Foolishly, we wore shorts. From puddles among rainforest vegetation, mosquitoes conjured themselves, arose innumerable, council-ed around our knees.
Mother initiated the swat, slapped her thigh with the trail map. The first bite became a welt. The second, a black dot exuding blood. More followed—red, black— each one a sigil. She was becoming wholly legible to them.
My brother attempted arithmetic. The bites, the blood, the welts defied counting.
Father watched the males ascend the canopy, heard the ko-kee of coquí mix with the stridulating hiss of tarantulas bristling their legs.
A frenzy of death and exultation unfolded above and around us. Male mosquitoes perished on the projecting tongues of coquí. Females drained us dry. Coquí, too late to drop from Tabonuco heights, met ambushing arachnid maws.
Dad, being a vet, witnessed the extermination with horrified fascination.
One phalanx pounced and poisoned— lunging from leaf camouflage, stabbing prey with chelicerae. Another wrapped carcasses in silk. The last liquefied the insides, sucked out the nutrients. They rotated roles— an efficient death machine. Consumption. Death. Sustenance. Life. A choreography of survival.
Our blood overflowed. Mosquitoes multiplied. They chanted zvuv— a sound not heard since Moses and Rameses, older than vowels. Unexplainable.
Then, the frogs began to fall. Coquí, small and unblinking, descended from the heights, fleeing tarantulas who waited with eight-legged patience and no moral compass.
It rained frogs. They landed on our shoulders, on the trail, on the backs of our hands, in our hair. We were marked.
The coquí did not blink. The tarantulas did not chase. The mosquitoes did not leave.
We did not scream. We did not laugh. We did not stay long.
We walked back to the rental car, bitten, blessed, coquí in our hair— days to shampoo out. Eventually, crew cuts for the men, bobs for the women. Coquí, Aedes aegypti, tarantula bristles, and silence in our mouths.
The rainforest had taken our sacrifice. We were permitted to leave. Not all are.
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