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1 Temporarily distracted by the flickering rays of the sun settling in the conifers, you do not hear his lupine yelp as he frolics in the humus. His paws seemed so durable, you would later think, that it would’ve been an unforgivable oversight of nature to leave him vulnerable to an infiltration of this kind. Should you have kept him from playing outside? Should you have made him wear some sort of shoes? You feel guilty for wanting to laugh at the mental image of Jack wearing shoes as his body goes rigid on the steel table. You feel the urge to vomit as his his spine distorts in a final postmortem spasm and his dead body defecates reflexively. The naked sight of death unearths the long-buried instinct to reach for your father’s hand — for balance, for warmth — which instead you find outstretched and unreceptive, displaying the bloated, eight-legged body of the offending parasite. He thinks that you’ll be curious, you who avidly canvass the pine forest on midsummer days for arachnological specimens. “This is what killed him,” he declares as he drops the exoskeleton into your trembling palm; you know, however, that the actual culprit remains concealed within Jack’s stagnating bloodstream. Methodically combing through your ex-Labrador’s chocolate flanks and parting his unresponsive toes, the veterinarian calmly detaches four more living ticks by sliding the forked tip of a curved plastic tool around their fleshy burrows, twisting, and then squishes the disoriented insects against the steel with her knuckle. They pop and hiss. As though specifically attempting to restore a fraction of your childish belief in your father’s mastery over life and death, she hands him the implement and theatrically advises: “For next time.”
2 Jack’s molasses coat had just begun to grey around his haunches and muzzle when he died. Your red shock is perceptibly blackening now that you hide from the sun and meadows that the Acarina have forcibly reclaimed. Accordingly, your research enters a classification phase — the production of a catalog representing your impressive findings and their organization according to the most current taxonomic schemes. You spend days on end entrenched in the Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of the Pacific Northwest, and often can be found in consultation with the massive Larousse Encyclopedia of Animal Life when perplexed by the dense contradictions within morphological taxonomy and modern cladistics. Apart from such paraphernalia of your amateur calling, your laboratory resembles the bedroom of an average girl your age, siblingless, the daughter of a widower, and little or no access to the influences of popular culture. You cannot, therefore, be granted the excuse of ignorance regarding the structure of the events that circumscribe you. Among your finely ordered rows of upturned corpses are all the murderers and thieves of the forest floor, accurately labeled and indexed by genus, pathogenicity, species, gender, development, and size. You’re overcome with dissatisfication as you press down on the minuten, through the body of your latest specimen — the adult female Rhipecephalus sanguineus your father held out to you — filling the only remaining empty plot of the taxon Acarina. You wipe away the semicoagulated bubble of your dead dog’s blood from the hole you’ve just made in the shiny persimmon shell with a fragment of paper tissue pressed to the mounting board by the prongs of a pair of tweezers. You decide to keep this fibrous relic in the seashell-encrusted jewelry box along with Jack’s vaccination tag and a picture of yourself holding him when he was a puppy taken in the black and white photo booth at the harvest fair where you picked him from a litter-filled basket beside the goat milking stand.
3 It has become dark outside. Your father has been spending an increasing portion of his days in his study, not to be disturbed. Foraging in the hallway — emergent and unwashed — you step unknowingly over an invisible barrier that, now crossed, subtly reformulates the shape and (for lack of a more precise quality) luminescence of your body. The moment passes unobserved. You stealthily approach the sliding walnut panels that demarcate your father’s sovereign territory from the familial space proper, careful not to disturb the foreign silence of the house now lacking its most rambunctious inhabitant. Through the millimetric hiatus of the sturdy doors you discern a bluish sliver of phosphor sporadically obstructed by a fluctuating silhouette; your breathing decelerates as you strain to make out the muffled screams escaping your father’s headphones. The sudden flash of naked human flesh. Pirouetting in flight, a floorboard betrays your weight and spurs a flurry of falling teacups, scattered papers and buckling latches from within the private chamber. Halfway back to your nest, the walnut doors crack open and your father finds before him a skulking young woman who, indefinably, looks older than the girl he’d split a silent and sullen skillet of eggs with nine hours previous. As if suddenly unable to think of anything but the entropic progression of his life’s events, he clears his throat, “Well, well, my little nymph… what are you up to?” “…” “Are you ready for tomorrow? It’s generally considered to be a big deal, your first day of high school.” “I can’t go. Not yet.” He approaches you with an uncharacteristic lessening of his stature. You explain, “I’m not used to him being gone; not being here when I come home.” He takes your head in his hands and draws you to his misbuttoned flannel breast. The buckle of his undone belt presses into your side like a cold finger. “I know. I’m not either. But you and me — we’re grown-ups now, and we’ve got things we have to do. If I have to go back to work then you have to go to school, right? It might even be fun. Did you consider that possibility?” You shake your head emphatically in the negative and bury your nose in his axilla, puffing a barely audible, “No.” A cluster of flaxen hairs on your neck rustles as the first breeze of a late September storm wraps your isolated home in a vortex of needles.
