For several weeks now the little girl had been shaking her piggy bank each morning to check if it was full yet. She could not yet count money, but she had seen her older sister take her own piggy bank to their parents and return with crisp bills and, shortly after, new rollerblades.
    One morning, the little blue pig — which was made of Venetian glass, her mother said — did not clink nearly as much as it once did, and the little girl decided it was time. Surely she had saved enough to begin her mission.
    Carefully, she undid the latch on the pig’s tummy and, voila: money! Coins spilled out onto her bed and she watched in awe as tiny circles of different colors and sizes streamed into the river. When the last one fell out (she had to shake it, the penny was stubborn to leave), she gathered them all into her lunchbox and zipped it up.
    She skipped downstairs to her mother, who drank a coffee in the kitchen, and asked her please if she could go outside to play.
    “Sure,” said her mother, “but be back soon for breakfast.”
    The little girl nodded gleefully and went on her way. The route to the grocery store was long but she was so giddy she did not notice. Her legs jumped, skipped, danced. At last she got to the shop and pranced inside, straight to the refrigerator aisle.
    There they were. Eggs. Dozens of packs of dozens of them. She picked out an especially big one, a long brown box with words on it she read out to say: LARGE ORGANIC BROWN EGGS. Surely those would make the best chickens.
    She picked up the box and brought it proudly over to the counter, then hoisted up the lunchbox she had hauled all the way from home. The cashier watched her with a raised eyebrow but did not object when the girl unzipped the bag and coins poured out.
    “I’d like one box of eggs, please,” said the girl.
    The cashier smiled at her. “That’ll be $5.38.”
    The little girl frowned. “That’s all I got.”
    “That’s enough.”
    “Ok.” She pretended to count the coins. “5.38. Keep the change.”
    The cashier grinned now and the beaming little girl frolicked out of the store, hugging the carton of eggs in her arms like a newborn baby all the way home.
    When she reached her doorstep she hid the carton behind a bush and went on inside, where her family was sitting at a table eating scrambled eggs. She would not let this happen with her box.
    After breakfast, the little girl raced back outside and, when her mother was not looking, snuck the egg carton into her room. She opened the box and counted twelve.
    Twelve! Twelve chicks! she thought, and now she was ecstatic.
    For the next few days, she slept with her eggs, keeping them nestled beneath her pillow where surely they would be nice and warm. She gave each egg a name, and colored in the letters with permanent markers she stole from Daddy’s room. She did not know how long they took to hatch, so for days and days, then weeks, then months, the little girl waited.
    And then one morning a miracle occurred. She came home from school and the eggs had become heavy. Realizing they likely needed some assistance cracking the shell, she helped peel away the outside layer so the chicks could come easily out.
    Her nails could not so easily do this either, though, not for several days. So she waited, working away each day, until one day — another miracle! She came home and all of the eggs were done with their shells, and what was left was… boiled eggs?
    The chicks looked suspiciously like what she had had for breakfast just a day before. She ran downstairs and asked her mother if she had touched her chicks.
    Her mother chuckled. “Sweetheart,” she said, “your chicks have hatched, but you know the eggs in the store are unfertilized. That means there’s no live chicks inside.”
    The little girl sighed. Her shoulders slunk forward and she found herself sniffling. She wasn’t sure she believed her mother, but the eggs hadn’t hatched into chicks and she had yet no chickens.
    She decided enough was enough. Back in her room, the piggy bank had filled up again, and the little girl took matters into her own hands. She skipped to the farm across the street. She would show little Maryann that she had her own chickens. Just she wait.
    She crept under the fence and searched for the chicken coop. When at last she settled on the one she wanted, she dumped all of the coins onto the ground and picked up the chicken, a beautiful red hen who did not object to the child’s arms.
    She crawled back out the same way she came in, and pretty soon she was home, a brand new chicken in her arms. She went up to her mother, whose eyes popped out of their sockets.
    “Liar.”