He grumbled to himself as the yolk of the egg cracked open and ran over the top of the carefully fashioned hole in the piece of buttered bread, spilling over the crust and onto the sizzling pan. He meant for the inside of the egg to be over-easy, but now it would clearly be over-hard. This wasn’t the breakfast “Porthole” that he was planning but there would be no turning back now that the egg was cooking. Though his body instinctively mumbled in disapproval, this didn’t ruin his morning in the least, for he knew that when dealing with things as delicate as eggs one couldn’t plan on perfection (whatever that means). 

The dish he was cooking—if you can call a piece of fried bread with an egg inside it a dish—was known by a variety of names, but he always preferred calling it a “Porthole”. It was likely that he came to prefer this name due to the time he spent sailing ships on the ocean in a previous life, long before he retreated to the solace of the small cave where he now lived. The names “Sunshine Toast”, “Moon Egg” and “Rocky Mountain Toast” just seemed a bit too flamboyant to him as he crouched down over the makeshift stovetop he built out of stones, wood and an old charcoal grill-top. But in the end, the name of the dish was irrelevant, only the content mattered.

This brings us to two of the main reasons he docked his ship and ventured inland: cooking eggs on a seafaring vessel is a difficult feat, especially if one is attempting to leave the yolk intact, and names and labels hold little weight when the frivolous opinions formed by outside observation yield themselves to the substance of the object they’ve never taken the time to savor.

He chuckled to himself as he quickly realized that he both broke the yolk on steady ground and labeled the dish subconsciously. Then, grinning to himself alone, he took a big bite.