LICE

            Elise was sitting in the rear passenger seat of her parent's car, and her mother was driving. She was small enough that she was not allowed to sit in the front passenger seat. Her gaze turned from her mother’s right shoulder to the window to her left, where an endless field of emerald corn stalks cooked in the haze of a brilliant sun.

            "We'll go home in a little bit. We just have to stop somewhere first," Elise's mother said reassuringly. Elise realized that she must have asked where they were going, although she had no memory of it and didn't hear herself do it.

            The back seat was bestrewn with clutter in a way that always made Elise feel cozy. There were different work papers, pens, dog leashes, window scrapers, empty soda bottles, CD cases, McDonald’s bags, and many other items fighting for space against Elise. Next to her, a paper bag was sitting neatly folded at the top. Her consciousness moved a hand, her hand, although she couldn’t feel herself moving it, and she opened the bag to find a bottle of lice shampoo.

            She was dreaming. Once she understood that, she remembered where she was and desperately wanted to wake up.

            When Elise was seven years old, she got lice. The little bugs had begun a society on top of her head without consulting her. Her elementary school offered free checks throughout the year, and Elise had always scoffed at the other kids who were plagued by the infestation. She thought someone would have to be pretty weird to not know they had bugs in their hair.

            An hour earlier, latex gloves located the white devils running amok through the forest of her scalp, and her mother was called. Elise told them her head had been feeling itchy but no more than usual. That made the medical staff give her a distant look as though they didn't believe her. They said something to her mother about eggs. They had no way of knowing if the lice had babies, and they were worried that their eggs would hatch and there would be a lot more than there already were. They told her to go to the store promptly, get the proper shampoo, and go straight home to begin the extermination process.

            She itched her head and felt like she scratched off three or four of the retched little biters, along with a line of poor skin scraped into the shovel of her fingernail. She wiped them off her shoulder and held back her disgust. The idea of an entire generation of lice finding their first moments in this world, those crucial first few seconds of life to get the process moving, on her head sent a wave of goosebumps over her body. Creatures were living out their childhoods in her hair. Why weren’t they driving straight home like the doctors said? She wanted to go home. She heard herself say, “There are bugs in my hair,” although she couldn’t feel herself do it.

            “Yes, there are bugs in your hair, but they aren’t bad bugs. They’re fine. Plenty of kids have them. Sometimes you just get bugs in your hair,” her mother laughed, “You probably got it from a boy at school. Do you have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”

            There was a boy that Elise liked, but her innocence found the word "boyfriend" to be highly inappropriate. She was too young for that, and she remembered thinking he "isn't even that cute," although she did find him to be that cute. She desperately wanted to yell "no" and ask her mother why they weren't going home, but she could not find the strength to push the air out of her chest. She stared out the window at the passing, highly saturated green and gold agricultural wonders and itched her head. Just looking at the sun’s heat was making it worse. Her mother continued trying to distract her by asking about boys, but it wasn’t working. There were bugs in her hair.

            The car turned down a narrow driveway that led to a small house tucked away behind a tree line near the rural road. They came to a gradual stop, the tires slowly muscling and crunching the gravel driveway out from underneath them until they parked. The sun stopped shining through the window. It dotted here and there but was mostly blocked by the canopy cover. The car was dark and chilled, which lessened her discomfort. However, the sliver of relief was short-lived. Elise felt like she could barely see her mother.

            “Hey,” her mother said, "I just need to run inside real quick. I'll leave the car running so you can listen to whatever music you want and stuff. Does that sound good? The air conditioner can stay on unless you want windows. Do you want windows or air conditioner? You can do whatever you feel like. Feel free to draw something on the papers back there. I don't need them anymore. I don't know, do you like drawing? Could be something fun.”

            Her mother struggled to reach into the back seat with her arm bent at an unnatural angle and grabbed at different items until she crumpled a few pieces of scrap paper in her hand. She tossed them at Elise and then reached into her purse to pull out a blue pen she got from a bank. She tossed it into the seat next to Elise and collapsed the paper bag containing the lice shampoo.

            “That’s my favorite pen, so be careful with it. Don’t chew on it. Don’t get bug guts on it,” she laughed. Elise, again, felt offended and annoyed by her mother’s attempts at warmth. But she knew her mother loved her and was taking care of her in her own way. She had gotten to leave school early, so at least there was that. Her mother would be back soon. If she said it was going to be okay, then it was true.

            Elise could tell by the look on her mother's face that she was saying something, but she didn’t know what it was. Her mother smiled at her in the rearview mirror and playfully grabbed at her with her arm, which was now bending at an even more alarming angle. Elise reached out and caught her hand, holding it close to her chest. Her mother brought her hands forward and kissed them before letting her go and slamming the door shut behind her.

