ABOUT
The Daily Egg is a magazine publishing artists, fiction, and news local to Belita, California, and the greater SoCal area. We post every Thursday at 11 a.m.
ETHICS STATEMENT
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
BLUESKY - @thedailyegg.bsky.social
HISTORY
It’s hard to pinpoint a “start” to The Daily Egg. If you’re talking about the website you’re currently reading, that began in 2020 when the Church of Meology registered the domain during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you’re thinking of its prior iteration as a print newspaper in Belita, California, that was the pet project of Meology founder Pedro Garita.
Garita, however, did not conceive of The Egg. His newspaper was named after a remarkable and seldom-reported practice by early Belita residents. In 1907, two sisters made a discovery in their family chicken coop. A rather scrawny hen, affectionately named the “Poor Lady”, produced a red egg. Prior to this, the Poor Lady was kept as a pet. She had never given the Cryers eggs before, let alone one shaped like a giant ruby.
The children eagerly shared their discovery with Mama Cryer, who promptly dropped the egg in a boiling pot. The egg cooked for all of two minutes before its shell splintered. The flesh was an unnatural gray and bubbled out from the cracks. Mama Cryer meant to discard the egg, but the children asked to see if the yolk was similarly discolored.
To the family’s surprise, the yolk was already broken. Thick yellow veins grew out from the shell. Mama Cryer examined the inversion with a careful eye, suspecting a disease that might spread to the other chickens. Instead, she found herself finding messages in the yellow brushstrokes, Her children didn’t see them, and Mama Cryer conceded that the words weren’t in English, but they spoke to her.
”Rain tomorrow. Lightning.”
It did rain the next day, and lightning struck down one of the farm’s pecan trees. Mama Cryer stayed with her girls in the main house until early afternoon, at which point an insatiable curiosity and a healthy fear of God drove her outside. When she returned, everything below her knees was caked in, but the Poor Lady had dropped a new egg.
The children watched their mother repeat yesterday’s process. The water boiled, the egg popped, and Mama Cryer gently separated the eggs into two halves. The girls helped her scoop out the great goo, then watched as she read the shells, like tea leaves.
The egg predicted all manner of events over the next year, from meteor showers (“Starlight waterfall”) to earthquakes (“Rumble”). Word spread and people traveled to the Cryer house for insight, gathering in Mama’s living room every day to hear her 10 a.m. revelations. There was a small fee, of course, and anyone caught blabbing to the spectators outside was banned from future “forecasts.”
Unfortunately, the Poor Lady died 16 months after her first egg and took the premonitions with her. The goodwill Mama Cryer earned in that short year was enough to pay the bills for the rest of her life. It also forced an itch in the back of her head that never settled. She didn’t believe the Poor Lady was responsible for those messages. She was adamant that the chicken was a messenger for God himself, and he had chosen Mama Cryer to share his wisdom with her neighbors. She believed she was special, until she wasn’t. ⬤
