Hobo Eggs
S1 E3: Choosing Day
From, 2022.
It’s morning, or whatever counts for morning when your house might be eaten by anthropomorphic skinbags with grandma faces come nightfall.
And young Ethan, leg in a splint and pajamas askew, is being coaxed by his parents to get breakfast at the diner. But not just any breakfast. Not pancakes, nor bacon, nor the hellish, over-sugared entrapment that is a muffin. No. Ethan, this sweet, limping oracle-child in the pajamas he hates, wants hobo eggs.
Hobo eggs: toast with a hole torn out like the very fabric of this town’s reality, an egg dropped in and fried like a promise you’re not sure you can keep. Ethan asks about them with the impossible hope of a child who still half-believes that his parents can fix this. Can fix anything.
“Hobo eggs?” he says, like a password back to normal.
“No,” comes the answer. “They have oatmeal.”
Oatmeal, the food of resignation. A bowl of hot gray that says: “We live here now. In this godforsaken town where the trees move and you have to nail your windows shut or the smiling dead will come inside and flay you while humming lullabies.”
It’s Choosing Day—a ritual that forces newcomers to pick between the relative order of the town or the libertine, free-range chaos of Colony House. A ceremony, yes, but one that doubles as a referendum on the kind of person you are. Do you believe in rules? Or in today, because tomorrow may be your last?
Ethan’s sister Julie chooses Colony House. His mom Tabitha breaks down. His dad Jim vacillates between disbelief and desperate rationalization, trying to keep the family together with the same hands that just barely kept the RV from flipping into a ditch. A man named Frank prepares to die in a locked box as penance for breaking the rules and getting his wife and daughter killed. And a Silicon Valley software engineer named Jade tries to solve the town like it’s a puzzle game, only to realize too late that you don’t debug a nightmare—you survive it.
But here, in the middle of all that: oatmeal.
Because there are no hobo eggs in this place. Not anymore.
Ethan doesn’t complain. Not really. Because he’s already adapting. Already folding his fear into that small, resilient human core that says, “Fine. Oatmeal today. But someday, maybe, toast with a hole. An egg inside it. A reminder that the old world still lives in pockets.”
This one moment, buried beneath the dread and the dreadfully literal naming of Choosing Day, is a quiet gut-punch. It is the child’s question, and the parent’s regretful no. It is the last dying echo of a life where breakfast didn’t mean survival. It is the sound of an egg sizzling in your memory, and the hollow where the yolk should be.
Make it! Hobo eggs from 2 Nerds In a Truck.