hatching
by geckomancer

Break time.  When there’s only one a day, you make it last.  I dug my toes into the hot ash covering the floor of the boiler room and closed my eyes.  It’s the closest I can get to sand.  When I let my mind wander I’m always nostalgic, searching for the good moments in my life, to bask in for a little while before I’m thrust back into reality.
Most people say that their first memories are of the master’s brand; the pain of the experience blocks out any earlier memories.  This is normally done at the age of 2, when the fatality rate drops below half.  Some how I was different.  I couldn’t tell you why, but my first memory was of hatching.  I surged out of my shell to land wet upon white sands.  
Later I would learn that it was pure, coarse grain, silicon sand, almost impossible to obtain anymore.  The pristine beaches of old were submerged in ice long ago, the deserts blown clean to bedrock by driving winds.  Most the silicon left is mined and used to replace the ever failing chips that keep this little hell alive.
All I remember was the white.  All I had ever known before was the red light that filtered through my shell and through my eyelids to my still developing self.  When I finally pulled my nose out of the warmth; my world expanded.  There lay a stretch of white broken only by pieces of shell; it was so very vast to my tiny eyes.  Across it I could see darkness.
  I’m told most hatchlings fear the dark and wont approach.  But even then my curiosity overcame my fear and I skittered my shaky little body across to find out what the new thing was.  When I reached the cusp of the white, I found an invisible barrier blocking me from the dark.  A plexiglas wall separating the white and black sands used to alternate the temperature of the eggs (Artificial heating elements in incubators render us sterile or worse).
Out on the black I could make out colored blurs.  Eggs!  Warmth. Comfort.  Safety.  The little world I had only known until mere moments before.  My wonderment evaporated.  This new world became a big and scary place.  For the first time in my life I knew loss.  To this day I still want to go back there.  To go back and crawl into the one little place in this world that didn’t leave me cold and empty.
The crack of a leather whip breaks my reverie.  Some bulls are so old fashioned.  Warmth forgotten, it’s back to the world of searing heat and bitter cold.