The Scrambled Eggs of Creation

There was a family of gods, trying to decide what to have for breakfast.

Mother Nature said, "I don't care what we have. I just need my coffee so I can get on with the day.

The youngest goddess, Moon, wanted sugary cereal - Marshmallow Divine-O's - but obviously that wasn't going to happen.

"No way," said Mother Nature. "Your teeth will rot and fall out, and crash down to the Earth, where they'll crush thousands of people to death. Sorry, Moon. No sugary junk for you. Not happening."

Grandpa Time demanded that everybody eat a hearty bowlful of tree-bark porridge. "It'll put hairs on your chest," he said.

"No, Dad. Not again. That stuff tastes like garbage," said Mother Nature.

It really did taste like garbage. And Mother Nature knew full well. When she'd been a little girl, her father, then known as Father Time, had fed them either tree-bark soup or actual garbage for breakfast, on alternate days. And both meals were equally ghastly. A lot of damage was done to her taste buds in those formative years.

So, no Marshmallow Divine-O's. And tree-bark porridge was out. What else could the family eat for breakfast?

Mother Nature's pet dog, Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound, loved eating human bones for breakfast. But those also tasted absolutely horrible. Especially lukewarm bones which had been lying out in the dirt all night - and that was the only kind they had. And no way was Mother Nature floating all the way to the store just for another bag of bones. Gross.

So she sifted through the shelves and cupboards, trying to find out what they had to eat that might be slightly nutritious. Split-atom peas? Nah, they took too long to prepare. Furthermore, if prepared wrong, they could destroy the fabric of reality itself, which was too much to deal with this early in the morning.

What about primordial soup? Nah. That was just a bunch of lumpy amoebas and jellied amphibians. The thought of this made Mother Nature nauseous. She was, she had to admit, a bit hungover.

Ah. This might do. She'd found it on the highest shelf, almost but not quite out of her reach. She stood on her tiptoes, and carefully brought the package down.

The label read: "Eggs of Creation". According to some, the world as we know it hatched from one such egg. An egg as big as the universe, from which came all that has been, and all that will be. An egg outside of time.

Mother Nature vaguely remembered creating a universe from an egg a while back. She couldn't be sure if it was our universe or some other one. And anyway, it was a long time ago.

But her family was hungry, and so was she. This morning, they would not dine on sugary cereal, tree-bark soup or the bones of men. They would not dine on split atoms, or primordial soup.

She heated a pan. Into this, she placed a lump of Elysian butter, made from the milk of the goats of the Otherworld. This butter was the finest and saltiest in all creation. It was smooth as silk, and light as a feather.

The butter hissed and crackled, indicating that the pan was hot enough to fry the family's breakfast. Old Grandpa Time, the little Moon, and even the dog Cerberus looked on with hungry eyes, as Mother Nature prepared the meal.

She cracked in five eggs, one after the other, and five universes' worth of potential souls cried out and were suddenly extinguished.