Their lives begin in water where they, in larval stages, have been christened “wigglers.” They rise from stagnancy and shallows, though Creatures from the Black Lagoon they are not. No, they come as scourges of another kind. Mundane. Bothersome. Deadly. Mosquitoes.
As summer’s muggy heat cooks away into its seasonal entropy, the mosquito with its cold blood hunts for a certain shelter for its quiet, inexorable hibernation. The temperature dip signals a particularly treacherous gambit for the adult females of the mosquito’s 3,500 species. Some of those 3,500, the lucky few, find holes and wait, stilled, for warmer weather to return. Many others, though, descend into freezing water lay their eggs, and cease to be. A chilly homecoming from that of their birthplace. An odd and unforgiving return.
The eggs, though. They keep. Longer than the milk in your refrigerator; longer, even, than chicken eggs. For when the heat does return to stir them, the eggs hatch. A new batch of wigglers enter the scene, the stage set for another steamy summer.
To reconcile the brevity of these bothers with the harm they pose to other life. That’s the ticket. Full stop. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? They go by quickly for the mosquito, those days. The males buzz about for ten days or less. And then the abrupt silence. The females linger on, if fortunate, for six to eight weeks. They spend their time laying eggs every three days, and, in doing so, come into close quarters, close encounters, swooping in for a kiss to skin that is not theirs. It’s a quick but hard kiss. A serrated proboscis breaks the fleshy barrier, drawing blood.
It’s a touch, contact made, but perhaps the loneliest touch ever to exist. Unwanted, unsolicited, and so often met with harsh restitution. Even to the point of literally slapping the life out of something. A dangerous and vulnerable exchange for both parties. It takes two to tango. If the mosquito gets off scot-free, successful and without need of a getaway car, this robber has engorged itself with three times its weight in blood. In its place, an itch or pestilence. A classic bait-and-switch.
Strangest of all, perhaps, is what happens to the blood and the bitten’s relationship to it. No longer ours, it has been taken to give life to the yet-developing eggs. That life is short-lived, as we have seen: ten days at worst, two months at best. These flying vials have made their collection, given it to something hardly worth our time, but the very goal of their hated existence. What once would have sustained us, circulated in us for indefinite period unlikely to be acknowledged, now sojourns with a new life that aims for ingestion and nourishment, before going down into that stagnant River Styx. A sacrilege of blood, heretically expended.
Unfathomable as this exchange may be, we share blood in different ways. From parasite-host relationships and roadkill on the side of the road all the way to the sustaining essence we give, offer, take, steal, abuse. Unrequited. Surrendered.
Spilled. Blood, whatever you want it to mean, physiologically makes up about seven percent of all the body’s weight. Seven percent of us swirling and wiggling around in the form of red and white blood cells and platelets, carried in suspension in plasma, which is, unsurprisingly, ninety percent water.
Yet another homecoming, cycling through this celebration every minute. Each time, too, an odd and unforgiving return.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
