Mosquitos
I was securing a bolt with a nut when yet another mosquito landed on my leg. As soon as I had screwed the nut enough so it would not fall off, I swatted at my leg. My strike landed, but as I moved my hand away from my skin, blood bubbled to the surface. I sighed, wondering how many more bites I could withstand—the mosquitos were driving me insane.
I walked to the car to grab a sweater so that less of my skin would be exposed. We were parked on the edge of the world. A dirt road had brought us to the outskirts of the Indian Bayou and now we stood in the face of beauty itself. A wall of trees and dense vegetation separated us from a mystical land beckoning our immersion. A chorus of insects created a peaceful hum broken only by the melody of a rainbow of songbirds; as sunshine filtered through the treetops as a dancer navigating wings, casting flickering shadows and golden highlights. Wrapping myself in a sweater, I got back to work.
We had built one frame when a white pick-up truck sped past us. It rolled to a stop about fifty feet away. A boyish man got out. He looked to be in his mid-twenties. If he was older than me, it was not by much. His presence, however, set me on edge. There was something about him that made me uneasy. Perhaps it was due to the fact he kept looking over at us. He was on the phone, pacing in an area that had been mostly cleared of the blanket of small bushes and grasses covering the rest of the protected area. After a few minutes on the phone, he hung up and got into his car. He didn’t go anywhere as he sat, waiting.
We continued to build—bolt after bolt—adhering each piece to those it was meant to join. I would look over to the man in the truck every few minutes. My guard was up. Halfway through the building of the second frame another car could be heard in the distance. When a car approached the sound would begin as a slow rumble, as our ears picked up on the disturbance of far-off gravel, and then crescendo into a declaration of arrival. This time it was a red pick-up truck, inhabited by another man of similar age and build.
He parked next to the other man. Both of them got out of their trucks. A handshake. A conversation. An ATV ride into the protected area. The sign barring the use of motorized vehicles on the trails flashed into my mind. My eyes followed their trail into the Bayou. I felt a flicker of anger—tension in my feet.
I kept building, but I began to feel funny. A heaviness flooded my veins and arteries. My limbs seemed to be traversing an atmosphere of honey, making each rod progressively harder to attach to the last frame. My mind grew foggy—it was as if my eyes had been submerged in a cloud. Gold and silver threads danced across my vision against a nebulous backdrop of whites, creams, and soft pinks. In the midst of my laden movements and blurred vision, I distinctly remember hearing what sounded like a call originating from a bellowing animal. We had been told that we were in a good area to see wildlife, so I believed I was hearing some kind of alligator call—assuming it would be the only animal that could project sound to reach our ears some distance away. As I focused on the sound, the fog that had invaded my mind withdrew to the boundaries of my sight—golden threads slithering around the focal point in constant movement, almost as if tracing the arteries of the surrounding trees and grasses. Having fought through some of the numbness, I was almost finished with the third frame, when I heard the same animal call—this time followed by a piercing gunshot.
I froze, angry, hoping I had heard wrong. The area was a protected wildlife area with clear markings prohibiting hunting. I felt heat rising to my head and collecting in my feet. I focused on finishing the frame, pausing every once in a while to express my dissatisfaction with the two men, yelling into the air. My anger and feelings of helplessness began to ebb and flow as waves striking a rock-lined beach.
When the men returned on their ATV there was a lumpy object wrapped in a heavy black tarp in the back. I felt my suspicion had been confirmed. I thought about how wrong it was to hunt in a protected area...how ethically unsound...how illegal. When I looked at them, I did not see the same golden threads that animated all the other living organisms in the area. Instead, they appeared as if surrounded by a red aura—a source of life ripe for sacrifice, for revenge. In that moment I felt the recession of the golden threads from my vision. I felt them travel from their temporary home in my head to my legs. I looked down in an attempt to track their progress. To my surprise, golden fluid appeared to be oozing out of my many mosquito bites and drifting into the air. I watched as the threads of light drifted to the frames. They began to weave themselves into a quilt-like shape, with islands of patches connected by lone threads. For every mosquito bite I had acquired an island of patches had formed. For a moment the islands formed a beautiful glittering constellation spanning the frames. Then, in a moment, the tapestry of light lifted from the frames and expanded—its scale closely mimicking that of the latitude and longitude grid. The central patchwork island floated horizontal to the frames and slowly made its way toward the men and their cars. When it reached them the quilt floated down, swaddling the concealed animal in the back. For a moment, the quilt blazed like the sun, and then it appeared to sink into the now lifeless body of the animal. Only the few threads connecting the island to the rest of the patchwork quilt remained to be seen. The men did not appear as if they had been affected by the light show, so I doubted they were even able to see it. After a few minutes, they drove away.
Hoping that the frames had served their intended purpose, we broke them down and left the Bayou. As mangroves sped by us, I looked down at my legs once more—where the light had seeped out of me were clumps of knots, as if I had been sewn back together where the mosquitos had previously drawn blood. I redirected my gaze to trace the line of one of the golden threads painting the sky in an eastward direction. Eventually I was so transfixed, I was lulled to sleep by its hypnotic, glistening effect.
My sleep was fraught with visions. I dreamt that I had embodied the deceased alligator. That I had grown to one-thousand times the original size, breaking the bounds of the black tarp, and then eaten the entire home of the hunters—them still inside. It didn’t end there, however, and after that I visited what used to be a thriving rainforest. I felt my energy drawn to a group of trees that had fallen, or been cut, to the ground. Armed men surrounded what appeared to be an illegal deforestation effort. Chain saws met majestic trunk and I was drawn—as if by a powerful magnet—into the flesh of the tree. As if on autopilot the tree branches began to grow, piercing the logging trucks, log loaders, and the mafia who had injured the heart of life. They hung from my branches as ornaments, three miles into the air, a warning to others tempted to pluck the fruits of fertility from the Earth without consideration of consequence or ethics.
This kind of episode played over in my head at least thirty-six times.
I woke with a start. A piercing headache—the golden threads were back, no longer painting the sky, but my vision instead. It didn’t seem as if I were in a car anymore. My body felt as though strewn across a pile of rubble. Upon scanning my surroundings, I found myself in the middle of a pile of pieces of broken wood. Furniture was strewn about, some pieces more intact than others. It seemed as if a house had been tormented by a hurricane or something. The only objects still intact were two pick-up trucks, one white and one red, about a block away.