My shirtless wife was becoming hysterical, convinced the tiny spot on her back was something other than a freckle.

“Look again,” she said. So, I did, moving in with a magnifying glass like Sherlock Holmes on his lamest assignment ever.

“It’s a freckle,” I told her.

“It’s not,” she said, so I looked one more time and holy mother of God! That tiny freckle, no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence, had legs – eight arachnid legs and a fat little body engorged with blood.

Gah, I say, and blech! Horror movies have always insisted that the deadly creatures of our world would come supersized; fanged and mammoth, capable of swallowing us in one bite.

Instead what nature delivered were wee specks full of poison; vampire ticks so damn minuscule, you can barely see them even with an optic aid.

And the bloodsuckers are everywhere. Spend an hour in your own backyard and you’ll have to spend another examining every inch of your body, including those areas that haven’t seen daylight in years.

Go camping, hiking or streaking through the city park and your day will end with the most unromantic naked activity ever invented. For those who dare step outside the safety of their homes in summertime, the nightly tick check has become a ritual; an exhaustive hunt for a flesh invader that might be hiding between the toes. Under the hair. In the smooth landscape behind the knees, or in regions of the body so remote, even the TSA ignores them.

Ticks, man. The entirety of their purpose in life is to find living flesh in which to embed themselves so that they can feast on warm, succulent blood, offering in return bacteria, infection, disease.

And once they’re embedded, they don’t give up easy, those ticks. It takes them up to 36 hours to burrow all the way into your skin, after all. They have no intentions of giving up without a fight, so bring your tweezers, your scalpel, your aforementioned flamethrower.

Ticks are the ultimate summertime buzz kill, and the most buzz-killingest part of it all is the fact that it wasn’t always this way.

Did we worry about ticks when we were kids? Were we warned about their vampire ways as we went off to play in the woods, roll in the grass or climb trees? No, man. We got burdocks in our hair, splinters in uncomfortable places and now and then we stepped on a beehive and had dive into a brook to escape the wrath of the swarm.

The worst we got during those long summertime romps was a bad case of poison ivy that required us to wear embarrassing pink lotion for a week or so. To the best of my recollection, there were no dust-sized blood slurpers behind every blade of grass waiting to launch their spider bodies into our private regions. We didn’t have to submit to nightly body scans or worry about life-changing diseases injected by tiny assassins. We just had to take baths occasionally and scissor the burdocks out of our hair.

We used to tell each other horror stories back then. Did you hear about the sleeping kid who had an earwig burrow into his brain? Or about that spider that laid eggs in some poor guy’s face?

Even our wild, childhood imaginations could not conceive of a time when every inch of the landscape would be crawling with near-invisible terrors so insidious that they would follow us home.

Weaponized ticks, my friend, set loose upon the world like a biblical plague. Or like a government experiment escaped from the island lab, depending on which way your paranoia tends to lean.

Whatever the case, if you’re spending any time at all outside this summer, I predict nakedness and probing in your future.

And not the fun kind.

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.