The Ankle Bug
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
In the still hour before dawn, Joseph Gettering was jolted awake by the horrid sensation that something large and prickly was clinging to his left ankle. He threw back the bedclothes, leapt from the bed and swept his hand down to dislodge it. But his fingers met a surface chitinous, sharp-edged and so firmly attached to his skin that his panicked swipe didn’t even budge it.
He let out a yell and fumbled for the bedside lamp, the light momentarily blinding him. When he saw what had fastened itself to his ankle, he bellowed a curse, rousing his wife, Sandra who, on account of his chronic snoring, had been sleeping in the guest room. She took one look at the thing and added her startled squeal to the mix.
She turned on the overhead lights, and she and Joseph both stared at the huge, black, beetle-like insect about the length and width of a candy bar, tapering at the rear end in a roughly leaf-like shape. Its flat body seemed designed for clinging tightly to surfaces, and spines protruded from the sides of the carapace in a pattern that almost hid, and probably meant to protect, the six short, spiny legs anchoring it to the soft skin of his ankle. Its small, well-armored head, pointing upward, was equipped with blunt mandibles, and it appeared able to draw defensively into the carapace that slightly overhung it, much as a startled tortoise pulls its head into its shell.
He’d had insects on him many times before and wasn’t phobic about them, but none had been remotely as large or determined to settle on him as this creature. He reached down and, not knowing whether it might have a painful bite, he carefully grasped it under the pointed sides, well away from the head and tried pulling it straight off.
As soon as he touched it, the thing emitted a shockingly loud buzzing noise that vibrated under his fingers and reminded him of the high-decibel call of a cicada, but it carried a definite note of warning. He quickly realized that its gripping claws were equipped with sharp little hooks, because he felt them tightening their already secure grip to the point where it began to hurt. He immediately let go, and the bug just as quickly relaxed its hold enough to stop the pain. Clearly, it had every intention of staying put.
“Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “That’s not working.”
“Want me to get the kitchen tongs?” Sandra asked.
“Could just make it mad,” he said, fighting panic. “Let’s try putting a match to it.”
“All right. And I’ll bring a jar to catch it when it lets go.”
“Good idea. Might want to turn it in to the Natural History Museum. Never seen anything like this before. Not around here.”
“Be right back. Hang on, Joe.”
“Right.” He sat on the chair where he always piled his pants and shirt, and pulled up his pyjama leg, studying the thing with both loathing and fascination. What was it? Where had it come from? It wasn’t biting, sucking his blood or, as far as he could tell, depositing eggs under his skin, although the very thought made him shudder. It didn’t seem to be doing anything other than hitching a ride and refusing to let go. The longer the huge black bug clung to him, the harder it was to endure its squatter-like claim to his left ankle. “Sandra!” he called, trying to control the rising hysteria in his voice.
“I’m here,” she said, a box of kitchen matches in one hand and a large mayonnaise jar in the other. She took off the lid and positioned the jar close by, lit a match and let it burn for a second or two, then blew it out and held it against the bug’s broad back. There was a slight hiss, as if the match had encountered moisture, but it seemed to have no effect. She then lit two matches at once, blew them out and tried again, and this time Don felt something cold at the points where the legs gripped his skin, followed by almost instant dizzness.
“Stop!” he said. “It’s injecting something into me. I’m feeling woozy.”
“Okay, I’m calling 911,” she said, going for her phone.
“No, don’t. I’m all right. It’s... passing now. Felt more like a warning shot than a full dose. We’ll go to the emergency room. They’ll know what to do.” While putting on his slacks, he carefully pulled the pants leg over the insect, which didn’t seem to mind, but not wanting to risk trying socks, he wore sandals on his bare feet.
The nearest hospital was less than two miles away, and, as he feared, the sight of this grotesque hitchhiker created a stir. Even people nursing burns and lacerations got up with hissing exclamations of disgust and moved several seats away from the Getterings. It made him feel like a leper, and he was more than ever grateful for Sandra’s support, although he couldn’t help noticing that she sat on his right, the bugless side, not that he could blame her. He’d have done the same if it had latched onto her ankle.
Sweating with distress, his hands shaky, he filled out the usual exhaustive forms, then waited for nearly three hours to be seen, during which time they had the entire row of seats to themselves.
