Imagine in case your Wikipedia web page described you as a “segmented or parasitic worm” with “two head segments” and “suckers at each ends”. You may flip to the Bible, as a substitute – right here is the E book of Proverbs on leeches: “The horseleech hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three issues which might be by no means glad, yea, 4 issues say not, It’s sufficient: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that isn’t stuffed with water; and the hearth that saith not, It’s sufficient.”
The daughters are the leech’s phrases (although some interpret the daughters because the suckers): “Give, give.” Inside this damp, humid, leech-infested jungle is the surprisingly candy concept of the phrases you say as daughters you’ve got given beginning to.
A leech bit my daughter’s head as soon as: it needed to swallow, not pronounce, the daughter. She was eight months previous and arrived house in her provider after a stroll in bushland close to my husband’s mother and father’ home. He tried to tip her gently on to the mattress with out waking her, then abruptly referred to as to my mom, who was staying with us, to return – and to me to remain away.
In fact, I hurtled myself on the room he was in, and there, on my daughter’s spherical, mushy head, was a big black leech. We didn’t wish to pull it off in case it took a few of her head with it, in case it made her bleed – you always remember the primary time you see your little one’s blood (in my case, a nail-clipping accident). He ran to the kitchen and grabbed salt, and we salted the leech, which writhed off her head.
A leech hooked up itself to my leg after I was 11 and standing in a lake on faculty camp. After I screamed and burst into tears, the camp counsellor stated there have been no leeches within the lake. However I knew what I had seen. The leech, the leech: 32 segments, 9 pairs of testes, a genital pore, no toes. That morning on the best way to the camp, I had intense deja vu: I felt strongly as if a number of seconds, one after the opposite, had been one thing I had dreamed. When I attempt to bear in mind my premonition now, I see solely a shiny outside area and a internet.
William Wordsworth wrote a poem about leech-gatherers: the individuals who collected the leeches utilized in hospitals. It begins like this horrible, unpredictable American week is beginning: “There was a roaring within the wind all evening / The rain got here closely and fell in floods” and continues, as we hope it’d proceed: “However now the solar is rising calm and shiny / The birds are singing within the distant woods.”
We’re all leeches now. Writhing, attempting to work out what it’s that’s strolling down the trail in direction of us: what’s its chemical odor, can we sense heat? One sucker precariously hooked up to some flimsy actuality – a moist leaf, a slippery rock – the opposite one pointed on the future. Intense deja vu. However it will probably’t be actual. Can it?
Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a guide for Scribner Australia
Supply hyperlink
