Lice Cycle

A hitchhikers progress. 

Chapter 1. In which we confront the miracle of life and our chief protagonist begins her journey

Under a woollen beanie, nestled in a warm forest of tousled blonde hair, a new life is assembling itself . 

Its been a week since she slithered out from her mother’s abdomen,, a moist, silky-surfaced pearl,  Her mother , as she has done several times a day for the last two weeks, deftly coaxed threads of slime from the surface of the egg and coiled it round a hair shaft;  slime, that dried and tightened in the warmth trapped in the forest of hair.  She was tired, drained and dessicated , but her body was relaxed . She has laid the foundation for ongoing life, ensured her legacy. Her life is nearly over. Obeying the laws of nature, the wheel of life turns inexorably.

Chapter 2. In which we celebrate the introduction of New Life.

Inside the hardened coat of the egg, there is a slow confused awakening. A new life begins to shiver, writhe and expand. the embryo-nymph feels around the unyielding walls of the egg-shell. She is growing, and feels increasingly cramped  and constricted. What has been a safe place to develop, she realises suddenly ,is becoming a prison cell.

She urgently explores , probing with her front legs and finds an elastic softening in the end of the shell. With a convulsive heave, she breaks through, hauls herself free and collapses onto the warm soft scalp, 

As she recovers, she guides her short antennae over the contours of her head. Her partially developed eyes are of little use in the gloom. She flexes her jaws and feels ,with a sudden thrill , the sharp edges on the fangs that fold out fluently  from her mouth. The same thrilling sensation floods her whole being and her mouth is suddenly filled with sweet saliva. Seemingly without  thinking she leans forward, and drives the hooks on her front legs into the cushion of dead skin cells on the scalp and, bracing herself, pushes her fangs through the skin. They slide through the surface layer easily but she keeps  pressure on them, boring deeper until she feels a warm flood of salt-flavoured liquid filling her mouth, mingling with the fluid she has secreted.

She squats transfixed until the pleasure wanes and then gently withdraws and folds her bloody mouth parts cautiously in on themselves. It is time to rest. 

The next four days pass quickly. She gains confidence in controlling her six legs, the hooks ensuring grip in the drifts of dead skin. She reaches a clearing, where there is only fine scrubby hairs . It will become her preferred feeding area. With repeated use her fangs have lost their sharpness but ,on skin free of the gnarled hair roots, they slide  in and effortlessly tap into a free-flowing supply of vital, invigorating blood.

Chapter 3. In which our heroine explores her mysterious world and struggles to maintain her contentment with life..

The events of the fourth day remind the little nymph that she has a lot to discover still about this journey she is on. Returning into the forest, her gut is a tense bag of blood. She is suddenly aware of another pair of antennae sweeping her head and chest. In the gloom she strains her eyes to make out 

the looming form in front of her. Exploring warily with her own antennae , realisation dawns. She is not alone in this forest. How could she have been so naive. On her journey to the clearing she had passed several eggs still tightly bound to hair shafts. Probing round the open ends she had established they were empty and wondered why they were there. She realises now she is part of a community. She must be alert to the possibility that, amongst her fellow-travellers, there may be some who are a threat to her

As if to reassure her the looming presence in front of her abruptly turns away and lumbers off into the gloom, pushing past her as it goes.

She is suddenly exhausted. Her gut, still distended with undigested blood, aches. She pushes into the shelter of a knot of hairs and lowers herself onto the warm, cushioned scalp.

She is woken by a stifling pain in her back. The interlocking plates that form the protective shield of her abdomen have stretched to their limit in response to her rapid growth. The rising pressure is crippling. her. She twists then stretches to try and make room and , suddenly, there is a ripping sensation as the horny coat splits from the top of her head the full-length of her body, revealing a pale,  moist replica  beneath, of the torn apart back structures. Relief is immediate and with a series of convulsive wriggles she hauls herself out of the old skin, leaving a golden casing,, a perfect sculpted replica, intricately detailed, down to the hooks on the end of her six hollow ,hinged  legs. The new skin, pale and soft , rapidly dries , hardens and darkens to a bronze gloss. While she stretches her newly minted limbs , she admires the brittle translucent statue she has just vacated . She has no way of knowing that this process will repeat itself twice more before she reaches her adult size. Or that its a process as old as life itself, a process common to all insects ; a design workaround for species born with a skeleton on the outside that will not expand as the owner-occupant grows..