When they were finally called back, the doctor who entered the exam room was a soft-spoken young female medical resident from India named Dr. Singh, looking harried and baggy-eyed from lack of sleep. She took one look at the thing and shook her head, rather sadly, he thought.
“Oh my,” she said, making a note on his chart. “Another one.”
“You mean there’s been—?”
“Others, yes. It’s a recent phenomenon, but it’s getting, if not common, certainly less infrequent. We don’t know what it is. An entomologist we consulted says it’s an undescribed species, though probably from the order Coleoptera, the beetles.”
“Great. So I assume you’ve come up with a safe way of getting it off me.”
She wrinkled her forehead and rubbed her chin, as if the question caused her physical pain.
“Well, yes, in a way we’ve developed a treatment. And in another way, we haven’t.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” he said, starting to feel his blood pressure rising. “Can’t you kill it or cut it off of me?”
She seemed embarrassed. “Actually no, Mr. Gettering, and I’ll tell you why we can’t. Its six clawed legs are tipped with tiny, sheathed stingers, each carrying a deadly neurotoxin, which is unprecedented, as far as we know, among the known species of Coleoptera. As long as you leave it alone, those little hooks stay sheathed. But if you try to kill it, anesthetize it, or forcibly remove it, the last thing it does before dying is to inject the toxin into your bloodstream. For which, I’m sorry to say, there is no known antidote. Unfortunately, it took a fatality to teach us that. As physicians, we simply can’t take that risk again with a patient’s life.”
“So what the hell am I supposed to do!?” he burst out, much louder than he meant to. “Walk around for the rest of my life with this damn thing stuck to my leg?”
“You’re shouting, honey,” Sandra said quietly, laying her hand on his arm. “It’s not her fault.”
“I know. I’m sorry, doctor. But it’s hard to express just how hideous this is.”
“I very much sympathize, Mr. Gettering.”
“Please tell me there’s something you can do.”
“You won’t like this,” she said, taking a deep breath. “And I don’t like it either, but the one safe, accepted treatment that we have right now is to do nothing.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Sandra said disgustedly. “We waited for three hours to be told you can’t do anything?”
“Let me finish, please, Mrs. Gettering. I know this is an awful experience but, quite honestly, the best and safest course of treatment is to leave it alone.” She glanced at the sheet he’d filled out in the waiting room. “Now, Mr. Gettering, you state that it latched onto your left ankle sometime early this morning, which we’ve learned is when it usually happens. I’m happy to tell you that in a week or two, a month at the outside, it will relinquish its grip and depart. With no ill aftereffects.”
They both stared incredulously at Dr. Singh. “Depart where?” he asked.
“Nobody seems to know where. Or why,” she replied with a helpless shrug. “Possibly to feed on whatever it eats. Or to find a mate.” And here she permitted herself a brief smile: “Or a fresh ankle. All we know is that it leaves, usually at night, while the host is asleep. So many unknowns here. How did it get into your house? Why your ankle and not your wife’s? Does it fly? No one’s ever seen it flying although, like all beetles, it has wings. Nobody’s seen one crawling, either.”
“Thanks very much, doctor,” he said bitterly. “for referring to me as a ‘host.’ I’m flattered.” He got up from the table, staring disconsolately at the bug, that all through the exam had seemed to mock him with its complacent calm. “So I guess the sum total of medical and scientific knowledge on this thing amounts to zero. Wonderful news.”
“Again, I apologize. We’re frustrated, too. But if you could try to think of the Ankle Bug — that’s what we’ve been calling it, since it has yet to be classified — as a relatively minor inconvenience, something like a boil or a bad pimple, that will disappear in its own time without doing any lasting harm, it could help you to cope with your, uh, uninvited guest.”
“’A minor inconvenience,’ doctor? You should try it sometime, walking around with something big enough to scare people clinging to your ankle. I’ve become an overnight pariah. You say it’ll go away soon. Well, it had better, because I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
“Please, Mr. Gettering, promise me you won’t do anything rash.”
