Our girl wakes up in the tree around seven in the morning. Waking up might not be the right way to put it, because after what happened in the night, with the water dripping on her face, she never fell back to sleep, not deeply. Instead let’s say, for now, she’s given up on sleep, and is drawing her legs, unshaven and snagged with insect bites, out of her sleeping bag, twisting her long hair together at the base of her neck and tying it into a knot. She hasn’t washed her hair in a week and it’s coarse and tacky with sea salt and grease.
She could really use a hot shower.
Nobody else is up yet; she’s got the forest to herself. It stopped raining hours ago, but cool water still falls randomly, dropping from the rounded tips of cones and the fine points of needles, and from the bud scars and knuckles on endless branches.
This woman shoves her bare feet into cold, damp sneakers and climbs away from the hollow tree—her home, for now. She climbs up past the tents and tarps of this woodland community, this illegal squat, clambering over muscular tree buttresses and roots, and landing ankle deep in spongy moss, water seeping into her shoes. When she’s far enough away from the encampment, she balances herself against the trunk of a western hemlock, fern fronds tickling the backs of her knees and her thighs, and lowers herself to pee, and watches the pee splash on brown needles and absorb into the ground. For a moment the smell of her urine blocks out the smells of the forest, the damp earth and moss and wet bark. Old lichen, like fish scales, patterned onto rock.
A few metres above her head, silent, perched within a deep fissure in the rough bark of the hemlock: a mosquito.
The woman exhales and the mosquito catches a whiff of carbon dioxide. The mosquito detaches from the bark and floats lower down, towards the source of the carbon dioxide, searching for the blood meal that will provide protein to her developing eggs. She’s a good mother.
The woman stands and shifts, tugging her underwear and shorts back up over her knees. This movement draws the mosquito even closer, as she detects a moving silhouette. There but not there. She lands again, lower on the hemlock trunk, alongside a hardened drop of glistening sap. The mosquito can smell the woman’s sweat now, can sense the woman’s heat, and the mosquito’s abdomen, adorned delicately with brown and white stripes, twitches with anticipation.
When the woman moves again, she stumbles a little on the uneven ground. She presses her elbow against the hemlock for support and the mosquito alights, drifting, and settles on the woman’s neck, on that smooth, warm plain behind her ear where the softest hair grows. She’s a skilled mosquito, this one, deft with her proboscis, which she now slips into the woman’s skin (with, it could be said, a lover’s touch).
The mosquito’s abdomen begins to grow. It looks pink at first, then, as it becomes more engorged, turns a deeper red, like a pomegranate seed. Like a jewel.
Sated, at last, she retracts and floats away, somewhat burdened, as she now weighs three times what she did before she fed. She will settle somewhere quiet and protected to digest, then search for a pool of still water to lay her precious eggs. Some will be eaten but the survivors will hatch in three days, and the larvae will mature into adult mosquitoes by the middle of next week. By which time finding our girl will be impossible.
But for now, she, not yet feeling the itch, not yet aware that she’s been stalked and hunted, will slouch through the forest and down to the beach. She will sit on the damp and night-cooled sand, scooping some and letting it run through her fingers. She will try to build a cairn of smooth, flat stones, but they will insistently slip off one another and she’ll give up.
And she will consider the smoky mist rising from the morning surf and will question, not for the first time, if this is where she’s meant to be. Whether or not, maybe, it’s time to go home.