"On My Mind" by Ariel Pelage

Alo there, my name is Ariel and I'm the member of The Academy you might not want to get on the wrong side of if you don't like bugs. You see, I can control them, so that means I'm one of the only people Alex is nice to. He's a little squeamish, but he wouldn't want you to know that, so let's just keep that one between us two.

Now, I suppose you want to know how I do all of this, so I'm giving you fair warning that if you're anything like Alex you might not want to carry on. If you need any indication, go and Google the botfly to see if your stomach's up to the job.

Still here? I'm starting to like you. Let's get going.

So I'm from Haiti. I know what you're thinking, and it's either "earthquake" or "Quantum of Solace". I lived in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit, so I know which one comes to my mind when I think of home. The earthquake is actually where this story starts.

I think I was about ten when the earthquake hit, or maybe nine. Nobody really focuses on your age when the Earth starts shaking.

We were at home when it started, my family and I. Just having a meal together, nothing unusual. If I had known what was going to happen, if I could have been warned like Necahual, I would have clung to my family and never let go. But I was not warned.

Everything began to shake, the ground beneath our feet, our home, my whole world. My papa pushed me under the dining table and my mother got under there with me, cowering over me to protect me.

And then the roof caved in. And there was blackness all around.

I coughed, spluttered. There was dust everywhere. My lungs. My eyes. Everything ached, and stung.

I felt weight all around me, the soft weight of my mother on top of me, the rise and fall of her chest against my back telling me she was still alive. But everywhere else was hard weight, impossible to move against. I was trapped in the coffin of my own house.

I kept blacking out and waking up again. Who knows how long I was in there. I wished so hard that I could see the sunlight again.

Suddenly I felt a strange tingling, the feeling of things crawling all over me. Dust began to fall inwards, setting me off coughing again. My mother coughed too, so I knew she was still alive.

A searing pain shot through my eyes. Sunlight broke into our space. And air. Fresh, clean, dust-free air. We could breath and see again, like we had just been born.

My mother was on top of me still, so she pushed upwards through the hole, widening it enough for her to climb out, and then help me out. But when we got out we were amazed at what we saw.

Everything was devastated, razed to the ground. All around, there were people searching through rubble to find survivors. But there was nobody near us. Looking down we saw the only life on the wreckage of our home - thousands, millions of insects.

Then we realised. We started frantically scrabbling about in the rubble, looking for my papa and brother.

I cannot possibly express to you how I felt when we found them. Two mangled bodies, barely recognisable as my family. I collapsed and wept. A howling sob, with thick streams of tears running down my face. My mother was the same, as was most of the country.

Everyone's grief loomed over the country like a spectre, and lasted for years, longer even than the damage to the country. Death was not all that came to Haiti that day, however. Haiti got a hero.

In the moments when I needed rest from the throbbing of blood in my brain reminding me that I was alive and half of my family wasn't, I thought about the bugs. Why were there so many on the building? And why did they help us?

Then one day I noticed a little scratching noise. It was right inside my ear, and it never went away no matter what I did. I could stick my finger in and wiggle it about, put my head underwater, nothing helped. Thinking back it could have been there for months, but with the chaos of the disaster there were other things on my mind.

One day my mother took me to one of the paramedics that were still in Haiti, and she looked into my ears but found nothing. Well, nothing but a minuscule wound inside my ear, no bigger than a pin prick. That was enough for the medic to be worried though.

I was rushed to the nearest functioning hospital for an ultrasound test. Part of my hair was shaved to expose a space near my ear, then they smeared jelly on it. It felt cold and weird, but I knew it had to be done. When the image of the scan appeared on the screen the doctors started to freak out a little.

I heard them talking in hushed tones outside the room, making me panic. I heard little snippets of conversation. Operation. Nothing they've ever seen before. Strange chemical compound. None of it made sense to me, but it all frightened me.

"Miss Pelage, we have some news for you regarding your... condition," said the doctor as he approached my mother and I. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

"Is there something wrong with me?" I asked. I could hear my words waver as I spoke, the fear gripping my throat, trying to silence my voice.

"Yes, I'm afraid, but it doesn't seem likely to cause you any issues. It's more unusual than anything else."

"Okay, then what is it?" The wavering was still there. The fear for my life had gone, replaced by a fear of the unknown.

"There appears to be something attached to your brain, and we aren't quite sure what it is. With your permission, we'd like to operate. We would remove a small section of your skull so we can get a better view of what it is exactly."

I looked at my mother. She saw the fear in my eyes.

"You said that it won't kill her," she said to the doctor very sternly. "Why do you need to operate?"

"We cannot be sure that there will be no long term consequences. It's for the peace of mind of everybody involved."

"Will it hurt?" came the meek voice from out of my mouth. It sounded so quiet and frightened that I could have forgiven for thinking it wasn't mine.

"It might ache slightly afterwards, but you'll be unconscious for the entire procedure."

I looked over at my mother and nodded. "Yes," she said. "We'll do it."

