I’m a fairly pale, delicate-skinned, single girl with a finely-tuned sense of the ridiculous. I happen to live in a loft with no air conditioning and one window, sans bug screen. It’s been…how you say in my language…HOT over the last couple of days. So of course, I’ve had the window open at night to encourage some air circulation so that the cats, the litterbox, and I can sleep in relative comfort.

I awoke at 5 a.m. with that incredible, lucid awakeness that can only happen when you’ve been roused unnaturally…and which one later realises was a state of semi-sleep. I was dreaming about…something…something to do with my hands, and my shoulders, and my face. Something…vaguely distressing and repeated and…itchy. OH MY GOD I’M ON ITCH-FIRE!!!

What better prey for a mosquito than a pale, recumbent creature with a few patches of conveniently-exposed, above-the-sheets flesh? And what better mosquito for such reactively itchy, swell-like-a-puffer-fish prey than one compelled to bite a there-should-be-a-law-against-it number of times?

Several fingers. Shoulder (twice). Back. Eyelid. Eyelid? Yes. You’ve got to be kidding me.

I saw the little bastard(ess) shortly after The Incident. She saw me, too, and flew through a wormhole in the space-time continuum. Dammit.

But then…ohoho then…I saw her again. It was an epic battle, which culminated in my STOMPING her but good, and smearing my own blood (courtesy of fingers, shoulder, back, and eyelid (eyelid? yes. you’ve got to be kidding me)) across the floor. I’ve never been so satisfied in wiping up my own blood before, let me tell you.

So if you happen to be downtown in the early afternoon and witness Quasimodo lurching screaming from a building, that’ll be me, driven insane by hallucinations due to the combined torture of the itchy and the lack of sleep.