Ahh, emu eggs. We used to get them in four packs from a guy who lived across from my grandmother. His name was Bill, but he insisted you called him Billiam. I don’t think that was his name, I think he just liked to screw with people. I mean, the guy was 42, lived alone on an emu farm and didn’t own a car, he was a bit strange.

Anyway, Billiam never took money from us for the eggs, just always would say we could do chores for him to make up the difference. Which again, was a bit off, since he only charged 50 cents for a “quarter dozen” (even that’s not how many their were) and he also never let us help him with anything. Always figured he was just being extra neighborly cuz my grandma lived across the way. Plus once his emu herd once stomped the shit out of her cat and he was super distraught and blamed himself because he never penned them in or anything, and she never had the heart to tell him it was just a woodchuck she’d been trying to get rid of anyway. So I guess he figured he owed us by association.

So we were hanging around my g-maws house, me, my younger sister and my older brother and sister, and it was starting to get dark. We go to ride our bikes home and suddenly notice Billiam across the road just staring at us. He motions to me to come over and I do, because I’m like 12 and have no reason not to trust this guy. I get over and he’s just staring at me blankly, and says something about having a chore for me to do finally. Now I don’t really want to because it’s getting late and if I don’t go with my siblings I’ll have to walk home (we only had three bikes between the four of us), and mom was making lasagna for dinner, which was my favorite. But we like, super owed this guy because we’d get about a dozen emu eggs from this crazy dude a week for like five years and he never asked for anything. So I go to tell my siblings but they’re already gone, so I’m stuck with helping Billiam. I’m hoping it’ll at least not take too long, but he won’t tell me what we’re doing, just quietly leads me down into his basement. The whole way to his house I notice I’m getting stared at by dozens and dozens of emu all standing still as statues. Freaky.

His basement wasn’t much better. There were emu bones and skulls everywhere. And the feathers. Dear God the feathers. Piles and piles of thousands of emu feathers. He led me back behind an old shelving unit that had nothing but painted emu skulls on it to a little computer on a huge old oak desk. He pointed under it and asked me to plug his new printer in because he was too big and couldn’t reach and also the desk was too heavy to move. I did it and the printer turned on, he thanked me and I left. Had me take another pack of eggs for my trouble, which didn’t really make us even but he didn’t care. By the time I finally got home the lasagna was cold.

We wound up helping him burn his barn down for the insurance the next summer. Went off without a hitch, which was good, because I was really sick of eggs at that point.