Chapter 3. In which our heroine gets in the “family Way” and thereby answers many of her existential questions.

By the time she has her third moult, it is a familiar ritual and she feels confident and competent and ready to take on a more adventurous lifestyle. In short,  She feels like a grown-up..open to whatever , or whoever, comes her way..

On fresh legs, she hurries to the end of the forest to “fuel-up” in preparation for her new role, whatever that may be.. She is filled with curiosity, and a swelling desire to meet up with her co-residents in the forest… Until now she has avoided them, sensing they were somehow more competent, but now, since the final moult, she is feeling a new confidence.  Her enlarged adult abdomen, with its essential breathing holes, sways elegantly as she walks toward the clearing..

By the time she reaches her usual feeding grounds, she is picking up clues of other fellow travellers nearby. There are  fleeting movements detected at the edge of her vision, even, maybe,  the apparently accidental brush of an antenna tip as she rounds a knot of hair shafts  at the edge of the clearing. She has a weird feeling she is being followed, stalked even but, whereas before it would have frightened her, now, with her new sense of adventure, it feels exciting.

She probes around the base of a hair to find a gap between the roots and expertly slides her freshly unsheathed fangs into a free flowing tunnel of blood.  She squeezes the anti-clotting fluid from the  glands at the back of her mouth cavity and the warm blood suffuses through her so quickly that she fears she might overfill, and has to urgently retract her fangs . 

As she lifts her head she is astonished to see that she is no longer alone. While she was focussed on feeding, a male  has noiselessly approached her from behind, and is standing close to her, his legs stretched and his head raised, as if scanning the area for danger. She knows he is a male, (she has seen them in the distance before, strutting along hair-shafts, looking purposeful  and capable.) Like the others she had encountered, he is smaller than her but neatly turned out, his back-plates burnished copper and the  polished curves of his abdomen painstakingly maintained .,At the tapered tip of his abdomen his maleness confirmed by the grotesque penis jutting from his rear. 

Embedded , ancient connections  are firing rapidly in her nervous networks. Impulses she had not guessed at are now coursing through her, threatening to overwhelm her and all thoughts of caution or shyness desert her. For the first time she feels a pervasive sense of purpose. 

With this awakening has come a realisation, an urgent need to understand the point of her existence, to leave a legacy, to create new life. At the same time it strikes her, with profound certainty that this other living thing, standing so near her, is vital to her success in fulfilling her destiny. It is her role, to produce more and more copies of herself and him?..he has been sent to help.

She freezes, her six legs stiff, rooted to the spot as the male louse slides on his back underneath her. With the soft undersides of their abdomens pressed together, he reaches around her with each pair of legs in turn to lock himself into a tight embrace beneath her. She is wary. As she feels his weight suspended beneath her ,she must clench her legs hard to prevent them both collapsing to the floor. Now he flexes his lower abdomen so that the penis curls upward and pushes into the crack at her back end. She tenses reflexively, at the foreign sensation but   gradually relaxes as she feels herself responding to his flexing movement. Although it is an entirely new sensation for her she does not pull away. She responds to it by pushing gently against him, intensifying the connection between them. The two of them stay locked in this way for some hours, oblivious to their surroundings and the passing time. She is barely conscious of the intermittent pulses of fluid through his penis, that flow into her and bathe her depot of eggs that have been developing in her since she emerged from her final adult moult. 

She does not know that this is an essential process in activating the eggs to start their development. She relies on  her own instincts and trusts in the male she has allowed to attach  to her. Between them there is a sense of certainty : there is a confidence they both feel. They are co-operating for a purpose they do not fully understand except they share a sense that it is essential..in its own way as essential as feeding, essential as breathing..

Chapter 4. In which our heroine responds to the clarion call of nature and learns some more lessons  about the fundamental requirements of life.

Two days have passed since the extraordinary encounter in the clearing. After the male released her from his embrace and withdrew, she had felt profoundly tired. It was all she could manage to drag her exhausted body into the thick cover of the forest and she lay motionless for a full day. She continued to doze , eventually woke feeling hungry and after swallowing her fill of hot, salty blood she is feeling revitalised. Her abdomen is heavy and swollen, limiting the amount of blood she can swallow at each feed.

