The One Large Mosquito

Cynthia stomped her feet as she walked to school alone, once again.

She told herself she didn’t mind it. In fact, Cynthia would rather spend that time in her own head than have to sit in her mother’s beat-up old car and hear about her job again while flipping between talk radio stations. Cynthia wished that if her mother was going to break her promise to drive her to school, she would stop offering. Her mother worked as the assistant to some guy in a big building downtown and Cynthia didn’t fully understand what he did, but Cynthia assumed it was a big deal considering her mother kept having to leave before she even woke up because of some emergency or another. Or so the heart and sad face on the fridge sticky note always indicated.

But again, Cynthia was fine with this. She knew the route to school from their third-story walk-up apartment and, since the time her mom started working for the man, she managed to cut down the trip from thirty minutes to twenty. She accomplished this by cutting through the backyard of a neighbor, who she was convinced knew and approved without saying so, and ducking under a loose fence board into the parking lot of a local grocery store.

This meant she didn’t have to loop all the way around her own block and through a park frequented by many large dogs whose owners refused to keep them on leashes. Especially problematic to Cynthia’s commute was a monstrous Great Dane, white with black spots, that would roar at her whenever she approached. The new route was less stressful and gave her time to think about things other than strategizing ways to not get eaten by a demonic dog. Being smart about her actions was something Cynthia was good at…usually. Her mother identified this virtue and tried to cultivate it.

—

“Whaaaat,” Cynthia groaned. Her mother sat next to her at the kitchen counter. She was giving her…the look. Cynthia knew this look well.

On the counter, a puzzle box laid open, its pieces spilled in a pile much like the mountain on the front cover. Cynthia sifted through the pieces and imagined what it would be like to be there, in the trees and mountains.

“We have to talk.” her mother responded.

It became a long night and a longer talk. Cynthia listened as her mother tried to convey a myriad of issues, from her skepticism about “stranger danger panic,” to keeping her guard up while walking to school alone, and then…the other thing.

“You got your smarts and your wits.” Her mother would say.

She often tried to convey life lessons to Cynthia and while the lessons could be confusing, and Cynthia honestly didn’t always listen, she at least took this part to heart. Cynthia knew when and where to fill the gaps, and she already knew she had the smarts — she was about to turn thirteen, a teen-ager!

That night went on and Cynthia continued to half-listen while trying to find the last sky piece of the puzzle and thinking about what it would be like to see a really big tree.

—

This morning hadn’t given Cynthia the time to think. She woke in a tornado of sheets because her alarm, an ancient wood-paneled clunker from a neighborhood yard-sale, decided to not go off. It sat blinking “12:00” at her accusingly, and Cynthia didn’t have the wherewithal to comprehend why.

Cynthia hadn’t bothered to call out to her mother. She could already see the hot pink sticky note on the fridge door with the heart and the sad face. As she quickly ran down her morning routine, she thought, this wouldn’t be a problem if you let me have a cell phone. Her mother trusted her to walk to school alone and complimented Cynthia on her intelligence, but wouldn’t take the next step in trust. These little contradictions bothered Cynthia, but when she vocalized them to her mother, she dismissed them as a child’s whining.

From her bedroom, Cynthia could hear the radio blaring in the kitchen, which shouldn’t have been the case had mother already left. This was strange, but Cynthia didn’t have much time to stress about the details. When she was nearly wrapped up and ready to go, she ran into the kitchen and confirmed that yes, the note was firmly stuck to the fridge and yes, her mother was nowhere to be found. The radio, still blaring, was tuned to one of the talk news stations her mother listened to, and the kitchen was filled with the sound of two men blabbing on about “the movement of The Mosquito,” but Cynthia wasn’t particularly interested in this. Instead, she grabbed a handful of single-serve bags of potato chips from a value pack on the kitchen floor and threw them into her backpack before zipping it up. She clicked the radio off, shutting the two old guys up for good, and made her way to the front door. On the way, she yanked the sticky note off the fridge and let it float to the ground.

—

“You understand The Mosquito is not a joke, right?” her mother said in a stern voice.

