Christmas bugs

[Erik T. Burns]

Christmas bugs (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Posted on December 24, 2017 by Biblioklept (
https://biblioklept.org/2017/12/24/christmas-bugs-gravitys-rainbow%EF%BB%BF-2/
)

    Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish
brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering toward the
larder—pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent outrider bugs
flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late silences
between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be heard, loud
as mice, munching through Gwenhidwy’s paper sacks, leaving streaks and
footprints of shit the color of themselves behind. They don’t seem to go in
much for soft things, fruits, vegetables, and such, it’s more the solid
lentils and beans they’re into, stuff they can gnaw at, paper and plaster
barriers, hard interfaces to be pierced, for they are agents of
unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were deep in the straw of the
manger at Bethlehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell glistening red among a
golden lattice of straw that must have seemed to extend miles up and
downward—an edible tenement-world, now and then gnawed through to disrupt
some mysterious sheaf of vectors that would send neighbor bugs tumbling
ass-over-antennas down past you as you held on with all legs in that
constant tremble of golden stalks. A tranquil world: the temperature and
humidity staying nearly steady, the day’s cycle damped to only a soft easy
sway of light, gold to antique-gold to shadows, and back again. The crying
of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible
distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see… .

>From Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow.