So there’s a black tick in my bed this morning, inking its way across my ecru sheets toward my face, which is sideways on my pillow. My hair reeks of cigarettes, and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. For a moment I think that the tick is a dream or hallucination, but then I realize that I am awake. Tick tick tick tick tick tick – it moves towards my face – tick tick tick tick tick.

Last night I shared these sheets with a bartender who did what he came here to do and then left, quick, placing a succinct kiss on my cheek before jetting out the door. It’s my first one-night stand, and I guess I could end up pregnant. That would be just my luck. Twenty-five, single and pregnant by someone I don’t even know. My own fault really. No condoms on hand and too many gin and tonics at a law school party with scores of fancy folks. My mother, who died a slow death of cancer last month (drip, drip, dripping chemo), would have said that it was beneath me, that I should never have slept with a stranger. Of course, she believed in waiting until you’re married, however stupid that is. I feel dirty, like she is looking down on me.

As I stare at the blood-sucking blip of a creature creeping over my sheets, I’m immediately back in grade school, tramping through the woods behind our modest house, hunting for fossils and hoping to find some kind of treasure that will elevate me to a status far above the others, whoever those others are. I burrow my hands into the soft, pine-needled dirt and raise rocks with my small fingers, my fingernail tips black as I scrape the smooth surfaces and find nothing. Back at home my small-boned mother combs through my long dark hair, parting it to see the scalp, and tells my younger, blonde sister that she is next (this is the protocol after a day in the woods). My grandmother, who has come over for dinner, reclines on a leather Lazyboy, footrest jutting out, and watches.

"Good Lord, a tick," my mom exclaims, jumping back, her voice accusatory.

"Those things will suck out your blood," my grandmother says. "Lordy, lordy." She wrings her papery hands.

"Ew, ew, ew," I squeal, bouncing up and down. "Get it off, get it off!"

"Be still," Mom says.

She calls my dad in from the back patio where he is grilling steaks.

She leaves the room and returns with a jar of Vaseline that Dad uses to thickly coat the tick so that it will loosen its grip. Once he extracts the creature from my head, we all trot out to the patio. The charcoaled steak-scent fills the air. We watch Dad light a long wooden match and burn the tick against the patio cement. Its black body chars. Its six tick-arms splay outwards. No flushing down the toilet for us. These ticks must fry. My sister starts to cry. "You killed it," she says. She will never get used to this method of corporal punishment.

But that is what you have to do to evil creatures: destroy them. I know this innately, like I know that you have to cut a copperhead in two with a shovel. That’s just the way it is. That is what God should have done to the serpent a long time ago. Just cut him in two so that Jesus would not have to hang up on that cross, wilting while everyone watched.

So this tick in my bed momentarily paralyzes me. I lie still, watching it traverse my sheets. It seems to be moving in slow motion, like in a horror movie. I suspect that the bartender brought it in with him on his sweaty skin, a little infection waiting to get into me. Or, perhaps I spawned it. I picture hordes of ticks breeding inside me, swimming through my blood, through my marrow. Multiplying. I can feel them whirling within, and I wonder if I sweated this one right out of my pores. I want to take a bath or set myself on fire.

One summer day when I was young, my mom killed a large, bloated black spider in our garage. I thought it was a tarantula, poisonous and wicked, and I had been the one to call my mom out to the garage. "Kill it, kill it!" I had demanded.

As my sister and I watched, wincing, Mom beat the spider over and over with a broom. Suddenly, out of this spider carcass sprang all these spider babies, tons of them, oozing out on our garage floor in all directions, like ink. My mom smack-smack-smacked the broom bristles against the little ones, trying to kill them all. "Oh God, oh God," she said, crying, smacking, killing all the baby spiders until, if I recall correctly, our garage floor looked like it was coated in ashes. Mom wiped her tears with her perfumed wrist and told us to go inside and leave her alone.

"It was pregnant," I explained to my sister as we left Mom in the garage with the remains.

I sit up in bed and stare at the tick. I pick it up with the ends of my fingertips and place it on my arm. I want it to suck my blood. Suck it all right up into its durable, slick body until it becomes swollen ("You can’t kill them," my mom used to say. "You can’t smash them. You have to burn them to make them die." She knew everything about everything). It seems fitting that my blood should be sucked out today, like culpability has manifest itself into a minute black creature. But the tick won’t latch on. It just sits there, like my arm isn’t good enough for it. It begins to crawl deliberately up my arm, towards my neck. I wonder what will happen if I just let it find my head and suck its way into my scalp. I wonder what it will take from me. Or perhaps what I have to offer.

And then, after another moment of watching it crawl on my arm, I know that I will kill this tick; screw him! What do I care? That is what I’m supposed to do. That is what I’ve been taught; it is in my blood. I grab a Kleenex from my nightstand and wrap the tick inside. I will burn it to death, I think, almost gleefully. I carry the balled up Kleenex into the bathroom, holding it far from me like it is a bomb. I dump the tick into the slick sink, and it begins to crawl around in elongated circles. I grab a match from a small box which I keep on the back of the toilet to light candles at night while I bathe. I strike the match and watch it flare.

I move the flame towards the tick’s body like my Dad used to do, but I cannot seem to make contact. The tick crawls in panicked circles. My mind starts to trick me. I see the tick racing around and around, then the bloated spider bursting open, the baby spiders, then my mom’s slick bald head, the chemo dripping, dripping, dripping, tick, tick, tick, then my sister yelling, yelling, "You killed it. You killed it." My hand shakes. The match flame dies. I turn on the water, a trickle at first and then a gush, washing the tainted creature down the drain.