As she squats, the discomfort in her abdomen intensifies, rising gradually to a crescendo. She fidgets and stretches but the pain returns again like a wave, washing over her and, as it breaks, forcing her to tense her back legs and push down into her back end which is congested and gaping .  She rests between the pains, deliberately forcing herself to relax until the next pain begins. Time means nothing to her. Her focus is inward. Finally, as the pain builds to a climax, the first egg slides from her abdomen, slick with moisture that hangs in strings to the edge of the slit it has emerged from.  She rests momentarily then turns and drapes the strands around the nearest hair shaft.

Chapter 5. In which our heroine fulfils her purpose,, answers the queries brought up by a remarkable chain of events

The head louse has settled into a semi-automatic existence. She is no longer troubling herself with the existential complexities that define her . The exertions of laying, leave her exhausted in the morning. It is as much as she can manage to drag herself to the clearing after laying and securing two or three eggs in the night. She feeds greedily and , re-energised, hurries back to the safety of the dense part of the forest to recuperate.

Although she would , without question, continue with this regime until her egg pocket was empty of developing embryos , there is one more upheaval ; an unpredictable and unwanted adventure to endure. She is resting when it happens. There is suddenly violent shaking of the whole forest of hair, so violent that it shakes her free from the hair shaft she is clinging to and sends her tumbling end over end until she lands on her back with a thump, in an entirely foreign , unfamiliar environment.

She had no clue to what had turned her world upside down but it is a common misadventure for head lice.. The owner of the scalp, on which she was born, grew up and was now positioning her own children had fallen out with his brother.. Some disagreement between them over which channel they preferred to watch on TV had led to a tussle for possession of the remote control and , although they both had a hand on it, neither was prepared to concede to the other, and while they were straining and struggling to win control, their heads had rubbed together causing their hair to be mussed about by the skull-to-skull contact.

The hard-working, ageing mother takes stock of her new surroundings. The hairs in this forest are lighter, less rigid and have a tendency to curl, like a spiral. She can see no eggs, or even empty egg cases. She allows herself a long slow breath in through the spiracles in her, now shrunken abdomen to settle her nerves. It would be a simple task to find suitable hairs to attach the remainder of her eggs. Unless some other adults have been transferred at the same time as her there would be no competition for feeding sites or good laying conditions. The scalp she now stands on, she notices, is significantly warmer than the one she had come from. She would have to remember to position her eggs further from the scalp to avoid overheating them before they are ready to hatch.

As soon as it is dark she sets off in search of a good  feeding ground. The terrain of this scalp is different from what she is used to. It takes her a lot longer to find a cleared area, where the hairs have been shaved off near to the scalp, and she manages to guide her old fangs between the stumps and into a rapid-flowing pipe. The blood when it surges into her mouth is fragrant and sweet, less acidic than what she is used to. She rejoices at the novelty of the flavour and feels a boost to her lagging spirits.

Chapter 9. In which the circle of life is completed and our heroine performs the final act as the curtain falls.

Maybe it was the shock of having to adapt at her advanced age, or maybe it was just her time but within two days of arriving on the new scalp, and laying only four eggs she begins to feel listless and loses interest in making the journey to the feeding ground. Even when she does force herself to feed she no longer experiences any lightening of her mood. She squats immobile, enjoying the effect of the extra heat from the scalp she now lived on. Within a week her babies will be hatching and beginning their own journey to adulthood. In the meantime she is happy to enjoy the peace and quiet of having this sweet-smelling bush to herself. She settles down and folds away her ancient blunt fangs for the last time.. She is aching with tiredness but is content to rest and enjoy the sensation of her body warming in the radiated heat from the scalp. The movements of her abdominal wall that have drawn air into her system to sustain her since she first emerged from her, come less often. sHe does not notice when they cease completely. She drifts into oblivion, feeling nothing.

Its the older brother who complains first, when the babysitter is supervising their bath. She notices him scratching his neck when the hot soapy water, cascades over his shoulders. She lifts up the hair at the nape of his neck and sees the beads of blood forming where he has raked the scabs off with his fingernails. She has seen this before. There is no doubt in her mind. She gingerly parts the hair on the back of his head and soon detects the peppering of brownish cream nits. She debates silently her next move. Their mother has all the gear, the nit comb and the shampoo that kills the lice. She’ll have to deal with it…

“ Guess what”, she announces enthusiastically.. “ Looks like you guys are getting another week off school.”