The bug story was interesting but I didn't understand the ending.
Is the main character's girlfriend really the same bug he caught in the beginning of the story but is just disguised as a woman? It could be true but they also showed something that goes against that theory.
Can someone please explain to me the ending to that story?
why is the man larger than he was earlier in the segment? that's a question i have about it
shareI'm not entirely sure if this is correct, but I think we're meant to interpret that the bug has been living in Eric's bed since he was a teenager: when he went to college, he took the bed with him, still containing the bug.
Then when he met Laura, and they had sex in the bed, the bug was able to infect Laura by biting her: the bug's effect was to make her more emotionally and sexually attached to Eric, almost as if she had become his wife.
Or, as they say in relation to animals and insects, his 'mate': by later having sex with him, Laura too infects Eric with the bug; she ties him up, and removes the egg from the bite caused by the infection.
The egg then grows into the same bug that he caught when he was younger: their 'offspring'.
Eric is larger and with multiple bites at the end because he has become bedridden over time due to now being a breeding ground for the bugs; Laura knows that she must make Eric breed the eggs into their offspring when the spine of a bug grows from inside her arm.
The idea behind the story is to expose the fears of sex, commitment, birth, unknown creatures, and possibly STD infection (using the metaphors of gender role-reversal and insect infestation/mating).
To add to your assessment, I got the impression that the bug crawled into Laura through the slit in her hand. Maybe it would have crawled out, but Eric wrapped her wound, essentially trapping the bug inside of Laura, which eventually took her over (hence the leg growing out of the wound; it essentially became a part of her in it's attempt to escape, where over time the wound healed over it's leg).
shareI interpreted it as base karma, though the fear would be fear of commitment. Eric captured a bug in his youth, which he knew had burrowed into his bed. He refused to let the bed go, and kept the bug prisoner.
His comeuppance comes when a woman does the same to him. She burrows into erics life and refuses to let him go.