Worms/Maggots

After the death of her grandfather, Alice becomes obsessed with the imagery of worms and maggots and the general decay that corpses experience while underground. She writes:

I had a nightmare last night about Gramps' body all filled with maggots and worms, and I thought about what would happen if I should die. Worms don't make distinction under the ground. They wouldn't care that I'm young and that my flesh is solid and firm. (197.1)

This might be the first time that Alice truly grasps her own mortality, because up until now, she has casually remarked about wanting to die and blowing her brains out as alleviation to her crushing boredom. Now that she's actually lost someone to death, though, things have gotten real. So when her Gran dies shortly after, Alice's preoccupation with the macabre only continues. Check it out:

Gran died in her sleep last night. I tried to tell myself that she's gone to Gramps, but I'm so depressed all I can think about is worms eating her body. Empty eye sockets with whole colonies of writhing maggots. (225.1)

Alice has quite the vivid imagination, right? Her fascination with what happens to bodies as they decompose underground goes from dark fascination to super important when Alice is maliciously drugged while babysitting for a neighbor, and experiences her first bad trip. Guess what she sees? Yup—worms, maggots, and a decaying zombie Gramps. So you might want to read the following excerpt on an empty stomach:

[…] Gramps was there to help me, but his body was dripping with blazing multicolored worms and maggots which fell on the floor behind him. He tried to pick me up, but only the skeleton remained of his hands and arms. The rest had been picked clean by wriggling, writhing, slithering, busily eating worms which seethed on his every part. They were eating and they wouldn't stop. His two eye sockets were teeming with white soft-bodied, creeping animals which were burrowing in and out of his flesh and which were phosphorescent and swirled into one another. The worms and parasites started creeping and crawling and running toward the baby's room and I tried to stomp on them and beat them to death with my hands but they multiplied faster than I could kill them. And they began crawling on my own hands and arms and face and body. They were in my nose and my mouth and my throat, choking me, strangling me. Tapeworms, larva, grubs, disintegrating my flesh, crawling on me, consuming me. (247.2)

You could try to say that this Tim Burton-like obsession with decay is symbolic of the destructive forces that Alice has subjected herself to, but we think that'd be a stretch. Alice is, above all, young and immature, and focusing on the physical aspects of death (rather than the spiritual, which may have offered more comfort) is how she ends up coping with the loss of people she loves. It's not particularly effective, but hey, we're talking about Alice, here. Her obsession with worms and maggots and such, then, reminds us just how poorly Alice handles life in general.