Blood Donor.
There was a red smear on my arm where I’d slapped a mosquito. It’s not even really summer yet and already I can’t sit out on the patio at dusk without being poked by at least a dozen tiny needles. It’s like a visit to the emergency room, but the bill doesn’t come in the mail—it shows up as a bunch of tiny, itchy red bumps. Some years mosquitoes completely ignore me, and supposedly what you eat can keep them away. As a kid I was told swallowing a spoonful of vinegar kept mosquitoes and other parasites away, and from what I’ve read eating a lot of onions, garlic, and beans will deter both mosquitoes and everyone else. As I looked at that red stain on my arm and the crushed mosquito body, such a dangerous, even deadly thing and yet so tiny and fragile, I started to feel something for the mosquitoes. I wouldn’t call it sympathy but I felt a kind of understanding of them. I’m not ignoring the fact that mosquitoes are responsible for at least a million deaths a year—even if it is indirect. The diseases they carry, especially malaria, cause so much suffering. Still the mosquitoes didn’t ask to be carriers. They just want to pop in, fill up on a few milligrams of a protein drink—which just happens to be blood—and go on. And eliminating the mosquitoes isn’t a great solution because there are so many other insects, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles that feed on mosquitoes that they’re an important, if extremely annoying, link in a lot of food chains. Malaria, on the other hand, we could do without. Malaria is the guy who shows up at a party and says, “You know, homelessness could be eliminated if people would settle for renting instead of getting into debt with a mortgage” and no one knows who invited him.
Also there have been a lot of times when I’ve been bitten by mosquitoes without even realizing it. They have the decency to inject an anesthetic when they plunge their snouts into our skin, and mostly it works. Sometimes it doesn’t and I’ll feel a little sting. Again it’s like going to the doctor’s office. Some nurses can slide a needle right in and I won’t feel a thing and some jab me and leave me feeling it for at least an hour afterward, and once a nurse said “You’re going to feel a little prick” and I said “You could at least take me out to dinner and a movie first” and somebody else had to come in and draw my blood, but that’s another story.
There is something amazing about the tiny, fragile mosquito. Just a few drops of our red corpuscles can produce hundreds, even thousands. And think about them this way: they’re shapeshifters, transforming from aquatic wrigglers to denizens of the air. They emerge at dusk, find an unsuspecting victim, and drink its blood.
The last thing that went through that mosquito’s mind was the flat of my hand. But I wonder if the next to last thing that went through its mind was, “Sure, when vampires do it you think they’re all sexy and cool, but when we do it we’re a nuisance.”
Then again I’ve never heard of a vampire bringing malaria to a party.