“No, I won’t,” he said wearily. “I didn’t tell you, doctor, that we tried burning it off with matches, and it released some of its venom into me, just enough to let me know it could have killed me. And when, right at the start, I tried pulling it off, it made this godawful buzzing noise that could drive a person crazy if it went on long enough. So I guess I’m licked. We’ll just have to wait it out. Thank you, doctor. I know you’ve done all you could.” As they were leaving the exam room, Dr. Singh touched his arm.
“Wait.” She reached into the pocket of her lab coat, pulled out a card and handed it to him. “Another patient with your problem gave me this, hoping I’d pass it on to what she called ‘a fellow sufferer.’ It might help you to get through this.”
The card read: Ankle Bug Support Group. Don’t suffer this isolating affliction alone! Join us Wednesdays at 8 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church, Room 12, 1517 Potomac View Road, Westland.
Yesterday, he would have found this as laughable as support groups for alien abductees. Now, he carefully stuck it in his wallet.
Predictably, his insurance didn’t cover Ankle Bug visitations, so he had to pay the insultingly high hospital bill out of pocket. While walking, his pants leg sufficiently covered the bug to allow him to avoid the expressions on strangers’ faces of fear and disgust that he’d been subjected to while sitting in the waiting room. It was an awful feeling, that general loathing he hadn’t experienced since adolescent pimples, and over which he had no control.
Joseph Gettering was a slender, medium-sized man of fifty, modestly good-looking, and he was used to attracting little notice in public. Now, he wouldn’t be able to avoid it, unless he quit going to work, eating out, and attending events. Dr. Singh’s assurance that this strange ordeal wouldn’t last too long was what kept him from doing something crazy, like taking a pair of pliers to the Ankle Bug, consequences be damned.
Over the next few days, he wore the baggiest pants he owned, and almost obsessively observed Sandra’s interactions with him, searching her features for the faintest expression of repulsion. It was unfair, he knew, to doubt her, and how could he blame her for the strain this bizarre intrusion had brought to their marriage? They’d been together for twenty years, childless by mutual choice, and still loved each other. He knew that she, too, was counting the days when the Ankle Bug would make its stealthy departure.
But each morning, he woke up out of another miserable night of poor sleep, due to his inability to turn over on his left side, with his unwanted guest still attached, and envied, perhaps even resented, Sandra her sound sleep. The bug hadn’t moved at all, to his knowledge, although he wondered if it sometimes left him in the wee hours to hunt for whatever it ate. How could it just stay there, hooked onto him, without water or food, for as long as Dr. Singh said it did?
In the mid-Atlantic region where he lived, there had been a mass hatching of the seventeen-year cicada a decade before, and he’d read that the larva lives underground for all but the last few weeks of its long life, foraging as it very slowly grows over the years and, once emerged into its adult form, it doesn’t eat again, its brief adulthood given over entirely to finding a mate, laying eggs, and then dying.
Maybe this creature also originated as an underground grub, its larval stage lasting centuries instead of decades, which might explain why it was an unknown species. He could believe almost anything now. Nature’s capacity to beggar human knowledge seemed limitless.
He was a web designer for an architectural firm in the area, and worked from home most of the time. But once or twice a month he was required to host a meeting in person. With Sandra’s full support, he invented a case of long Covid as his excuse for an absence that would last until the Ankle Bug departed. By the end of the first week, both of them were frazzled by the thing’s continuing presence in their lives.
It was early fall and getting cooler, and he once tried to put on a pair of the loosest socks he had, but the bug didn’t like that at all, which it made known with its alarmingly loud, grating buzz. So even though it was getting chilly in the house, he could wear only a sock that didn’t cover his ankle. It was humiliating, having to bow to the will of an insect.
And then there was the insidious itch that had developed around the skin where its legs were attached, and not being able to scratch those spots left him grinding his teeth in frustration. Sandra did her best to help him in all the ways she could, but she worked downtown five days a week and, for many hours a day, it was just him and the bug. He couldn’t help thinking she was relieved to get away from the damn thing’s presence and dreaded coming home. Since the advent of the Ankle Bug, they’d barely touched each other.
He hadn’t forgotten the card in his wallet, and on the following Wednesday, after dinner, he told her that he was going to attend the Ankle Bug support group at the church, ‘just to see what they have to offer’ and, if she didn’t mind, he would prefer to go there alone. She agreed so readily that it irritated him.
Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Greene
