Summer in D.C. stretches long into September, refusing to leave, even though everyone has already started talking about pumpkin spice and back-to-school. Walking outside of an evening still feels like slipping into a warm bath at best, like climbing into someone’s mouth at worst. (This is a classic D.C. line, that summer in the city is like living in a mouth. Everyone seems to have a friend who they thought came up with it.)
This city wasn’t really built on a swamp, despite what everyone says. But the myth persists because it feels truer than the truth. In the summer, the city often feels like a place better suited to mosquitoes than to humans.
We keep bug spray on our front porch. We always have, as long as I’ve lived here, before it became a public-health recommendation on the level of sunscreen, before Zika became a household word. It’s more symbolic than effective—I coat myself in it and sit on the porch to read for half an hour, and the next day I have 30 mosquito bites on my legs, one on the bottom of my foot. My shoe rubs against it all day.
A mosquito is a vampire. It sucks your blood and leaves a mark. But it’s never more vampiric than when it spreads a virus.
“I bet it was Aedes aegypti, the ones that spread Zika,” I say to my roommate. “Most of the bites are on the back of my legs, and that’s where they like to bite you. They sneak up on you, you know.” She feigns interest in my mosquito trivia.
A mosquito is a vampire. It sucks your blood and leaves a mark. It “lives on human gore,” as the humorist George Fitch put it in his early-20th century column Vest Pocket Essays. But it’s never more vampiric than when it spreads a virus. Like a vampire, its bite hijacks your body. The bite leaves behind a poison that weakens you, that changes you.
