was a marble. That’s weird. I know. But now you know how I like my eggs. It was inevitable, that.