4 The four-by-four growls through the dust under the influence of your father’s muscular shifting. You nervously check and recheck the contents of your backpack: the main (official) compartment well stocked with three-ringed binder, plenty of paper and pens for note and doodle making; the secondary (but still innocent) middle compartment which carries a vegetarian supplement of pasta salad, cheese sandwich halves and a ripe Red Astrakhan apple — as well as the three gradated plastic jars you always carry on field excursions. Through the canvas you trace with your fingertips the contours of the objects in the front pocket you dare not inspect visually for fear of your father’s reprisal: the slippery plastic wrappers of three organic tampons, the folds of two crisp twenty dollar bills you slipped from his sock drawer under the assurance of his absent-mindedness, a matchbook from a diner, and the tantalizing rattling of the two remaining cigarettes in the pack of Lucky Strikes you’ve held onto since the fair in Redmond a month ago. The gravel becomes smooth asphalt. After two or three blue metal mile markers have crossed your field of vision, your typewriter-motion pupils dilate and settle in a verdant soft-focus far beyond the wall of Ponderosa pines lining the edge of the Deschutes National Forest.
An absence, out of focus and cloud-like, condensates.
The sudden smashing of your morning reverie by the clockwise flailing of your father’s arms startles you. He holsters the gearshift and throws the red Land Cruiser into a lurch; the neutral hum scores the exchange: “We’re here.” “Oh.” “Got everything?” The crystalline image of the contents of your bag flashes inside your mind, and with feigned insecurity you respond, “I think so.” “I’ll be here to get you at 4:15, okay? “ Nod. “Break a leg.” He raises and drops his right hand in a sharp parabola from the gearshift to rattle your thigh with three rapid pats of encouragement. You compose a cinematic smile and kiss his stubbled jowl, then disembark. Over the yellow-brick bureaucratic edifice sitting at the interstate junction, the peaks of the Three Sisters transcend a grey cloud. You follow your photocopied routine of sitting in specified chairs in specified rooms at specified times. Despite the tangible energy infusing the dry northern air between the eyes of the boys and girls around you, most of whom have not seen each other in months, the greater part of the day passes without surprise. You sort your peers into their various stages of growth in order to predict their implied behavioral patterns. Michael, the boy you smoked pot with and kissed at the Deschutes County Fair two months ago has developed an elongated torso in a very short amount of time, and his formerly auburn eyes have brightened slightly to reveal an ornate yellow root structure. He leans forward in his chair and audibly inhales the scent from your ex-best-friend Lauren’s exaggeratedly perfumed cascade of black hair. Lauren, tempted by the brass knob of the Bunsen burner in front of her is possibly unaware of this transgression. Ms. Fennel, having completed her first role call of the year, attempts to break the ice that has thickened around her adolescent student body. “So! Did anybody do anything exciting over the summer?” No one volunteers. “Well I know at least three of you had a very exciting time with me in this room, retaking biology.” There is a callous giggle from the remedials. “Did anybody take a trip? A vacation? Robert — you went to Spain I heard, with your family, didn’t you?” Michael whispers something wicked to Robert, his teammate on the Outlaws. Robert shifts back in his chair and nods unenthusiastically. “I saw the Alhambra.” Michael looks straight into you, as though to force your recollection of the most exciting moment of his summer. You speak suddenly, with a venomous matter-of-factness, “My dog died two weeks ago. He had ticks, but we didn’t find out until he got really sick. I think they were Rhipicephalus sanguineus.” Michael and the remedials laugh at the sound of Latin syllables, distinguishing themselves as a group. You feel a swelling of your heart, and retreat into the echoing silence resulting from your unexpected verbal display.
