Great and Small
Lillie Franks
[EGG]
After entering its final, imago, form, the Dolania America lives for less than five minutes. This is the shortest adult reproductive cycle known, but that is because we cannot see the creatures who live and die upon this mayfly’s back . We cannot estimate their numbers, but we know the civilizations they devote themselves to rise and fall at the same pace as the glass-clear wings they are built on.
When the mayfly flies straight, some say, the nations on its wings are at peace, but when it flies in circles, they are at war.
The mayfly is the only insect in the world which has a full metamorphosis after gaining the ability to fly. However, this isn’t the reason you know it. You know it because it is small and you are great.
Hundreds of generations of these people live and die in the time it takes for the mayfly to mate and perish. And we would consider their lives very short, except that there is a flower they grow, and that flower is more beautiful than any other flower, but if it buds when they wake up, it will die before they go to sleep, for even these people’s short lives is interrupted by sleep.
Once, a child among them imagined a world of people who lived on those flowers, a world that rose, flourished, peaked, or perhaps decayed, but finally was wiped away when the flower died. She smiled at her notion and looked no closer at the sapphire blue petals.
[EMBRYO]
Does it seem strange a people would not know what it is they live on? It’s not so uncommon. There is one people I know with some fondness who live on a rounded globe, circling a sun. They call their world a planet and build happily on it, and only in jest would they ever imagine they are living on an egg.
That egg is laid by a bird that flies among the stars. The pregnant bird finds a sun to warm its child in the cold and lays its egg in orbit of it. As soon as it has laid one, it wings its way to another star to lay the next. One of them can lay a hundred eggs from a single mating, and of those hundred eggs, at most a dozen will grow to adulthood.
The egg that circles this star was laid late in its clutch. It is unlikely that the egg will hatch before the star burns out. It is a failure, in some sense. But in another, a people live there, and I love them.
What happens to all these unhatched eggs? Some are eaten by larger birds that soar their own way along the galaxies. Others are cracked in collisions with the planets and asteroids that circle the same stars. But the most common, and disappointing end is that the star burns out before the egg is ready to hatch, and both fade into the cold.
Every time it lays an egg, the bird smiles to the sun and wishes it a long life. What a shame, it thinks, as it soars away, that something so beautiful as a star should be so short lived.
[HATCHING]
One night, a young woman and her best friend were sitting on the edge of the left wing, staring up at the sky. It was as it always was: blue with clouds that constantly moved in one direction. That direction was the opposite of the way the wing was moving at that moment, but they had no reason to know that.
“Why do you always sit out here like this?” The friend asked, dropping onto the translucent ground below them. “As if there’s something to see?”
“It’s big,” she answered and shrugged. “That’s it.”
Her friend laughed. “So’s my nose, but you don’t see me staring at it”
“It’s gotta mean something,” she said, and didn’t say the second part.
I’d mean something if I were that big.
She started to stand up, but as she did, she was caught in a current of wind. It was an incident that happened, never too often, but enough to be feared. At their size, even the slightest variations in the currents of the air could be deadly.
Before she even understood what was happening, the wing and the world she knew had disappeared. She floated with the wind, up, up, up.
[LARVA: FIRST INSTAR]
It has been said that there are fleas on the back of fleas on the back of fleas, and so on infinitely in both directions
But anyone can see that the chain is broken, somewhere. We find fleas many places, but if there were greater fleas for them to sit on, those are gone, perhaps forever.
As for the smaller fleas, I can confirm them down to two levels. Flea upon flea upon flea upon something else. It is tempting to extend the pattern.
Some naturalists have been so caught by it that they imagine we all once lived upon our own kind, human upon human, dog upon dog, tree upon tree, and that the world we see today is the result of an ancient catastrophe, perhaps a great wind that blew us from our accustomed homes to new places.
And yet, convinced as they are that we are not home here, even they still live happy, and if they expect a great human to come for them one day, they do not wait with any particular impatience.
Whether they are right or wrong, I cannot say. But it seems to me that either way, they have stumbled upon a valuable truth. A world of like upon like, with each kind alone and each size at its own level can be destroyed in a moment. A world of unlike and unlike, of great and small, will last forever.
[LARVA: SECOND INSTAR]
She flew up into the air, and the world she had lived in for so long became small, or rather the distance between it and her became great.
Her mind was on even smaller things. She thought of her younger sister, who would miss her and the story she wouldn’t be able to tell that evening. She thought of her parents and how they would struggle to bring in the harvest. She thought of her friend, running home in fear to beg adults for help, and she thought of the small animal, which we might call a dog, or not unlike it, which she petted each morning on her way to the fields. She thought how it would have to do without the small spark of joy she brought it each day.
She did not think of the disputed throne of the neighboring kingdom and the series of back and forth incursions that promised a war in the near future. She did not think of the troops who would spend their lives for the right to demand a tithe from her crops, or the fine, vast principles which never followed them onto the battlefield. She did not think of any of the matters that a historian chronicling her age would write. Even if she knew for certain what she already suspected, that in time these matters would consume the things and people she loved, she still would not have thought of them.
