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Mosquito

Lisa Newkirk


��It was the strangest place for a mosquito bite. The skin around the lower-half of her middle finger was swelling rapidly - a white, weirdly shaped bubble was forming and fingers of its own were sliding up hers, on blood vessels leading to the heart. A mosquito had deposited its poison there. She hadn’t even felt it. Hadn’t even heard it. Hadn’t even seen it. It was an absolutely invisible soldier, it was a task well done. The urge to itch was unbearable. She knew the best thing to do was leave the affected area alone and just ignore it. But how could she? Every minute, a searing feeling in her finger taunted her, shooting up her arm and into the surrounding fingers, making those unbearable too. She wanted to madly scratch the whole hand. She wanted to just scratch and scratch and scratch until it didn’t hurt anymore. the itch spoke to her ... if she would only scratch it a little, it promised to stop bothering her. But she knew from experience the itch lied - it would never go away. Scratching would only make the itch stronger, and the finger would swell up to “New, Enormous” size. So instead she held the entire arm up, trying to staunch the blood flow to her middle finger. The finger hung there upright in the air, singled out from the rest in a salute to the mosquito. She tried to imagine how the mosquito had bitten her there. The finger had lain hand down on the arm rest of the kitchen chair, held together against all the other fingers. The space was too compact to be maneuverable for a mosquito. How unfair! There wasn’t even that much blood in a finger. What could the mosquito have been thinking anyway? This was so unfair. She wasn’t even outside when this happened. She was sitting inside at the kitchen table, waiting for the mahi mahi to be grilled and dinner to be served while she watched some stupid nature special about Australia’s native animals and their mating rituals on public television. In all likelihood the mosquito had slipped in while someone opened the porch door in the kitchen to take the fish out to the grill. And now, as she tried to hunt down the unwanted insect, there was absolutely no sign of it. It wasn’t in the usual dark areas, like under the tables or in the dark corners of the ceiling. There was no noise, no wavering flight of black that would give it away. Irritation, anxiety, she wanted to find it so it couldn’t bite her again. It had committed the perfect crime. Not even a chance for a few fair swats. If it weren’t for being bitten, she wouldn’t have known that a mosquito had been there at all. And so she sat, her arm tiring from holding itself upright, the finger still swelling and the itch still begging.





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