Give, Give
By Rose Ragsdale
The tick fell from the tree, burrowing its small, diseased head into my arm. The first hitchhiker that made my body its home. Then it was the leech, finding my foot in the lake I visited as a child. Someone once told me leeches have an anesthetic in their mouths, so it doesn’t hurt when they bite you. I don’t believe them.
I tried to discern what it meant, these animals so full of bloodlust choosing me as their host. I looked for answers on Wikipedia and in the Bible. Where else would you learn about parasites, if not from Google and God?
Ticks, for the record, have no biblical meaning I can find. They are a sign that something is draining you physically, or mentally, or romantically, or vocationally. Luckily I don’t have a lover or a job, and I may have lost my head somewhere along the way, as well. The tick has nothing to steal from me.
Greed is what I should be worried about. “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give,” (Proverbs 30:15). Leeches take what they want from others and then disappear, either by force or because they are full of blood. I don’t suck blood; just fun out of conversations at dinner parties.
I tend to talk about myself. Not because I’m selfish, but because I don’t know anything else. Nothing holds my interest but researching useless things like the Biblical meaning of leeches, and people don’t want to hear about that over steak and asparagus.
Ticks used to be more sinister than leeches in my mind. I have since learned the truth. Ticks are deadly only if you’re quite unlucky. Leeches are avarice. Everpresent and inescapable.
Sometimes I like to imagine I’m the main character in a movie. One about a girl finding her religion through inexplicable events. The Bible has never spoken to me and I’ve never had much interest in God, yet I look to them for a sense of clarity.
The day my father died, a white dove appeared on the stairs to my porch. White doves are not seen unless you are at a ceremony, and contrary to popular belief they don’t disappear into the wild after they are released. They go back to home-base, where they are kept in a warm cage with no thought of death or escape. Doves are a symbol of mourning and The Holy Spirit, and if I believed in God, I would have thought it was a show of sympathy.
The night I lost my virginity, I hit a lamb on the drive home. I lived in a small town for most of my life, and hitting cows or coyotes was not uncommon. Lambs, on the other hand, were hardly found dead on the side of the road. They are the most innocent creature in the Bible, and if I believed in God, I would have thought it was punishment for promiscuity.
The most recent of my encounters with religion was when a snake appeared on my front doormat, near dead but still twitching. It was a cottonmouth, four feet long, all black and brown scales. When it fully passed I froze it, intending to preserve it in formalin. It still sits in my freezer, waiting for a new life to be bestowed upon it.
Snakes, of course, are symbols of Satan. In other cultures, they are catalysts of change on account of their shedding skin. To God, they are nothing but harbingers of destruction.
It seems to me the messages I receive get continually more dismal. I am greed, I am sin, I am drained of meaning. I am without a father or a Father. I didn’t ask for these things, I simply allowed them to happen to me. Perhaps I am not the main character after all; rather, I am just a person, searching for significance in meaningless things.
THE END