Cynthia had given up finding the last of the sky pieces and had moved on to the browns and greens of the leaves. She was particularly disinterested in this part of the conversation

“Cynthia,” her mother’s tone was more direct.

“Yeah, it’s serious,” Cynthia replied, still sifting around the pile of pieces.

The talk didn’t have a central theme beyond “stuff is dangerous out there” and Cynthia was getting tired.

Her mother tried to convey the danger The Mosquito posed to their family, and to the neighborhood in general. Mosquitoes were, at most, an annoyance you flicked away with your finger. This Mosquito was different. It was large, considerably larger than the others. It moved from place to place and as long as you avoided it, you were safe.

Cynthia nodded as her mother continued. Her attention was planted anywhere but here.

—

Cynthia made her way towards the alley leading to her neighbor’s backyard, stomping her feet along the way. It rained the previous afternoon and into the night and giant pools of water filled pot-holes lined the street in front of her apartment. Her shoes were dirty with dried mud and she stomped to break off as much as she could before she got to school.

As she entered the backyard, she felt eyes on the back of her neck and glanced back toward the second-story window where her neighbor typically sat with her pink hair rollers and perpetually burning cigarette. But she didn’t see the pink hair rollers or the red cigarette glow. Instead, the window and curtains were shut tightly and she saw the faint impression of movement from a ripple in the fabric.

“Something more important than spying on the black girl this morning?” she mumbled under her breath. The curtains didn’t reply.

Cynthia readjusted her backpack and wriggled under the loose fence board and through to the parking lot on the other side.

It was unusually warm this autumn morning, something Cynthia seemed to be noticing a lot lately. One afternoon in study hall, she dove down a black hole of articles and blog posts about global warming and came home crying to her mother. She managed to calm Cynthia down, but the looming dread was always in the back of her mind.

The heat was already unbearable, and she became too distracted tying her zip-up hoodie around her waist to notice how eerily empty the parking lot was this morning until she was already halfway across it. She expected to see the typical troup of old rusty cars owned by senior citizens trying to get their shopping done early, and butting into her quiet time. But they weren’t there, and across the vast expanse of blacktop she could see into the front windows of the grocery store. The lights were off.

She looked at her purple wristwatch and thought to herself, Is it, like, daylight savings time? Did I forget to set my watch back? She groaned. This wouldn’t be a problem if I just. Had. A. Cell. Phone.

After what felt like a journey across the Sahara, Cynthia stood in front of the four-lane road that her mother always told her to cross at the intersection, which Cynthia never did. She glanced in both directions a few times and darted out in the middle of the road toward a median where she proceeded to repeat the same process.

Except before she managed to toss her body out into the street once again, she felt a deep rumble that made her eyes jitter.

Without warning, several monster-sized trucks, all dark green and black with tires the size of her, rumbled past. One truck looked like something her uncle would have owned, but in the back sat a bunch of grown-ups wearing military clothes and holding big guns.

Cynthia nearly fell back into the street she expertly dashed across and exclaimed, “What the heck!”

As they rolled by, one of the adults leaned over the edge and pointed to her. His mouth was moving, but the sound of the trucks drowned it out.

The truck drove into the distance like a passing thunderstorm, and Cynthia remained in the median for what felt like forever, her feet frozen in place. Almost getting crushed was not supposed to be on the agenda today.

Something knocked her back into the moment — well, more the lack of something, actually. The early morning traffic on this road was usually light, but she expected to see some cars moving around, at least a few lined up at the traffic light down at the intersection. But this morning she was alone on the median, like she had been alone in the grocery store parking lot. Her stomach complained in hunger and she felt sweat beading on her forehead. The temperature this morning was increasing rapidly as the sun continued to peek out from above the houses.

Her gut told her something, but she wasn’t sure what.

In Cynthia’s head, her mother repeated, Your smarts and your wits.

Should she go home and call her mother at the big building downtown?

She was riddled with doubt.

If Cynthia went home now and tried to call her mother, she would be asked why she wasn’t in school. Did she have a genuine reason? Because it was hot and she was hungry and there weren’t enough cars on the road?