            She watched her mother walk around the back of the small house and disappear around the corner. It was like a cabin. It was nice. There appeared to be a large, rainbow-dotted prairie and more trees in the back, all radiating and hyper-naturally saturated in their fabulously heightened preservation in Elise's memory.

            The itching returned. Elise’s mother had momentarily taken the girl’s mind off it, but it was back now, and it felt like it was getting worse. Now stooped in the vibrating Nebraska countryside surrounding her, the itching reached a new pitch.

            Elise scratched at her scalp so deeply that she felt the retched creatures crack and split open beneath her rigid fingers and drain into the rows of carved skin behind them. Her nails dug into her skull and pinched her blood to the bone in dark streaks that flooded out of each cut. It felt like with every little pop, she was suddenly met with the sensation of ten more little dots to replace it. Little grains of rice, chewing and sucking on her head. Her fingers tickled, and she pulled her hand away from her head to see a mob of lice working toward her elbow and back up to her head.

            She clenched her mouth shut, grinding her teeth, and rolled the window down, wiping her hand against its frame. A few bugs fell to the ground outside while a larger group continued toward her ear. The tickling and itching on her head were unbearable, and her miserable hands were of no use. She opened the door as her other hand scratched a pummeling rain of writhing lice out of her hair onto the dirt. A pile of white, crawling creatures locked their legs together and blindly fought for another host to drain.

            Running toward the house felt like the only reasonable thing to do. Her mother was there. Anyone in the building would understand that she was her daughter and that certain obligations work on a higher plane of importance than others. Even if she wasn’t allowed to come inside, she needed her mom, and that was all that mattered.

            The lice had run out of space on her head. There were too many. Her hair fell away in clumps, no longer rooted to her exposed skull. The weight of them was squeezing her neck and compressing her spine. The horde of lice trampled down her neck and explored her body, running in and out of her clothing. There were so few places to hide. They ran in chaotic circles, confused, gnashing, digging, and soon, the excess began falling off her into the grass.

            She ran up to the door and pushed her face against the window in its center. Lice hung off her eyelashes and mashed into her eyebrows. Inside the small cabin, in the middle of a living room, in front of the television playing a religious sermon, her mother was kissing a man who was not her father. She couldn't see the man's face. It was cast in shadow and impossible to commit to memory. Elise tried to scream, but she, again, could not find the strength to push the air from her lungs to produce any sound.

            Elise’s mother caught the movement through the window in her periphery and yelled inside the living room. Elise gasped at her silent scream. Her mother ran to the door and opened it.

            "Oh my god, Elise," she said in a mixture of anger and terror, "What happened? You're covered in them."

            Elise’s mother took her a few yards into the prairie, hidden from the house by the tall plants. She left Elise blindly kneeling in the grass for what felt like minutes and returned with a large plastic blue tub. The bubbles of the lice shampoo filled and streaked down the outside of the tub as Elise took off her clothes and jumped in.

            Water encased Elise in a frigid cocoon. Cold darkness. Peace. The pain of the chill was now a blissful relief, assuring Elise that it was repelling the pests. Sheets of dead and choking lice peeled away from her body. Her mother scraped the layers of corpses off the surface of the water and separated them out into mass graves around the outside of the tub. She relaxed, suspended.

            The sun's warmth poked through the tree above them and pierced the water's surface, hitting Elise's forehead. She felt her mind heat up and her body follow. She felt content to hold her breath for hours in the fabric of that bath. Sleep would come and go, and she could continue to live happily there, unbothered. She didn't need to breathe. The sunlight grew until it covered the rest of the water's surface, glittering off the shiny finish of the ocean-blue plastic surrounding her.

            Before she raised her head out of the water, she felt her mother's hand on her arm. Elise's mother probably felt like she had been under the water for too long and worried about her, or she wanted to hurry up the process of bathing her so they could get home to her father, who was expecting them. Her parents had gotten into arguments about this sort of thing in the past.

            Spitting water on the ground and laughing, Elise pushed the bubbles from her eyes and looked at her mom to see her wiping away tears. Her mother joked about how embarrassing it would be for Elise if her crush saw her naked and covered in lice, and Elise laughed, happy to be discussing something else.

            She dried off with a dirty towel from the back of their car and wrapped it around herself. Her mother soaked her clothes in the bath before stuffing them into a plastic grocery sack and throwing them in the trunk.

            “Let’s tell Dad that you showered at school. I don’t want him to think you had to bathe outside.”

            “Okay,” Elise said, and they drove home.

            As badly as she wanted to wake up during the beginning of the dream, she wished they had been able to make it home before she opened her eyes. She wanted to see the house her parents shared one more time.