Compound

by Noa Covo

Neo Lee

The entomologist has a knack for finding new species. She claims her success is because of the sheer diversity of the insect world, and tells her mother she never would’ve had achieved what she has as a doctor. Her mother, whose name the entomologist bequeathed on a shiny beetle endemic only to Central Park, never acknowledges this. Instead, she asks her when she plans on giving her grandkids. The entomologist wants to tell her that the children she has, all six legged and boasting antennae, are far better than any continuation of their tragic line could possibly be, but instead she promises she’s working on it.

The entomologist is invited to speak at a conference on another continent. She accepts the invitation and promptly regrets it. She hates planes, but she admits this to no one because it is not crashing she is afraid of but rather the moment when the wheels leave the tarmac and everything out the window becomes tiny and indiscernible. The entomologist hates missing details. She never wants to be like her mother, not noticing her world collapsing until it is too late. She has to see everything. She used to page through her parents’ wedding album, looking for warnings no one had noticed until it was too late. A clenched fist, the shadow of a bruise, a skulking dog. As a child she tried to point them out, but her mother snapped the album shut. I don’t need to see this, she said. Besides, the damage is already done. The entomologist examined the photos anyway; going with a microscope over the few baby pictures of herself she had, as if the apple sauce smeared on her chin could tell her the future. When she ran out of pictures she turned to bugs. Her career now constitutes of her pointing out the details in lengthy papers, pinpointing omens. Her students jokingly call her a seer when they see her bent over her microscope, jotting things down in a notepad, as if she is reading tea leaves. She keeps her baby pictures in a sparsely populated album, just in case they’re right.

The entomologist calls her mother from the airport and tells her not to worry, that she’s on her way to the conference. Her mother tells her to find someone nice and get some practical biology done. The entomologist hangs up and boards the plane.

She closes her eyes when the plane takes off. When she opens them, she sees her hands one hundred times over, the safety pamphlet in front of her splitting into fractals. Compound eyes, they’re called, eyes constructed out of tiny little sensors. Bug eyes. She blinks, looks out the window. The highways and rivers spell out things in wide, sloping letters again and again, telling her secrets across wide expanses. The rows of houses down below form an epilogue of her parents’ wedding photos, and as the plane passes over swaths of forest she recognizes herself in the shapes of the trees. The entomologist closes her eyes and comforts herself in the darkness. For the first time, there is just too much to take in.

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Noa Covo is a teenaged writer. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Jellyfish Review, Okay Donkey, and Waxwing. Her micro-chapbook, Bouquet of Fears, was published by Nightingale and Sparrow Press. She can be found on Twitter @covo_noa