The Small Made Large

Last Monday we found a baby rabbit dead on our lawn. Two babies, in fact, laying broken-necked in the grass. We blamed the neighborhood cats. Hid the babies in plastic bags inside the plastic garbage can.

A few days later, we noticed that the bags containing the carcasses had moved. They'd budged inside the garbage cans, as if the rabbits had come alive. We looked closely. The bags writhed, alive with pale grub-like worms. Maggots, I mouthed. Maggots. We must be grateful, we said to each other, to these cleaners, these busy morticians. Still, as I lugged the maggoty garbage cans down to the curb this morning, it was an effort not to vomit.

Am I afraid of what I do not understand? Here are more images of the small made large, the invisible visible. Do we feel better now, looking at their buggy eyes, their poky, cartoonish teeth?

What is it about maggots? Medical specialists use them to clean, to sanitize. So why don't I want them to touch my hand? Or worse, the soft skin on my arm? Perhaps such squeamishness is related to evolutionary instinct; for, after all, dead things, we are told, carry diseases. But I prefer to think the instinct comes from our tendency to think symbolically. To see the outside as part of what's inside. We don't want to touch dead things because they're, well, dead. And we don't want to get too close to that.