Tick, Days Three Through Thirty

I was sifting through my daughter's tangled sweat-curls when I found a tiny brittle clump of black legs hanging out of her neck. The tick's body was almost completely buried in her creamy nape fat. Dizzying, but not as horrifying as the ticks you don't find, the ones that have time to swell up and fade to grey like polished pebbles. My best friend lost half of seventh grade to a tick she never found. My uncle lost his mind. In the new forests of the apocalypse, we will shave all our hair so ticks have nowhere to hide.

Midway through his decline, my uncle paused to look at an empty tree branch. "She watched us here." He cocked his head, remembering the cat's gaze on his neck but forgetting cougar. His forest walks spiraled out longer and further until his wife had to call the neighbors and then search and rescue, and then, when he grew violent, the police. Years ago there'd been warning headaches, unexplained fevers, joint pain. But this was up on the butte, where mail only comes three times a week and you can cure almost anything with a long enough ramble in the woods. By the time they diagnosed his Lyme disease, hours of intravenous antibiotics couldn't root it out.

The tick released from my daughter's neck with a steady pull of the tweezers, leaving a small bloodless crater behind. I swabbed it with disinfectant and flushed the tick down the toilet and washed and washed and washed my hands, sterilized the tweezers. How long had it taken to burrow so deep? I counted the hours, back through the night while we slept curled together in the cabin—could I have missed it during the cursory bathtime tick-check, hurrying the kids to bed after an evening of chasing wild turkeys—could the tick have clung, feeding since the afternoon when we played Owl-and-Mouse in the meadow? Please no earlier. The internet says ticks start transmitting diseases after thirty-six to forty hours, time enough for them to start swelling. The signs of infection—rashes, headaches, fevers—can appear three to thirty days later, and the sooner you get the antibiotics, the better your chances. In the new forests of the end, there will be no antibiotics for anyone's chances.

Even so, we will all want land like my uncle's when time runs out. The solar panels run over with light, the light drying the hills' south faces into sagebrush desert, yet the new well spurted thirty feet into the air and the spring in the garden never freezes under the snow. My uncle loved the place for how it might have saved us all; for how, skate-skiing down off the butte, he caught air on the long-abandoned ditches of Chinese laborers, though he'd forgotten the words for waxes and bindings and gaiters, for gold and flumes and slag-heaps, for ponderosas and sagebrush slowly burying the truth: the end has been here before. Have you seen the smoke? Ask those Chinese laborers—they shoveled thirty miles of rock, no pay until their year was up. My god, ask the Nez Perce, the Northern Paiute.

Back among sidewalks and fences a week after tickbite, my daughter has learned to shrug my fingers from her neck. The tick's burrow grows shallower but I keep my watch. Is this the moment I will come to regret, when more vigilance might have prevented disaster? Or has it already passed? Mostly the rashes appear seven days after infection, the internet says. My daughter says there's a coover in the closet and she doesn't want it to eat her. She means cougar, and usually they just eat deer and rodents, the very creatures whose burgeoning populations nurture the ticks of the apocalypse.

Twenty-one days after tickbite, the burrow has tightened into a sandy little scar, pale and rash-free. But here's a speckly rash lower on my daughter's back, the sort that I would...