Jesi Bender
Soft Egg
For Maria Sibylla Merian
“Point out Suriname on this map.”
Her finger met the crown of a liver-shaped spot without hesitation.
The officials scrutinized the fifty-year-old woman who stood before them, alone. She looked like an omaatje in her shawl. She needed their permission to sail across the world. Her intention was to study insects with a paintbrush.
The report before them said she left a cult in Friesland. Left a husband, too. It also said there were bugs in matchboxes across her home, festering like skin from the Devil himself. They thought she might be soft in the head.
Still, they let her go. Her promises to bring back secrets from a new World felt like potential prophecies. Was life always somehow familiar? Or could there exist something truly new?
Indeed, she saw oracles in the virgin forests and oceans of color and in a coral snake wrapped around a caiman’s throat. But the lowliest creatures proved to be the most holy, those unnumbered underfoot. Tiny beasts that, when broken open, quivered like a soft egg. That was what she wanted to show the world—that deep down where things crawled and clambered, there were insides so beautiful, so delicate and bright, that they mirrored the infinite ecology of the human heart.