And still the distance grew greater. She could see the fly now, and began to see the world that it was a part of. To be thrown so high by the wind was like being made vast, to be even the size of the mayfly, Dolania America, that carried her world on its back.
But not quite. It was still the wind that was in control. What world the wind might be a part of, she couldn’t imagine.
[LARVA: THIRD INSTAR]
Some say that the small are always ruled by the large, but this is not always so. On one world I know, the majority of the people are vast giants, but the rulers are, next to them, tiny specks.
“Of course,” these rulers say, “we would love to give you greater representation in the government. But you must understand, the government buildings simply aren’t built for creatures your size.”
Their cities are organized in concentric circles, with the tunnels and rooms becoming smaller and smaller as they approach the center, where the smallest of all of them live. On the outer edges of the cities, the giants can live comfortably, and even in some of the houses in the middle, as long as they stoop or crawl. But beyond that, they simply cannot go, and these are the halls where power sits.
On another world, there is a separate government for the giant and the minuscule. The giant residents control the placement of objects, where the stones and blocks that fill their world are put. However, the small residents control the surfaces of these objects and defend their borders with zealous enthusiasm. Since neither can live without the other, they have come to a peace, of sorts. Some would call it a slow war.
On still another, all the people are of many different sizes and only their rank determines which are important and which unimportant. However, by tradition, they assign importance in the opposite way to us. The more powerful a person, the less important they are thought to be.
“After all,” a friend of mine from there explained to me, “to rule another person is to dedicate yourself to serving them. Clearly, the servant is less important than the master. So whose needs matter least of all? Whoever can say their life is affected by everyone but changes no one’s.”
Their history books are full of stories of poor peasants and beggars eking out life. These hungry, desperate people stand on great stone statues in the city squares. Their stories, that every schoolchild of their world learns by heart, are bleak and painful. The great wars and the triumphs of the rich and wealthy appear only in passing footnotes, as they happen to change these lonely wanderers’ lives. But the sadness students read with is resigned, never active.
“What can be done?” My friend said. “That’s just the way history is.”
And so it will be, at least among them. Because no matter how many museums collect these heroes’ every possession, how tall their effigies stand, they are small to the people who sit on thrones and counsels, and no one yet has returned to them the greatness of freedom.
[NYMPH]
The wind, she realized, lived on a scale of time so much vaster than hers that she might well live a long life before the updraft even stopped. Certainly she would be dead before she came near the ground.
For all practical purposes, in fact, she wasn’t falling or rising. She was floating in a space that made even the Dolania America she lived on seem miniscule.
At first, this brought her to despair. What could she do to have any import in this colossal emptiness? Who would remember her for her driftings? Why did she have to be so small?
But as she continued to float, she seemed to be blown further and further from such questions. They became first indistinct, then small and finally disappeared into the distance. In place of them, a new question arose.
What sort of life?
[SUB IMAGO]
If the wind could speak, it would be puzzled to hear you claim it moves from place to place. Don’t be silly, it would tell you. I’m simply evening myself out. Where would I want to go?
The wind is not alone in this. Many things that seem to move in one direction are only evening out their small irregularities in order to better rest. The water that falls on the land and grows the crops that feed the societies that write the histories wants nothing more than to rejoin itself in the deep sea. The dust that becomes those humans, who love and fight and record and remember is just following a path back to the ground again.
Some even say the very time that passes in those histories is only sloshing one way, and long from now will slosh back again. Then, every event we’ve lived through and every event we haven’t will happen again backwards. We will take back all our achievements, unlearn all our lessons and finally give way to the past rather than the future. And when the first of all of us have given way and all the time before them has passed, time will turn around again. Every moment, every life, will repeat and unrepeat, happen and unhappen, a great pendulum of being, forever.
But if everything I do will be undone, others ask, what good is it to do anything?
What good is it, the first reply, to do anything that will happen only once?
[FINAL MOLT]
It was only when she asked this new question that she opened to the new world she was in. No one explores a world they believe is cruel, only one that might be kind.
And when she did, she found wonders. A star drifted past her in the great space, no larger than a speck. Around it a tiny egg circled. And on that egg lived a whole world of people.
She noticed another world in the distance. It was covered in massive circles made of stone, which became intricate and complicated in the center.
There is no reason to pretend any longer.
I am her. She is me.
I am still falling.
[IMAGO]
I have floated and lived by the kindness of the many peoples of all different sizes that I have found, and still, the wind carries me and I do not know what carries the wind.
I have met people who must look down and squint to see me and others who can understand me only in pieces. I have learnt something from all of them.
Often, it is the same thing: how to be my own size.
It is easy to become larger than yourself, or smaller. To try to be the narrator who understands the entire world you walk through, or to fall into small memories and experiences that do not fill the whole space of you. Even now, it is only in moments that I can be my own size exactly.
It is, I think, a good size.
I’ve heard it said the entire world is no more than a speck of dust on the fingernail of a giant. I don’t know whether that’s so, but just in case, I’m always careful when I wash my hands.
Lillie Franks is a trans author and teacher who lives in Chicago, Illinois with the best cats. You can read her work at places like Sword and Kettle Press, Poemeleon, and NonBinary Review or follow her on Twitter at @onyxaminedlife. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.