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Coloring the Shells Carrie J. Preston We need to color Easter eggs together tonight, far from family, a Mississippi April that is already summer. He goes out to buy color. I begin the boil, open the vinegar, and the smell moves through our utility kitchen, moves me out of the springless South moves through me, the way pink seeps through shell to color the white inside. And I'm diinking of egg salad with a hint ofpink, days of devilled eggs with the albumen tinged yellow to match the fill, thinking of writing our names on the shell in white crayon, CP. + D.O. Hiding one in his cover or his flight bag to find tomorrow at the squadron, dipping half in pink, half in yellow. And by the time he comes home, I'm dancing rite of spring with a garland of towel around my neck. But, he bought the Patriotic Easter Egg Kit. Stars and stripes on the shrinkwrap, Red, Blue, White —the shells are almost white anyway— he probably hardly noticed, lives with flags the way I ignore marginalia in library books. 13 1 4 CARRIE J. PRESTON He has never understood, the set of my jaw when his mother sent me his picture in a frame ofAmericana and Marine Corps Semper Fi. He probably wasn't thinking. But I am still...of daily shelling in Iraq, and holidays diat celebrate torture, and the Star Spangled Banner illuminated by the red glare offire. Legend says, Mary took eggs to the soldiers at Golgodia in exchange for compassion, Jesus' blood colored them red and her tears fell blue, but the coloring ofshells began long before. The Persian earth goddess, Sepanta Armaiti, holds blue eggs in fingertips. The Seder egg reminds Jews ofstarting anew as do baskets of Persian No Ruz eggs, Romanian cozanaci, Ukranian pysanky, and the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn. He doesn't know why I'm crying again, and I'm trying to save our night to chip away from the inside at the shell calcified around me, to imagine flags that are always moving, snapping pungent at a vinegar wind in a rolling boil of dieir contradictions. Inside symbols that seem dead there could be something silently moving, cutting die chahza spiral that binds yolk to shell, spiraling what binds any shell and color. I love diis man who believes diere is something worth killing for. Fm not sure. COLORING THE SHELLS1 5 I pour the vinegar that sets the dye, not quite water or wine. He dips half in red, half in blue, and it is this act of coloring, the movement of color and light that makes meaning of the shell. He rolls an egg to me across the table and in the Persian rites of spring, I catch the universe. ...

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