May bugs

May bugs stand in a child’s recollection of the Chernobyl disaster as a disappearance without a known end. Sparrows returned after two years, but the May bugs had not; their possible return lay so far in the future that the speaker would not live to witness it. Their absence gives the changed landscape a measure that human memory can feel but cannot resolve.

Disappearance and Unequal Returns

The recollection sets the May bugs beside the sparrows, but the two species follow different timelines. The sparrows had vanished in the first year after the accident, their bodies found in yards and on asphalt, and were raked up with the leaves. Two years later they reappeared, prompting people to call to one another with the news. The May bugs, by contrast, remained absent. The speaker reports that a teacher allowed for their return in a hundred years or perhaps a thousand, then draws the personal consequence: that future is not one the speaker will see.

This contrast makes return more than a simple measure of recovery. One familiar kind of life comes back within a few years and can be greeted; another is left to a timescale that overwhelms an individual lifespan. The account does not explain why the May bugs failed to return or establish a date for their disappearance. Its force comes instead from the certainty of absence and the uncertainty of its duration.

A Wider World of Buried Life

Elsewhere in the book, a witness remembers the cleanup as the burial of earth along with insects, spiders, and leeches. Another speaker asks how animals could have been evacuated when some lived underground and others in the sky. These accounts do not identify the May bugs as particular victims of a specific operation, but they place their disappearance within a larger problem: the disaster and its response affected forms of life that could not be gathered, relocated, or accounted for as people were.

The surrounding landscape was subjected to deliberate removal as well as contamination. Radioactive flowers were mown, their earth taken away, and, after a village was evacuated, houses and scattered possessions were washed, lowered into a deep pit, and covered over. Against this background, the May bugs’ absence belongs to a transformed habitat, though the recollection does not assign it a single direct cause.

Memory and the Limits of Recovery

The May bugs are remembered through a schoolchild’s lesson, not through a detailed account of their appearance or habits. That narrow form matters: the teacher’s immense estimate of time passes directly into the speaker’s recognition of mortality. There is no promised restoration within the recollection, only the possibility that the insects may return long after the person remembering them is gone.

The book repeatedly turns attention toward lives outside the human story. A filmmaker recalls being unable to answer a child who asked why no one had helped the animals, and reflects on how human art attends to people while leaving other living beings at its edges. The May bugs’ continuing absence sharpens that concern. They are not presented as a symbol with a solved meaning, but as an independent loss whose duration exceeds the witness’s life and whose endpoint remains unknown.