Under a Ceiling Fan

After watching the third and last installment of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy, I sat in silence musing upon the fact that during the entire film, the swordsman never drew his sword except during an ambush battle. The ceiling fans were whirring and I shut the windows and turned off all but one light. A strange, low buzzing bleared through my ear.

I knew that sound.

The lamp lit the corner of the ceiling and I noticed a zipping, flitting movement. I tried not to react as I observed it, kept my breathing steady and relaxed my muscles. Motherfucking mosquitoes are here. We have a duel scheduled right this moment.

I fought my emotions as my mind flashed back to the terrible time a year ago, when I was laid up with a fever in the back of a diesel truck traveling two hours north on an island in the Philippines. I thought I was going to die in a strange room, within concrete walls and unfamiliar sheets under a ceiling fan keeping an anxious beat, in front of a faded picture of a weeping Jesus. My sweat was running into my eyes and through my hair. I heard whispers of "You think its the dengue?!? I heard you can only get that from the green mosquitoes in the morning..." being spoken in Visayan in the room just outside my door, and wondered if I was just dreaming as my kidneys screamed and writhed in pain. Just two mornings before that, I had been at the top of my health. I emerged from swimming laps in a pool in the mountains of Cebu City and was drying off when I was bitten.

I got over my fever, but not after vowing to destroy any mosquito who crosses my path in the future. My mind flashed back to another time, many years ago. It was a particularly rainy summer, and my window screen had a crack in it. At night, they would sense exactly where I was and would just zoom straight through and feast upon my blood with wild abandon, as I would thrash and scratch in utter torment. I had already been suffering from insomnia from being bit by mosquitoes all summer, one early morning when I heard that familiar buzzing careen past my head. I had to get up early the next day, so every moment that I stood staring at the dim lit walls left me sweating with increasing anger. "Die, Mosquito! Die!!"

It was a lost cause. I was defeated by the fact that my room was so messy that there were way too many places for a clever mosquito to hide. She taunted me when I tried to ignore her. There may have been more than one - I wasn't sure. As the long hours of the morning wore on during that battle, I was certain I began hallucinating. I didn't actually get any sleep that night, and counted 13 new mosquito bites the next horrible morning.

"You are not winning this one", I told the mosquito hopping predatorially around the corner of my room. "You have no idea what's in store for you, trying to come in here looking to bite me. You are a dead mosquito."

Across the air I lept over the cushions. I noticed a spider web and took a break to dust the ceiling. The mosquito hovered just beyond my reach in the lamplight.

I had a paper towel in my hand from dusting down those hard to reach shelves and I noticed it moving when my the light got blocked by my arm. It was getting chased by my shadow! They hate the dark!! I guided it closer to where I could leap. I didn't want my roommate to wake up so I decided to keep it absolutely soundless. I snatched the mosquito out of the air, opened the paper towel in my hand and saw it's smashed remains.

I flushed it down the toilet and came back to find another smaller mosquito bobbing around. This one I smashed with my foot against the wall, as slowly as I could get away with.