Someone Else's Eggs

The first sign was the eggs.

I was making breakfast on a Sunday morning, same as I'd done every Sunday for twenty years. Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. The routine so familiar I could do it blind.

Except when I cracked the egg, my hands moved differently. Not wrong, exactly. Practiced in a way that wasn't mine. The crack was sharper. One-handed. A confident snap against the rim of the bowl that split the shell cleanly and dropped the yolk without a single fragment.

I've never been able to crack an egg one-handed in my life.

I stood at the counter holding the empty shell and tried to figure out what had just happened. My hands looked the same. Same knuckles. Same scar on my left thumb from a kitchen accident when I was twelve.

But for that one second, they'd moved with someone else's muscle memory.

I put the shell down and finished breakfast. Told myself it was nothing.

My name is Walter Fenn. I've been a practitioner for thirty-two years, trained at Mudwick, currently licensed as a place consultant in the Northeast. Companies hire me to evaluate properties to check their saturation profiles.

A tech startup doesn't want to move into a building saturated with decades of bankruptcy and failure. A hospital wants to know if the site they're considering carries residue from whatever stood there before.

It's boring work. Pays well. Keeps me drawing regularly from a variety of sites, which keeps my skills sharp without the risks of more specialized practice.

Two weeks before the eggs, I'd been hired to evaluate an old farmhouse in Connecticut. It was a standard job. Family wanted to renovate, thought they'd check the saturation before knocking out walls, which was smart. Tearing down saturated structures without knowing what's in them is how you end up with construction crews that can't sleep for weeks.

The farmhouse was interesting. Two hundred years of continuous family occupation. Layers of accumulated domestic experience. Cooking, cleaning, raising children, growing old. Normal stuff, deeply embedded. The kind of saturation that feels like being wrapped in a quilt you didn't ask for.

I read the layers. Noted the concentrations. If we're being honest it was a standard report.

But one layer caught my attention. The kitchen. Someone had spent decades in that kitchen cooking for a family, and the accumulated skill and care was so concentrated that the room practically hummed with it.

I spent extra time in there. Drew a little more than I needed to, testing the depth of the saturation the way you test a pool by wading in. Professional curiosity. The kind of thing I'd done a thousand times.

Sip, not gulp, as they say.

I must have gulped.

The eggs were the start.

Then it was the garden. I don't garden. Never have. My apartment in Hartford has a fire escape and a dead fern I keep meaning to throw away.

But the following Tuesday I caught myself standing in the produce section of the grocery store, picking up tomatoes and squeezing them gently, testing for ripeness with a practiced touch I absolutely did not possess.

I knew what I was feeling for. That slight give under the skin that means the tomato is one day from perfect. The warmth that means it was vine-ripened instead of gassed in a truck.

I don't know those things. I buy whatever's on sale.

But my hands knew. My hands were confident and quick and they moved through the tomatoes like they'd done this ten thousand times. Which someone had. Someone who'd lived in a farmhouse in Connecticut and cooked for her family for forty years and picked her tomatoes from a garden where the soil was black with decades of compost and care.

I put the tomato down and left the store. Sat in my car with the engine off, breathing.

Bleed-through. I knew what it was, and I'd studied it at Mudwick, passed the exam on symptoms and management, even written a paper on historical cases. The technical definition was the absorption of experiential residue past the point where it integrates with your own psychological framework, resulting in the adoption of borrowed behaviors, memories, or emotional states as native to the practitioner.

The practical definition was simpler. Someone else's life was leaking into mine.

That night I dreamed I was kneading bread.

Not watching someone knead bread, but actually doing it. Feeling the dough under my palms, pushing and folding and turning with a rhythm built over decades of practice. The kitchen around me was warm and smelled like flour and lemon cleaner and something herbal growing on the windowsill.

I knew the recipe without knowing the recipe. Three cups flour, pinch of salt, the yeast bloomed in water just warm enough to activate but not hot enough to kill. My hands knew the feel of the dough when it was right.

That elastic, slightly tacky quality that meant the gluten had developed. That particular resistance that told you ten more minutes and it would be ready to rise.

A child was sitting at the table. Small. Four, maybe five. Watching me with the particular focus of someone memorizing something they'd need later.

I felt a rush of love so intense it ached, and I knew the child's name, and I knew the name was not the name of any child I'd ever met.