It was ridiculous. But why did her neighbor have her curtains shut like that? She never did that. And where were those trucks going?

She wished her mother had driven her to school this morning.

Cynthia suddenly realized she was literally straddling the line, and standing in the median wasn’t the safest choice. Cynthia pictured her mother finding out that she got hit by a car because she was absentmindedly hanging out in the middle of the road. Like a puppet with a thread pulling her head, she drifted to the other side. Before she knew it she was stomping towards the backstreet that led to her school.

—

Cynthia, her elbow resting on the kitchen counter and her chin propped up by her palm, pushed pieces around with her finger. Her mother droned on.

A sudden shock of sky blue appeared under a pile of greens and browns and Cynthia snatched it, throwing the adjacent pieces in all directions.

“There!” she exclaimed.

“Cynthia,” her mother responded, her voice piercing. “You better be paying attention.”

Cynthia wasn’t.

—

The road leading up to her school’s rear student entrance was narrow and didn’t have the typical markings other roads did. It was awkwardly situated with large fenced backyards on either side, making it feel like a corral that herded students toward the school. The school itself was like a castle that towered over all other houses, and as she turned onto the backstreet, she could see its imposing structure looming ahead. If zombies were real, Cynthia decided, this is where she would go first.

Her gut continued to churn with nerves, and the lack of any other students walking down the backstreet with her ticked another box in her mind signaling that Yes This Is Weird. She thought she saw people in the windows of the houses that lined the road, but every time she looked, there was nothing. The dark windows glared back at her like they knew a secret she held deep within.

She heard shuffling, the sound of something scraping against asphalt. She was already halfway down the backstreet but the sound startled her into spinning in place, and standing there was the first living being she’d seen in what felt like an eternity. Her heart skipped a beat.

It was the monster, the Great Dane from the dog park with its white coat and black spots along its spine. It was the biggest dog she had ever seen, a mammoth with legs that pushed its frame up to at least Cynthia’s chin. It stood there panting and whining as it looked in every direction. Something had clearly spooked this large boy.

Cynthia was less than thirty seconds from the student entrance, but her instinct tugged at her to try and help this boy.

She lowered to one knee, extended her hand and whistled softly. The dog turned its head toward her and whined again. Cynthia shuffled slightly forward on her knee to see what it would do next.

Then she felt a gust, a displacement of air from above and in front. The sun, which was still just barely peeking slowly over the rooftops, was obscured as if by an eclipse.

In that moment, she recalled a memory from when she was much younger. She’d been standing with her mother in front of someone’s house, somewhere near their apartment. At that age, she’d followed her mother around and had no frame of reference for where they were or what they were doing. Her mother had been chatting about something — she didn’t remember what, when suddenly she felt the ground shake. From above the rooftops, she saw a massive black triangular shape emerge, blocking out the sun as it flew overhead and off into the distance. The immensity was something Cynthia could not make sense of, and she screamed as if it was coming after her specifically.

Her mother tried to calm her down, but Cynthia had been inconsolable. It wasn’t until much later that her mother tried to contextualize the event, saying that there was an “air show” taking place nearby and that the monstrous shape was some kind of “stealth bomber.” None of this made the memory any less terrifying.

That terror came swelling back, like a balloon being inflated and popped in a single swift motion. Except this time it wasn’t a massive black triangular shape flying over the rooftops. It was a massive shape of…something, a thing with parts going in all directions. It was big enough to fill her vision, and it sluggishly maneuvered itself to the far end of the road where the dog was frozen in place, likely as stunned as Cynthia. The thing’s speed was deceptive, she realized. Its movements looked sluggish but the ground it covered in a short period of time was quick.

Before she could react, it was on the massive dog, and she heard a muffled grunt as the poor animal was pushed to the ground.

Cynthia found herself still kneeling with her hand extended, a sign of friendship, ready to accept a nuzzle or a lick from the dog she’d hoped to help. But the dog never came to her. She could only stare as what she came to realize was The Mosquito monotonously extracted the insides of the dog into its bulbous abdomen.

Cynthia watched in terror as the dog twitched slightly, smothered under the weight of The Mosquito. Cynthia’s memory spiraled. The events from this morning unfurled in front of her.

