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I stared at that photo, cold sweat breaking out across my palms in an instant.
My roommates were already tearing into her:
"Camille, are you sick in the head!"
"Priscilla's pregnant, and you send a picture like that? Are you trying to freak her out on purpose!"
"If you're sick, go get treated. Stop with this creepy nonsense and delete it, now!"
But Camille acted like she hadn't seen any of it, and asked again:
"Your mother-in-law... she makes you eat a goose egg every single day, doesn't she?"
My stomach clenched. How did she know that too?
"What would you know?" I shot back before I could stop myself.
"My mother-in-law says goose eggs clear the toxins from a pregnancy. My morning sickness was bad, she was afraid I wasn't getting enough nutrition, that's the only reason she..."
And then it hit me. My appetite had exploded, and it seemed to have started right around when she'd begun feeding me goose eggs.
At first the morning sickness was constant. I had no appetite at all, and I dropped more than ten pounds almost overnight.
She was beside herself with worry and rushed me to the doctor.
The doctor said morning sickness in early pregnancy was perfectly normal, but she couldn't let it go. She was afraid my body couldn't take it.
Later, she heard somewhere that goose eggs could clear the toxins and add nutrition on top of it.
So she rode a bus for hours out to the countryside, going village by village to buy up goose eggs.
When she came back, both her hands had raw red marks pressed into them.
But she just smiled at me and said,
"Priscilla, I don't trust the eggs they sell in stores. These are all from farm geese raised free out in the country. Best nutrition there is."
From that day on, she made me a goose-egg dish every single day.
Boiled goose eggs, goose-egg custard, pan-fried goose eggs, goose eggs scrambled with tomato... at nearly every meal.
I got so sick of them that I balked, and her whole face fell.
"Priscilla, these weren't easy for me to get."
"You're carrying a baby. If you won't eat, how is your body supposed to hold up? If you don't get enough nutrition, it'll break my heart."
Looking at all that worry in her eyes, I gave in, the way I always did.
After that, I made a point of eating one goose egg every day.
Just then, another message came through from Camille.
"Think about it carefully. Those marks on your belly, didn't they only start showing up after you began eating the goose eggs?"
My breath caught.
I looked down at my swollen belly without thinking.
That vine-like red mark had spread across a wide stretch of skin at some point I hadn't even noticed.
And it... it really did seem to have appeared after I started eating the goose eggs.
At first it was just a small, faint red patch.
Then the lines grew denser, the color deeper.
And at the same time, my appetite kept growing.
I'd thought the pattern was strange, but the doctor and my mother-in-law both said it was only stretch marks.
She'd even gone out and bought me a whole pile of imported stretch-mark cream, telling me to rub it on every day.
"You're six months along now. If I'm not wrong, those marks have almost reached your chest by now, haven't they?"
I froze where I sat.
My own husband didn't even know about this. So how did she?
I forced down the unease clawing at me and gritted out a reply:
"Quit putting on this spooky act! They're just normal stretch marks!"
Camille wrote back: "You can talk tough all you want, but it won't help, because you..."
She never finished. She was kicked out of the group chat mid-sentence.
"Priscilla, ignore her, she's a lunatic!"
"Sending a corpse photo was bad enough, and now she's making up all this garbage to scare a pregnant woman. Honestly disgusting."
While everyone was piling on Camille, Zoe, who had stayed quiet the whole time, suddenly spoke up.
"But... do you all remember Deidre Gilbert?"
"Back then Camille said there was something unclean on Deidre, said she wouldn't live out the month. Deidre didn't believe her. And not long after, she hanged herself in a classroom at school..."
The words were barely out before someone pushed back.
"That's nonsense! Deidre clearly had depression after a breakup. What did that have to do with Camille?"
"She just got lucky with a wild guess, that's all!"
I watched the messages scroll past, and the cold in my chest kept deepening.
After turning it over and over, I decided to call Camille and get a straight answer.
The call had barely connected when my mother-in-law walked in beaming, carrying a plate of scrambled goose eggs.
"Priscilla, here, eat this. A little extra between meals!"
I looked at that steaming bowl of eggs, remembered what Camille had said, and my stomach suddenly turned.
I glanced up and met the hope in my mother-in-law's eyes.
Thinking of how she'd worn herself ragged for these eggs, guilt washed over me.
But the moment I lifted the egg to my mouth, Camille's frantic shout came bursting down the line:
"Don't eat it!"
"Priscilla Simmons, do you have any idea? What you're eating isn't goose eggs at all!"
