Blood
Wash |
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Clinging beneath the underside of a liana leaf on the bank of Orchid Pond, the bloated, pink-red body of a female mosquito hung heavily upside-down in the shadows. Her spindly, segmented legs seemed too weak to support the mass of her torso, which was the shape and color of a single drop of blood. Indeed, she was engorged with lifeblood, for she had dined, not a half-hour past, on a nutritious fountain in the vein of the leg of a mynah bird nestling. Her torso seemed almost too heavy and hung like a single, juicy berry under the leaf in the green shade.
The dainty legs trembled as the blood drop of her torso clung heavily there, but they were securely anchored to the rough surface of the back of the leaf, and she had no fear of losing her grip. She was not trembling of fatigue - she was trembling in ecstasy. Her tiny brain was engaged in a narcotic-like trance, induced by the digestion and absorption of a fertile supply of intoxicating ingredients from the blood which was encased within her swollen stomach. These ingredients were necessary as nourishment for her still-incomplete eggs; hundreds of them, microscopic in size, lay entwined within her abdomen, and the blood she had consumed would be the single, life-giving ingredient necessary to the eggs before their development was full and finished. As soon as the drop of blood was entirely consumed, the female mosquito would be ready to rid herself of their burdensome weight by laying them, one-by-one into the still waters on the edge of the old fighter's cove.
The eggs would glide slowly down through the water, to land and be protected in the glabrous incubator of mud that was the bottom of the pond. In hours, they would hatch into mosquito larvae, commonly called wigglers, which would be nourished by a microscopic plethora of plankton and would breathe air from the atmosphere above the pond by hanging upside-down at the surface, inhaling and exhaling through a tube-like aperture in their tails. Eventually, they would mature to exit the waters in the manner of their parent, now resting on the back of the liana leaf, enjoying the mind-tripping experience of the injestion of her filling repast.
The female mosquito, days earlier, had emerged on sparkling membranous, transparent wings into the air above the pond. She had escaped the watery habitat of her incarnation as a larvae by climbing out on the stem of a reed. Her shell, crystallized by the air, had split up the back, and she had humped into the air to cling to her perch atop her old encasement and pump her trembling wings to full splendor with the blood of her body. Soon, they were magnificently inflated, and her maiden voyage into the mystery of life on the banks of Orchid Pond had begun.
She made not a sound as she darted about, for only the male of her species produced an audible sound when in flight. The flight of the female was as soundless as that of an owl, for silence was imperative in her quest for nourishment. The alerting drone of mosquito wings could produce deadly consequences, and the little insect was innately aware of this fact.
She was also disconcertingly fast in flight and agile enough in her movements that she was able to dodge between raindrops in a shower. One raindrop could mean the end of her life, so tiny and frail was she, and she avoided them by hiding on the underside of leaves where it was snug and dry.
She had chanced upon a male mosquito, had mated, and consequently had begun to feel, deep within her body, an overpowering urge to find and consume the fresh, nourishing blood of a warm-blooded creature. This morning, she had been rewarded.
On her sides were orderly rows of heat sensors, which had intercepted heat waves emanating from the bodies of four young mynahs as they lay waiting in their nest in the flame tree. Unerringly, she had homed-in on the heat waves and softly as the caress of the tradewind breeze, she had alighted on the exposed, scaly leg of one of the birds and had pierced the soft skin at the edge of the feather-scale line with her telescopic-needle mouth. Her body pulsing in a strong pumping motion, she had injected the spot on the bird's leg with a venom to imperceptibly numb it and had proceeded to gorge herself to capacity with the blood from the leg vein of her young victim.
A frantic scrambling of the baby birds - the result of the return of their mother, bearing food - had frightened her away, and she was barely able to support the weight of her burden of blood as she careened on straining wings to light on the underside of the liana leaf. She would stay here, tripped-out on her plasma fantasies, for up to an hour, preparing the eggs for their deposit into the liquid medium of Orchid Pond. As she waited, engrossed in her orgy of satiated stupor, two pairs of twinkling dark eyes watched her in quiet contemplation of a bloody repast to curb the hunger in the belly of their intent possessors.
The mosquito gave a pulse of energy to her long cloak of wings, and they quivered, catching a faint ray of light. Instantly, an open-mouthed chameleon surged up in a leap from one side to land, its spraddled legs enclosing,her.
A strong clamp of jaws burst her fragile sac of a body into a blood-wash of delightful tastes in the reptile's mouth, and as it masticated her juices in contentment, it was in turn surprised to be engulfed, itself, in the gaping jaws of a monstrous bull frog.
With a deep sigh and a gulping bob of his head, the frog made a quick meal of the reptile. In several hours, the blood of the chameleon as well as that of the foul and the insect would provide hearty fuel, to ultimately end in the throbbing, cold veins of the antiquated bullfrog.
The frog landed with a plop on the damp moss below, from where he had been observing the unfolding drama and with a loud wheeze of expelled air from his lungs, gave one gigantic push and disappeared in a single jump into the shadows under the lianas. Only a twinkling red speck of mynah bird blood remained on the moss below the leaf to mark the merging of three lives on the edge of Orchid Pond.
(c) 1993 Carson Clippard