Mosquitoes and My Current State of Stuffy Affairs
I don’t have a cold. I’ve got a icicle stuck right into my sinuses. It’s a headache that doesn’t hurt so much as it makes itself known by jumping up and own. My feet feel like they’ve been trampled on by the defensive line on a roller derby team. A thin line of film sags from my right nostril on every exhale, but retreats with the following inhale. The whole shivering situation gives me the desperate urge not to talk to anyone. Instead of answering any questions, I’ll look at them, or right through the whites of their eyes into their brain pan. They can continue talking if they must, but I’ll do my very best to pretend they’re a lampshade or a houseplant or nothing at all.
These feelings don’t do much good for the mood. It’s difficult enough to keep pleasant when the world is warm and fuzzy. Now, with an icicle jammed up though my nasal passage into that mucus-filled void between septum and brain, it’s considerably more challenging. Only fractions of minutes pass between disastrous thoughts. I imagined myself biting off, chewing, and vomiting severalpartially digested heads today. I tried to pull the steering wheel free from my moving car so that I could use it as some sort of medieval weaponry. With the right accuracy and velocity there’s no telling what damage it could do.
I went to the doctors for this particular condition. My doctor is a woman with long spider-veined legs and feet like text books. She’s always half asleep and working on a combination of momentum a Adderall. I know this because she is incapable of standing still. I once grabbed her by the shoulders and held her in place. She was sound asleep instantly. I rolled out some fresh paper sheets and left her in one of the examination rooms to enjoy a siesta.
There was no point in telling my doctor about the icicle wedged in my head. If she didn’t see it for herself, it was no use. Instead, I told her I was dying. I told her I had a rare form of dystopian febrility. I explained to her that it was worse than Zika and Ebola and anything Africa ever witnessed. While Zika shrinks kid’s heads. My disfunction packs heads with ice cubes and shakes them the way a bloated bartender mixes his drinks. It’s never the pain and fever that are fatal, it’s the overwhelming irrigation that arrives as a symptom.
The doctor wrote me a prescription for Mescaline. I had to go to three different pharmacies to fill my order. I took the Mescaline and sat out in the yard for a while. For a moment, I felt the icicle melting. My nose began dripping, oozing. Not only was the icicle change from solid to liquid, it was whining, like a neglected puppy. There I was, with my mouth agape. Long angle hair boogers strung out of my nose and ran into my lap. A soup collected there and the evening sun reflected off of it.
While all of this was taking place, unannounced to me, there was a fleet of genetically modified mosquitoes using the back of my neck like an aircraft carrier. They ran a smooth operation. A battalion, eighteen strong, landed in perfect formation. One by one they anchored themselves and began fueling. I couldn’t feel them, per say, but I had the sense that I was losing oil pressure. There was a dull, dry pain that started behind my eyeballs and evaporated all the liquid off my tongue. I thought that I might fall asleep. Maybe the pharmacist had given me the wrong dosage.
It was only the chance happening of scratching an itch on my neck that saved me. I’m no less that certain that one second longer would have left me infected with Zika, Freaka, Malaria, Hysteria, an plenty of other parasite driven illnesses. The refuted fleet of bugs took off like herd of spooked horses.
I felt the swollen landing zone on the back of my neck. Before I knew it, the icicle was back and I was back to square one.