Excerpt: Sexy tales of paleontology by Patrick Lenton
EGG
The call came through at 2am. It was one of the agents in Berlin. I whispered ‘hello’ even though I could tell Brian had been awoken by my ringtone. He exhaled slow and annoyed.
‘Boss,’ said the voice through the phone, piercing in the cold silence of the night. ‘Boss, we found one.’
I muffled a gasp, flushed by triumph, panicking in silence.
‘Egg?’ murmured Brian next to me, sitting up slightly and disturbing Christina, our labrador who slept under the blankets near our feet.
‘We found one,’ I said softly, the words catching in my throat.
***
I’m talking to a diplomat, an ambassador from a European country. Brian looks better than me in a tuxedo and is asking the ambassador lots of earnest and thoughtful questions about his home country. The ambassador is telling us about how the bridges are old and beautiful and how there are catacombs underneath them, full of secrets. The ambassador finishes describing an old brass statue and asks me what I do for a living. Who am I to be eating canapes in this marble building?
‘He works for the UN,’ says Brian, rubbing the small of my back.
‘Ah,’ says the ambassador, raising his eyebrows.
‘I head a research team,’ I say uncomfortably, feeling the bowtie constricting my throat. ‘We’re looking into the business with the toasters. We’ve been working for … years now. Years.’
‘Ah yes, very curious,’ says the ambassador, looking over my shoulder. ‘You must excuse me. I see a small bowl of olives.’
I was used to this sort of reaction ever since the world woke to discover not a single toaster worked anymore. There’d been a brief panic; a few months of science articles and conversations on TV. The UN had put together my team of forty investigators and scientists and agents tasked with getting to the bottom of this … anomaly. This global breaking down of an everyday appliance. But as the world spun on, as the looming reality of rising sea levels and elections and the return of the mammoths took over the news cycle, people forgot about the toasters. People learned to grill their bread or use toasted sandwich makers. It became a curiosity, an embarrassment. They wanted to forget ever having toasters.
***
In the lab I pointed out the toaster to an impatient six-star general. It was red with decades of crumbs crusted around its classic two-slit structure. It had been bought from a bewildered grandma for over two million dollars.
‘So what makes this one so special? Why does it work and none of the others?’ he barks.
I shrug. As far as we can tell it’s just a toaster.
‘Some things just work,’ I said, thinking of Brian and how young and handsome and interesting he is and how I’m merely a toaster researcher nicknamed Egg. Thinking of our hot crowded bed on a cold night. Thinking of how the mammoths got cloned and everyone loved them.
***
This is an excerpt from Sexy tales of paleontology by Patrick Lenton (Subbed In).
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Patrick Lenton is an author and journalist from Sydney, recently moved to Melbourne. He is the author of the books A Man Made Entirely of Bats (Spineless Wonders), Uncle Hercules and other lies (Subbed In), and Sexy Tales Of Paleontology (Subbed In). He is the Editor of Junkee, and tweets @patricklenton.