My name is Egg Wellson. Yes, my first name is Egg. Born in a tornado, I got my name on the road. I stuck with it through the end of seventh grade, when things started to go topsy-turvy. That’s when I cut off for my parents’ hometown. Amazing Grace Acres, North Dakota—that’s the place.

            My name wasn’t given because I’m an egghead. I’m a blah, Cs student, except in my least favorite subject, civics. My name wasn’t given because I am pale like an egg or eat eggs for breakfast. I am blue-haired and eat blueberry Pop-tarts for breakfast each morning. Here’s the scoop: My town is called EGG, INDIANA, POP. 45. INCLUDING 556 CHICKENS, HOME OF ORIGINAL AMERICAN EGG SALAD.

            Momma and Daddy came to Egg, Indiana accidently, in a tornado warning. Leaves whipped like scouring pans, weathervanes flew, stop signs bent double, chicken coops flying. My Momma yelled and yelled at Daddy, “Get out of the blankety-blank car and hide in a ditch, for God’s sake!” Daddy was determined, and his face was flushed with excitement.

            “Kelli,” he said, “We’ve got fifty pounds of gift-wrapped Bibles in the trunk, waiting to get shipped to the starving souls of Indochina. If we abandon the car, all these Bibles will go to the wind without us.”

            “Let them rip!” sobbed Momma.

            Momma forced him to stop in the town of Egg, Indiana, while she knelt in a soggy, wet old ditch full of Styrofoam and beer-cans. My Daddy, the pious-headed old rooster, as Momma called him—his car got hit head-on by an airborne fencepost, glass breaking like it was the end of the world. When the cops came round to haul off the dead and wounded, my Daddy sat in his front seat, stuck full of glass-shards like a porcupine. He was dead, but he was staring so fixedly that the paramedics threw up. The cops helped Momma from the ditch. She was frightened and soaked to the marrow, her prayer shawl stuck all crookedly to her head, her hands trembling.

“The car! Geraldo’s car!” Momma shrieked.

She peered in through the smashed windows. The stinky, fake-leather seats from the Seventies were still intact. The pine air freshener hung dancing. The windows were gone, but everything else was in place, including the gift-wrapped Bibles. Everything was in place except Daddy.

My Momma was seven months pregnant with me. She and Daddy had been traveling from their home farm in Samson, North Dakota, where Momma ran the farm with her bare hands and Daddy made his living with sending gift-wrapped, recycled Bibles overseas. Momma hated religion, Daddy loved his Lord so much that he just listened to various artists covering “Amazing Grace” all day and wrote lists of Revolutionary Resolves. Daddy’s religion didn’t stop him from fighting with Momma, though. Momma canned blackberry jelly, and every time Daddy insulted her, she thew a jar at the kitchen wallpaper.

“Bum!” hollered Momma.

“Apostate!” shrieked Daddy.

One day, Momma laid her head on the tablecloth and sobbed, “I’m pregnant. I won’t bring my baby up on this horrid kidney stone of a farm, a million miles from the general store. If you make me stay here, I will leave you.”

Daddy was frightened at the thought of Momma leaving. So he told her they’d take a month-long road trip across the U.S.A. Wherever Momma saw a town that suited her, there they’d park their hats and stay for a while. My Daddy was alarmed over Momma’s condition, and he had to keep rolling down the car-windows so she could puke. They slept in cornfields, wheatfields, tobacco fields, and on the front steps of churches.

When they approached Egg, Indiana, Daddy spoke his last words. “My last Revolutionary Resolve,” he said, “Is to cover a hundred water-towers with Scripture verses.”

“There are just two things I want in life,” said Momma. “To shout from the top of George Washington’s nose on Mouth Rushmore, and to walk the Santa Fe Trail all alone.”

So it happened, that Momma was stuck in Egg, Indiana. She was so grief-stricken that she had me all of a sudden, in the cop-car taking her to the Salvation Army relief center. I was so tiny that my head was baseball-sized, my lungs refusing to bloom with air, my tiny limbs refusing to kick. I wasn’t supposed to survive three nights, but foolishly, I did survive. That’s all my Momma and I are best at—survival. Dead men always attract more attention than surviving women.

Momma and I lived in a trailer, double-wide, overlooking the Greensburg Highway, a junkyard, and a river. The cars rushed by, the beat-up mushrooms of trucks in the junkyard waited for the crusher, and happy families fished in the river. It was a world of color, excitement, and noise. When I was just learning to stand, I propped myself on Daddy’s gift-wrapped Bibles. I gazed wide-eyed out the window.

“What did Daddy look like?” I asked Momma.

“He looked like a molded egg-roll without any soy sauce,” said Momma. “He was the worst-looking man in the world.”

“Where was I born?”

“Amazing Grace Acres, North Dakota.”

“I thought you said I was born in Egg, Indiana, Momma! That’s how come you named me Egg!”

“Good little girls don’t ask questions.”

“What did Amazing Grace Acres look like?”

“Just like you father. Ugly. Christmas wrapping wads every time I turned my back. We fed Christmas wrapping wads to the horses. The farm was all your father’s.”

“Was it always Christmas at Amazing Grace Acres?”

“No.”

“Why not? I like Christmas!”

“Good little girls don’t ask questions. Here, Egg, take your pacifier out of your mouth!”

I was four and a half. I looked two. I pulled my pacifier out with a tremendous suck and a scowl.

When you’re four, you stare at the gift-wrapped Bibles and don’t care to ask the rest. Then you get older and older and you won’t take no for an answer—you won’t listen to people who shut you down. You look at maps and scrapbooks from Amazing Grace Acres. You’re determined to escape.

That’s the story of how I began.