Karen Arnold

She barely notices the bite at first; it’s another red dot added to the constellation spreading across her arms and legs. She swats the bug from her forearm and its wings click, sending out tiny flashes of iridescent green in the low afternoon sun. Another flick of the wrist and it lands in her drink. She watches it drowning slowly in the last two inches of a sticky sweet cocktail that was supposed to taste of strawberries but smells like cheap pick and mix sweets. The bug is still now, at the bottom of this drink that she only ordered so that he wouldn’t complain that she wasn’t entering into the spirit of the holiday. She is unsure about the exact nature of the spirit of this place, this fringe of new buildings on the edge of a jungle. He refuses to mute his enthusiasm, he is so pleased with himself for finding it, being ahead of the crowd, she can hear him now “it’s so good to get here before it’s spoiled, before it’s full of tourists” She wonders what, exactly, he thinks he is. A latter-day adventurer with an office tan and an allergy to spicy food. She watches him, sweating and pale on the sun lounger and thinks she will end this as soon as they touch down at the airport.

She scratches at the bite. There is nothing to do here in this half built complex. Nowhere to go, no swimming pool. Just jungle, thick and teeming and watchful. As the sun rises, howler monkeys swing and loop through the trees and the noise is like the undead. Or so she imagines. The undead are thin on the ground in her part of Birmingham. Though she laughs about it, the monkeys make her nervous. Even the butterflies make her nervous. There are so many, big as small birds, wings that shine a toxic purple as they rest on sleeping limbs, licking up the salt from sweating arms and legs.

She glances down and sees blood under her new gel manicure. The lump is throbbing and the itch goes right through her body now, carried in her blood. She is so hot, everything around her brightly coloured and shimmering. In the dark green canopy, the monkeys are howling again.

The waiter collects her glass, glancing at her warily. When he sees the beetle in her glass, the pale-yellow film that has formed on the surface of the liquid, he looks at her again, crosses himself and drops the glass over the edge of the terrace. She hears it shatter and the noise feels deafening. She wonders why he did that, why he is backing away from her. The rest of the staff are huddled together in the doorway and they are scared, she can smell it coming from them like pheromones and it makes her smile.

She stretches her arms above her head, her movements languid and liquid, eyes flicking across the rows of bodies on sunbeds. She looks at all the veins throbbing in all those pale throats. She smells blood on the warm, damp evening air. She smells blood and is so hungry she wants to howl.

Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience.