The line reads—in da-DOOMing iambs—‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ and my marginalia consisted of scribbling a line first through the the and then through the s of gods; replacing the little g of gods with an uppercase G; and then writing (trailing after the modified God) ‘zilla’; that is, I emended the line so that it read (with editorial markup) ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gGodszilla.’ I don’t know why I thought this was so amusing then (perhaps it was simply the collision of cultures, high [seventeenth-century English Renaissance theater] with low [Japanese kaiju films]; or perhaps it was that, even in high school, I had lingering associations between giant lizards and Death), but at that point in my intellectual development, the thought of a man in a Godzilla suit waddling out onto the Globe Theatre’s stage and vaporizing Goneril with his atomic breath was enough to make me bark with laughter, right in the middle of my second-period English class. Now, of course, the image doesn’t even make me smile; I have outgrown the joke. Nevertheless, I find its relevance to the spectacle on my windowpane (or rather the relevance, not of the image, but of the marginalia itself: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to Godzilla’) fascinating. For, in their double aspectuality, the gray dots manage to occupy both positions of this emended simile simultaneously: when considered as they are in reality (mites), they are flies to wanton boys, and yet, when considered as they are in my imagination (humans), they are men to Godzilla. In the first of these aspects, I am the wanton boy, I suppose, and then the gecko—it goes without saying—is Godzilla. Though it must be said that the gecko does not in the least resemble Godzilla. Whereas the gecko crawls on all fours, Godzilla was traditionally bipedal; and whereas the gecko’s smooth skin is neon pink, Godzilla’s squamous skin was dark as charcoal; and whereas the gecko’s back is bare (though I cannot see the gecko’s back, I can very well imagine that it is bare), Godzilla’s was lined with that stegosaural cordillera of spiky dorsal plates, which studded the length of his spine down to the tip of his tail, where the dense aggregate of jagged spicules (like clusters of rock crystal) could be swung into his enemies to devastating effect; and, finally, whereas the gecko’s eye is turbid and pale, Godzilla’s own eyes were vitreous and clear, narrowed beneath his hacek-shaped unibrow (a distinct V formation of lighter-colored scales, which gave him a constantly angry and aggrieved appearance). With that said, it’s still easier to pretend that the gecko is Godzilla than that the little gray dots are men. Refocusing on the windowpane, I watch the dots flee leftward toward my reflection, and as they run I can begin to imagine their fear, panic, dread of death. I am even able to summon surges of pity for them once more, visualizing the looks on their faces.