Her gut had been nagging at her, saying something is wrong, but she hadn’t abided by it.

She continued to spiral into a long list of what if’s and what should’s:

What if it turns and comes at me?

Where should I go?

Can I make it over a fence and into a yard? No, too big for me.

The school, a fortress with big heavy doors and windows with metal grates.

The last thought floated for a mere moment before Cynthia broke into a sprint towards the student entrance of her school. Within five seconds her body slammed into the thick metal door, but it didn’t open. She shoved the handle again, half-expecting she didn’t apply enough force the first time. But the door did not budge — she could hear a hard clank as something metal banged against the inside of the frame. It was locked.

The sound of the clank echoed down the narrow road, bouncing off the high fences like a toy ball tossed to a dog that could no longer catch it.

The Mosquito, far at the other end of the road, jerked once and began to flap its wings. It rose and hovered in place above the asphalt, over the motionless body of the monstrous Great Dane that Cynthia ascribed so much fear to. The Mosquito’s wings slowly pivoted and it turned lazily to face her.

She panicked and threw herself behind a dumpster which sat against the back wall of the road and crouched. Her legs and arms were sticky with sweat and she struggled to keep her breathing in control.

Poking her head out from behind the dumpster, Cynthia got her first glimpse of the monster’s horrifying face. Two large green pearlescent plates sat above a massive needle that looked to be as large as her arm. The plates glinted and reflected the sun in all directions. Cynthia could have thought it was pretty, had the creature not sucked the life out of a dog a few moments before.

The Mosquito’s bulbous abdomen sloshed, causing the creature to sway from side to side as it attempted to stabilize its hover. Its stomach had a red discoloration that looked like a red balloon, ready to pop. She was at an impasse — a standoff with a creature that didn’t care about her existence beyond what coursed through her arms and legs. Cynthia knew she needed a plan.

Your smarts and your wits, her mother had told her

You understand this is not a joke, right?

Her mother said a lot of things. Cynthia chose to listen when it was convenient to her.

She thought about times her mother actually fulfilled her promise and drove her to school.

She thought about the nights they spent listening to the radio.

Cynthia wished her mother had more time for her. Cynthia wished she had more time for her mother.

Cynthia’s mind swirled like a vortex.

Think. What did she say? Cynthia scanned her memory.

She printed out papers from the internet. Articles and other things, what else?

Cynthia squeezed her hands into a fist and tried to appear as small as possible. She attempted to draw any kind of relevant information, any detail from “the talk” she had with her mother months before.

—

That pesky sky blue piece fit perfectly in its place.

“Whaaaat,” she groaned as her mother glared at her.

“Pay attention, I’m trying to give you the tools here.” Her mother placed a pile of papers on the counter, printouts from various internet pages. Cynthia groaned at the thought of her mother sitting at work slowly printing pages from the internet.

“You know you can do this all on a phone right?” she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

Her mother didn’t respond to this, instead she lightly slapped the pages down on the unfinished puzzle and pointed to the text.

“Read this.” She said.

Cynthia grabbed the pile and leafed through the pages.

—

Cynthia remembered the titles of the pages but struggled to remember the details.

Anatomy

Life-span

Breeding-habits.

Eating-habits —

There! She thought. She remembered a short article on one of the print outs that described the details of a mosquito’s eating habits. Mosquitoes fed on warm bodies, but they were attracted to salts and sweets as well. When they filled their bellies with enough…stuff, they would laboriously fly away to somewhere safe as they tried to metabolise the…stuff. Cynthia tried not to think about what was currently sloshing around the inside of The Mosquito’s stomach.

She squinted and saw that this particularly large mosquito seemed to be about half full — not enough for it to ignore another meal she wagered, but enough that it would be slower and more lethargic.

Cynthia began to draw up a plan in her mind. The road was narrow and she was nimble. If the creature came towards her she would do a juke, or a dive, and it wouldn’t be able to adjust in time. Then she would simply run away, all the way back home and lock herself inside for the rest of her life.

