"Ssshh." Tzich hushed her, and he shoved a spatula under the sticking brown mass of yolk and onion. The skillet hissed. "You're always too loud. You drown yourself out. Listen." He flipped the crumbling omelet and it popped and snarled and screeched anew. "The egg is a potential life -- half of a whole life that could've been, half of what makes a breathing, eating, fucking animal. Fragile like a skull, wilder than the woods. They're never-born children screaming. Half a life, in yolk and white or blood on the moon, it's all the same. Smell them burning, unbreathing." He broke a piece off with his fingers and popped the steaming-hot mass into his mouth, contemplative. He'd been staring at the eggs for a long while, letting it burn while Carly took her time getting up. He turned off the stove. "Better never-born than living, better living than dead. Better food than forgotten."

He grabbed the skillet with a bare hand and tossed it scorching onto the table, then shoved the handle of a fork at Carly. "What do you smell?" He went to the window and leaned on the sill, staring out at the empty road and a dog squatting in a neighbor's front yard. He grinned and turned around again, lazy and loose, just to see how Carly liked his breakfast. The omelet was sour and had been drenched in vinegar at one point in its cooking; it was blackened and bubbled and chunky with unidentifiable mounds of green and red and brown. "You smell the colors, don't you?"