Egg
His daughter walks up to a small crowd huddled in a semi-circle. A woman is selling hard boiled eggs cooked in volcanic water.
White orbs bobbing in a bowl-sized indent in the hissing rock.
His daughter looks at him, excited and he fingers his pocket to find loose change. He hands it full fisted to his daughter, careful not to lose the money in slits of rock where his hand cannot follow to retrieve it.
She brings back a pearly egg, a spherical gem. It smells thickly of sulfur and she is tossing it back and forth between her two hands, dividing up the heat. She presents it to him, showing off her prize. Perfectly sized for a cupped palm and balanced in shape so precisely that he would like to spin it like a top.
She asks him to peel it for her and he holds it between his thumb and forefinger, measuring its lightness despite the dense material inside. The egg cracks readily on the floor and he begins peeling at the shell, letting it snag at his nail beds and then flake off in puzzle piece shards.
Her face is vigilant as she watches the meat of the egg grow exposed and luminous. He hands her the egg and her eyes close, the motion of biting in.
-Saehee Cho
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I’m putting together a little collection…
If you have a thing for eggs, please send your egg-related:
poems/stories/essays
to
Saehee@soo-nfood.com.
