Nappy, Riddle, Mammoth

3 things to inspire 1 story written in 20 minutes. #story320
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The mosquito used to be a miniature nightmare, hated by all but those precious few who studied them. Now, they have evolved to mammoth proportions.

Weekend skeet shooters use them for practice, the mosquito’s blood engorged torsos exploding in red across green lawns.

However, that is the lighter side of the issue. Where once it was thought that smells caused disease, as in the miasma theory, now we know disease can be carried through the water. It was not the smell of baby’s dirty nappy, it was the fact that mama or dada threw it into the sewer where it seeped into the water supply. A riddle solved by the use of mapping and a willingness to admit they didn’t know everything.

Now we find ourselves with mosquitos the size of crows, hunting us. No longer does their bite cause a minor bump and in some areas carry disease. To be bitten by a mosquito now could be to get stabbed by a dagger, deep in the heart or to become paralyzed if probed in the spine.

Imagine a metal straw impaling you at any given location from 1 to 3 inches deep. To smack a mosquito straight down is to push the dagger deeper.

Best practice now is to grab the mosquito and attempt to understand the consequences of pulling or removing it.

In the femoral artery, at the leg, one could bleed out. A hole could be poked in a lung. A hole could be poked in the cheek, sometimes stabbing through to the tongue.

There are fewer mosquitos, because each encounter now is, potentially, everyone’s last. A mosquito full of blood flies low and slow, ripe for cars, skeet shooters and children with tennis rackets.

A person could contract a disease, accelerated by the amount of blood transfused or die of being stabbed directly in the heart, which for the mosquito would be a bulls eye.