5 The larvae incubate in rows of Tupperware on shelves in the large stainless steel growth chamber vibrating at the extreme low end of the spectrum of audible frequencies in the corner of the laboratory. The sample your father extracted from the synganglia of the Amblyomma testindiarium pinched from Jack’s interdigital tissue has been isolated and synthesized at the university and arrived, via courier, in liquid form in six clear ampoules protected by bubble-wrap and cardboard that morning. In the basement of the remote research compound, under the oscillating fluorescent work lights hanging from the rafters, your father slides the syringe gently into the soft pink belly of a squirming she-mouse, pressuring the aqueous solution into her circulation. When the light-emitting diodes on the hot-plate read 60.5° (Centrigrade) he lifts her between his pincers and places her on the experimenting surface. He is waiting to see if she feels any pain. In some cases, a host organism is unaware that it is being drained by its parasite, rendered insensitive by a chemical secreted at the site of exploitation. This substance, if identified, can be very valuable. Sixty seconds later, under the opiate trance of the synthetic peptide, the small white rodent is plucked from the plate and placed in a clear plastic cell for further observation. Half of her test group has not survived this assay; if she recovers unfazed she will have provided her tormentor with a crucial datum. Your father watches her overdose on the solution he derived from the tick’s nervous system. He prepares a new subject and resolves to find the elusive quantity to which he feels he is excruciatingly near. He does not register the passing of time normally, but rather as an aggregate of cellular deaths.
6 You are leaning against a chain-link fence that surrounds a large heating unit in the southwest shadow of the gymnasium. Your father is an hour late. Smoking the penultimate cigarette in your month-old pack, you unearth a saturated log with the edge of your powder blue All-Star. The methane lamps encircling the field click on with the sound of a giant unseen lever, transforming the early evening into a striation of deep green grass, orange radiation, black shadows of trees, royal blue sky, and a nascent, silver starscape. The Outlaws run their final play, the collisions of their bodies preordained in diagrams chalk-scrawled on the locker-room greenboard, producing an exoskeletal crackling of protective equipment that resonates far into the night forest. The black swarm of spiders you’ve uprooted scatter into the sparkling quartz gravel; you kneel to investigate, but no exceptional individuals present themselves. t minutes pass. Michael materializes within the dusk, his hair slicked back and wet from the showers. “What are you doing here still?” You can see now that he has caught up to you in height since last you stood this closely: in the methane glow, his eyes fluoresce on an equal plane as yours go dim in shadow. “Not anything. My dad is really late.” “That sucks. Are you cold?” You shrug and blush at the sensitivity of his inquiry. You are overly aware of your shoulders and your arms dangling awkwardly in your outgrown sweater. Part of you knows what he wants. Michael and you share the last Lucky Strike — the one you had placed upside-down in the box only because you had always seen it done that way. Noticing this, he says, “The US soldiers in World War II would smoke their unfiltered cigarettes backwards so that the brand name would burn away and the Germans or whoever wouldn’t be able to tell they had been there when they found the butts on the ground.” He had told you this a month ago next to the pond at the fair while watching the farm trout flutter, and you felt a little embarrassed for his attempt at impressive conversation. “Yeah.” “I’m sorry about your dog. I always check my dog carefully after he’s been outside — for ticks.” Your heart swells again, as if filling with a million purple eggs. “So did I. I’m starting to think he didn’t get them outside.” “You can come over to my house, if you want, to wait for your dad. I live pretty close.” “He’ll be here soon. He probably just got distracted.” “You can call him from my place when we get there.”
7 Your father activates the headlights with an angry pull of the knob protruding from the sun-bleached dashboard. He curses at himself as the chemicals in his brain are agitated, exposing an inchoate tableaux: his daughter, underdressed for the autumnal shift in temperature and abandoned in the school parking lot, growing even more emotionally distant, surrounded by the transparent ghosts of her childhood pets. The tires rotate deeper into the interstate as the sky goes black. Scorpio ascends, triumphant.