I woke up at three in the morning with flour on my tongue that wasn't there.

The sensible thing would have been to go back to the farmhouse. Return the residue. Spend time there consciously releasing what I'd accidentally taken, letting the experiences flow back into the walls where they belonged.

That's what the textbook says. That's what I'd have told a client.

Instead I waited. Because here's the part nobody talks about in the training materials. The borrowed memories felt good.

Not good like drugs or alcohol. Good like warmth, like belonging to something. The woman who'd lived in that kitchen had been happy.

Not every day, not in every moment, but fundamentally, structurally happy. She'd built a life around feeding people she loved and the satisfaction of that had soaked into her daily routines until even the most mundane task carried a hum of contentment.

My life was not like that. My apartment was functional. My work was competent. My relationships were a series of connections that had slowly thinned until I was left with colleagues I respected and neighbors I nodded at and a brother who called at Christmas.

Her life felt like a home. Mine felt like a waiting room.

So I let the bleed-through continue. Told myself I'd deal with it next week.

By the third week, I was cooking.

I mean real cooking. Not the heat-a-can, microwave-a-burrito cooking I'd relied on for years. Actual meals. Soups that simmered for hours. Bread that rose on the counter while I worked from home. Vegetables cut with a precision that should have required culinary school.

My knife skills were astonishing. Whoever she was, she'd spent decades at that cutting board, and the muscle memory had transferred with everything else. I could julienne carrots without looking at my hands.

I invited my brother for dinner. He drove up from New Haven and sat at my table and stared at the food I'd made with an expression I'd never seen from him before.

"Since when do you cook?" he asked.

"I'm trying something new."

"This is incredible. This tastes like..." He trailed off and took another bite. "This tastes like Grandma's kitchen."

It didn't. It tasted like a stranger's kitchen in Connecticut. But I understood what he meant. It tasted like someone who loved the people she cooked for. That flavor translated.

He left that night looking happier than I'd seen him in years. I cleaned the kitchen and realized I was humming. A song I'd never learned. Something about a garden.

Week four. The child from the dream started appearing during the day.

Not visually like I was hallucinating. But I'd be sitting at my desk writing a report and suddenly I'd feel a small hand on my knee.

The weight of a child leaning against my leg while I worked. The particular warm heaviness of someone who trusted you so completely they'd fall asleep against your body.

That scared me.

Not because it was unpleasant. Far from it. It was the most comforting thing I'd ever felt and it wasn't mine. That child hadn't trusted me, hadn't leaned against me, hadn't fallen asleep while I worked. She'd done all of that with her mother, in a kitchen in Connecticut, decades before I was born.

I was stealing a dead woman's best moments. Wearing them like someone else's clothes and pretending they fit.

I went back to the farmhouse on a Friday afternoon. Told the family I needed to do a follow-up reading. They let me in without questions.

The kitchen was exactly as I remembered it. And the residue was still there, still warm, still humming with all that accumulated domestic love.

But it was thinner. I could feel the gap where I'd taken too much. The saturation was slightly depleted in exactly the spots I'd drawn from. Someone who came after me and read this kitchen would find a woman's life with pieces missing. Her bread recipes. Her garden knowledge. The feeling of her child's hand.

I'd taken those things, and in taking them, I'd stolen them from the place where they belonged.

I sat on the kitchen floor. Put my hands on the old tiles. And I gave it all back.

The release felt like grief. Slow and necessary and painful. The muscle memory drained out of my hands. The dream kitchen faded. The phantom child's weight lifted from my knee and returned to the floor where her mother had knelt to hold her.

It took three hours. When I stood up, my legs were stiff and my face was wet and I couldn't crack an egg one-handed anymore.

The kitchen was full again. Everything returned. The gap closed.

I drove home to my apartment with its dead fern and its empty kitchen and I sat at the table and I felt the absence of everything I'd given back.

This is what they should teach you at Mudwick. Not just that bleed-through happens, and not just the symptoms and the management strategies. They should teach you that other people's lives can feel more real than your own, and that the wanting is the most dangerous part.

I started cooking for myself that week. Badly. From recipes. With my own clumsy hands that burned the garlic and overcooked the pasta.

It was terrible. It was mine.

That had to be enough.