The Rotifer
Mary Gavell, 1968
A woman pieces together experiences that take place over many years, amounting to a greater story about how our lives carry us “in our own dimensions, like people passing on different escalators.” We all exist in different realities, separated by our size, time, or complexities of what we do not know or cannot do. When the past and present whirl together, or a human finger’s gentle nudge of a microscope creates a cataclysm inside a drop of pond water, these moments of intersection make the separateness of our individual dimensions evident. The story’s title refers to the rotifer, a microscopic animal existing in its own world inside that drop of pond water. A typographic illustration cut out of paper embodies the ideas of separateness and intersecting dimensions, reality existing on macro and micro levels.