She slapped her hand on her knee. Keys. She needed to unlock the door to her apartment and the keys to said apartment were in…her backpack.

Cynthia felt around her shoulder desperately. In the urgency to escape to the student entrance she must have dropped her backpack. She glared toward the space halfway between her position and The Mosquito. The bright purple backpack lazily sat on the sweltering asphalt.

Okay — first she needed to make a break for the backpack and fish her keys out. Hopefully The Mosquito wouldn’t be able to react fast enough.

If all else failed, she would not only use her smarts, and her wits…but also her fists, and punch The Mosquito. She was sure a straight shot to the abdomen wouldn’t be a pleasurable experience regardless of the creature’s size.

Cynthia composed herself for less than a half second — she didn’t want to give herself too much time to think about this, otherwise doubt would convince her this was a bad idea. She slowly rose from the asphalt and trained her eyes on the purple backpack. It was a five second sprint away.

She burst out from behind the dumpster and into a full run, head down. Focused.

Less than three seconds later, she was already on the backpack and ripping into it. As the top zipper tore open, there was an unexpected crunching and crinkling sound as a cascade of small potato chip bags fell to the ground. She…hadn’t remembered she put those in her pack this morning. But providence wasn’t to be questioned, because suddenly she had an epiphany. Salts and sweets as well. The ground in front of her was filled with some of the saltiest treats she could imagine.

Cynthia felt the air displacement once again and she glanced up. Sure enough, The Mosquito was slowly making its way toward her. The wings moved in such a labored way that she could count each individual flap. Its belly sloshed from side to side, causing the entire creature to buck as it attempted to course correct.

Yes, this is perfect. It’s too full and I’m small, she thought.

Cynthia looked down towards the mountain of potato chip bags, and with a single mighty swing, brought her foot down on top, causing the mountain to explode in a confetti of small salty golden treats.

She backed up and lowered herself once again to a knee.

Be small, and be ready.

The Mosquito approached, swaying. Two large antennae high up on its head twitched.

Moment of truth, Cynthia.

Like a moth to flame, or more accurately like a mosquito to a pile of potato chips, The Mosquito gently lowered its massive body onto the pile of treats. It began poking through the debris with its needle. She was unnerved by the sound of it scraping against the asphalt.

Cynthia waited, just a moment, for the perfect time, and once again broke into a run. The body of The Mosquito filled over half of the road but there was just enough space to duck under its wings, which has ceased their flapping.

Cynthia didn’t think, didn’t scheme or strategize. She simply ran. She pumped her arms and legs and pushed herself past The Mosquito. She kept her head down and moved.

From behind, she felt the air shift once again, and the sound of the flapping wings accelerated. It reminded Cynthia of the sound of the beat-up old car her mother used to get to and from work.

Except she heard that sound as well, and it wasn’t coming from behind her.

Cynthia lifted her head, and at the end of the road she could see a hulk of metal and rust appear. It was her mother’s beat-up old car. She was…here?

She was here.

Her mother reached over and opened the passenger side door, then started waving her arms around like a mad person.

Cynthia nearly stumbled from the sudden shock, but then her arms and legs pumped even harder, and after a brief glance she realized she was actually pulling away from the creature. Her assumption that it wouldn’t be able to course correct fast enough was spot on.

The next moment, she dove into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. Her heart was beating almost as hard as the wings of The Mosquito, and she slapped her hands on her chest to try and keep it from flying away.

The car accelerated with a lurch, pushing Cynthia’s head back into the seat.

Neither Cynthia or her mother said anything. The shock and urgency of the moment was too intense. Much later, they would sit in the kitchen and Cynthia would cry thinking about all of the what if’s and should have’s in their relationship.

Her mother loosened the whiteknuckle grip she had on the steering wheel and reached to turn on the radio. Cynthia gently stopped her, and brought their hands down on the middle armrest and held them there. She looked over at her mother and they both smiled. Her mother gripped her hand lightly.

As they drove into the sunrise, Cynthia wasn’t sure if they would ever be on the same page, but right now that didn’t matter. Her mother had saved her and now they were together.

Cynthia’s eyes began to well up.

“How’s work been?”