8 You and Michael walk along the shoulder of the empty highway toward his house. The streetlamps throw his brow into relief, casting long shadows over the nervous grin frozen on his face. You pass two call-boxes. “It’s this way,” Michael says as he turns down a dark dirt road slinking off the interstate that is so enshrouded with overgrowth that the only sign of its existence is the crooked wooden cross of the mailbox at the intersection. Just as you trip in the darkness he slips his fingers around your wrist, and your aspiration doubles in frequency. “I didn’t realize anybody lived up here,” you skepticize. He says nil. The hollow metallic trickling of a nearby drainage pipe and the hollow metallic ringing of crickets are the only sounds not made by you or Michael as you walk deeper into oblivion. His fingers release your wrist.
9 Your father slows the truck to an idle, scanning the unpopulated campus. His fist slams the dash and he returns to the highway with the increased momentum of attempted self-redemption, sharpening his eyes for your nocturnal recovery.
10 Michael’s attack is rapid and professional: all you see is a flash of yellow iris before he forces your body to the ground with his. You scream and he shoves his palm against the underside of your chin, dislocating your jaw and clipping the tip of your strawberry tongue. Your mouth fills with blood as he tears at your buttons. You glimpse the punctuated joints of a stellar claw through a clearing overhead, rotating imperceptibly. You go limp as he salivates on your breast, and he gains the confidence to relax his grip on your throat in order to undo his belt. With newly adjusted eyes you see him invert the arch of his back, hoisting himself up like a centaur, and a filtered starlight glistening on his intermittent organ. His hooks ratchet your hips to his and he self-lubricates his palm. He enters a rhythmic trance. Your fingers roam the earth and excavate your bag on the ground next to you. It produces a book of matches, which you light in its entirety with a single one-handed strike. Startled by the flash and the sight of a living human being beneath him, Michael disengages in a fearful pratfall. Instinctively, you blow out the book of flames, restoring the cover of darkness. You press the packet of hot coal into his flesh, which sticks to the melting skin of his erect penis. He writhes, he curses. Running full-tilt down the path, you stumble and roll into a creek-bed. Your bare bottom half sinks into black icy mud and an eruption of tears pours from your useless eyes. After a moment of collection, you discern a patch of illuminated highway in the distance, and further, a pair of familiar headlights flickering through the density of pine. You fly across a field of needles and cones toward the approaching vehicle. Emerging from the trees, you emit a bloody yelp. You are panting on the median. The Land Cruiser screeches to a halt, and inside, your father is frozen with the impact of the image of his muddy, half-naked daughter screaming in the middle of the highway, overexposed in his headlights. You crumble. Your father picks you up as though you were only a hollow shell and puts you in the back seat of the truck. You are screaming again, and from your torrent of unintelligible sounds your father constructs a narrative that chills him to the bone. Halted at an unnatural angle across the white and yellow lines, the truck is thrust into gear and, instead of carrying you to safety or medical attention, overtakes the rotten wooden mailbox and enters the forest road. All too soon the headlamps of the speeding truck reveal the boy limping towards a decrepit trailer parked in a clearing next to a septic tank. The truck swerves and the boy jumps as though dodging a tackle from an unevenly matched opponent. Without seeing, you know exactly where you are. Your father looks back at your blood-smeared face and says, “Stay here.” Michael hardly protests as your father grabs him by his damp black hair and presses his head into the dirt. In the gleam of the headlights your father can clearly see Michael’s burnt member dangling from his undone trousers. Forming a tool from his hand, your father twists the limp purple appendage around and around on itself, eliciting a shriek from deep within Michael that you never knew a human could make. For an infinite length of time you cannot look away from the frayed canopy of the truck, lying on your back, the forest around you filled with the sounds of torture. You count the stitches of the fabric beneath you with your fingertips. The cries deescalate into a pathetic whimper mixed with sobbing. The metal door slams behind your father climbing back into the vehicle, pulling in a gust of night air laced with the scent of fresh blood. You feel the road beneath the truck turn back into highway and your trembling body registers the familiar turns and inclination of the route back to your house. Your tears have not ceased although they are now as mute as the churning of your internal currents. When the truck stops in your driveway, the engine goes silent and the fan belt begins to pump cool forest air under the ticking hood. After sitting silently in the driver’s seat for three minutes or three hours, your father, in a sort of daze, slowly raises his arm above his head without looking and gropes unconsciously for the dome light switch. Eventually, the incandescent glow pulls your eyes down from the back of your head involuntarily to behold the bloody lump of Michael’s flesh resting in your father’s outstretched hand.
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