The Tick

The Tick

I watch the tick climb my pants leg. So serious. His tiny legs work both independently of one another and together, like a crew of rowers. He wants my blood, can smell it through my jeans. Can you imagine how blood must smell to a tick? Good enough to draw him out of the grass where he has been waiting for me all his life. Surely, he thinks, there is a gap here, a chink in this denim armor. He dreams of dark, moist places where he can latch himself, secure as a padlock. Then he will drink and drink, like a man in a dark bar on a bright day in a town he's just passing through. But no bartender, it’s all for him, and all for free. He can’t know I’ve seen him. He doesn’t know what seeing is. He only knows my blood and his hunger and his need to fill one with the other. I let him climb. These are his last flat seconds alive. I pick him off and split his body — tiny enough to fit inside a watermelon seed — between my nails, then blow the mess off my thumb. Later, in the shower, I will search my body for his body, and, not finding him, feel inexplicably lonely.