It was during a quiet, sedate reading session that Burke said the most worrying words: ‘Uh oh.’
As per my training over the last years, my eyes went to the dog sleeping at my feet and my brain went to Donald Trump. With the slightest facial movement I ask Burke what the problem is and if I need to do anything. She answers with words.
“I might have a tick.”
My jaw has found a very comfortable resting position which I am unwilling to disrupt. So I give her the two-muscle facial sign that says ‘ah fucker’.
Indeed, a tick has made home on Burke somewhere I am not at liberty to mention. We call it names while we flush it down the toilet. Within a few minutes, I become one of the apartment building’s leading experts on ticks.
It was pretty flat and had not been there long because we got him out fast. He had not yet gorged on blood. He had likely not transferred any sickness or illness (knock on wood). But man did that little fucker get to me.
It happened quickly. An hour after Burke found her tick, I found myself scratching and prodding my ass. Then behind my knees. Then under my arms. Then I was in the hallway mirror with a flashlight and a bodily flexibility I haven’t known since my weight started with a 1.
Ticks are nature’s little assholes – which is funny, because that’s the human body part they sometimes get pulled out of. Their sole goal for millions of years is to live off the blood of other animals. They also excel in transferring terrible sicknesses to others. Nobody in the animal kingdom seems to like ticks – even those who eat them. That ticks seem to be the nature’s equivalent of the drunkest person at the bar doing their Andrew Dice Clay impersonation seems to be an earthly universal truth.
The illness the tick has given me is a bad case of the old fuddy duddies. When I was a kid, I spent my days in the woods and farmer’s fields and streams and lakes. I used to come home at the end of the day covered in blistered skin and poison ivy. And, yes, occasionally I would be like public transport for a small parasitic arachnid. I found a tick in my ear once and I remember watching Saturday Night Live after a day of gallivanting only to feel a small sensation on my forehead. It was a tick walking down my face to no doubt greener pastures.
Never did it occur to me that this little jerkoff could ruin my day and many other subsequent days the way the tick can. But now that it has occurred to me, I am leery of nature.
Yesterday, the dog dragged me into the field out front so she could get a closeup smell of a pile of crap evidently left by Prague’s only Kodiak bear. I spent the whole time looking at the tall grass and counting the zillions of ticks recently alerted to my arrival and marching towards me. The dog, having taken a 900-kc pill that keeps ticks away and faced with the Mount Kilimanjaro of scat, was less concerned.
What has this bastard tick rendered me? One of my colleagues is going camping and all I could think was: you’re going to come back with encephalitis. I scratch and itch and poke all day. I looked up medicine people who might burn some ticks in effigy to rid them of my life, but the Czech Republic is notably short on witch doctors.
I fell asleep last night with a werewolf book on my face and dreamed about my future. In it, the zombies have gone in league with the ticks and together they are ruling the world. A third of us are brain-swelled zombies, a third of us are fighting that, and that two-thirds still looks down on those who voted for Donald Trump. I am an old man in a hazmat suit walking around my house pump-spraying toxins into corners and under couches.
When I wake up, I realize it was all a horrible dream and that I am being ridiculous. But then my arm itches and I get my flashlight and go to the hallway mirror.