I woke up after the operation feeling groggy - the anaesthetic was still working it's way out of my system. I felt the bandage around my head so decided against investigating how my head felt. I was just glad to be alive.

My mother was asleep in the chair beside me, and I could see by the inky blackness of the sky outside that it was night. There was no noise on the ward. Nothing except the scratching inside my head.

It was still there. Why was it still there? Did something go wrong? Is it there permanently? My mind went into panic mode, thinking of the worst case scenarios of what this could be.

The creaking of the door snapped me back to reality. The doctor entered to tell me what could only be bad news.

"Ah, Ariel, I'm glad you're awake. This will not be easy to hear so it is most likely the best thing we could do to get it out of the way now.

"We removed the necessary section of your skull in order to reach the necessary area, but I'm afraid we could not remove the source of the problem. There was something in there... attached to your brain. It had its legs buried too deep in your brain, if we took it out there might have been serious health issues."

He handed me a brown envelope and told me "We took some photographs."

I opened the packet hesitantly, unsure as to how I would feel seeing my own brain, especially with something attached that shouldn't be. I steeled myself as best I could and pulled out the photographs.

What met me was most unusual. It didn't frighten me, I was actually quite curious. There was an insect, one that we call a toe-biter in Haiti, clinging to my brain. It was larger than any I had seen before, and it was inside my skull.

"We believe that an egg was laid under your skin, most likely inside your ear, at some point. Instead of burrowing out once the larva hatched, it went inside your head and somehow attached itself to your brain. It has been living there for years, feeding off of whatever you eat, taking the oxygen from your blood."

"Does it do anything to my brain?" I asked, turning my head as I looked at the photographs, intrigued by the creature feeding on me.

"We detected trace amounts of a strange liquid around the insect, but we believe that to have something to do with how it attached to your brain in the first place. The only abnormal thing would be this."

The doctor then went over to the closest window to my bed. The blinds were closed so that I could not out. As he lifted them I saw a swarm of insects covering the glass on the outside. There were so many crawling and squirming things that I could not see the sky outside.

"They followed you to the operating theatre as well, we could see them through the skylight. Perhaps the creature is using your glands to further its ability to secrete pheromones and communicate with other insects."

The next few days, before I was dismissed, I spent in contemplation of the news I had received and what it could possibly mean for me. Was I simply a host to this parasite, used merely to further its existence? Did it call the other insects to save me in order to save itself? Or could I be more than a Petri dish? Was it in fact I who saved myself from the earthquake, subconsciously controlling my saviours myself? More importantly; could I do it again?

Much like many of my new friends at The Academy, I spent a lot of my time once I learnt of my enhancement trying to figure out how to use it. As much time as possible was spent in my room, quietly trying to focus on the insect in my brain.

After a while, the scratching stopped. At first, I thought the toe-biter might be dead, but then I knew it wasn't. It didn't give me a sign, it's not like it burst out of my skull thinking it was John Hurt's chest. I just knew. Then I realised that the scratching was the insect trying to communicate with me, and now it didn't need to do that.

As I opened my eyes, somehow knowing that something had switched on in my brain, I saw an ant moving on my leg. I thought of it stopping, thought hard, and it did. Then it looked at me. I tilted my head to the right as I tried to figure out if it was I who had done that, and it mirrored me.

"Ariel! Come and help me with the washing!" came the call from my mother downstairs, breaking my concentration. The ant scuttled away.

The next time something like that happened was with a butterfly. I was watching one intently, mesmerised by the gorgeous colours of its wings. It flew towards me and went over my shoulder, but then I felt dozens of tiny legs crawling on my skin. Every bit of skin on my back and shoulders not covered by my vest was occupied by a butterfly.

Years later, after I'd spent much more time figuring out what I could do, I was told I had to go back to the hospital. I was moving a wasps' nest when the doctor from all that time ago found me, after speaking to my mother. Apparently a foreign doctor was interested in my case, after something similar had happened in Portugal.

When I arrived at the hospital I was met by two men. One was tall and muscular, with his brown hair slicked back and suit jacket draped over a chair, sleeves rolled up to alleviate the heat and reveal his hairy arms. The other was shorter and much older, sweating in his tweed suit but refusing to take it off. A finely groomed grey moustache matched his white quiff, and the circular tortoiseshell glasses finished off his look.

"Ah, you must be Ariel," the larger man greeted me, a broad smile on his face.

I was nervous. The man spoke French but with a strange accent. I didn't want them to tell me that something was wrong. I was sweating more than the older man in his suit, tucking the side parts of my black bob behind my ears. The fly circling the ceiling light left the room.

"Now, you do not need to worry young lady. We're not here to hurt you, but we believe we may know something about what caused that creature to get into your brain."

"You can't take it out," I blurted defensively. "You're not allowed."

"That's not going to happen," he leant over and spoke quietly. "We know what it lets you do. We've had our eye on you for a while, and we would rather prefer you to keep it."

I started thinking about what they could possibly know. I found out so long ago but I had tried to never use my abilities in public. There is a large voodoo culture in Haiti and I didn't want to do anything that would make people think I was getting involved in it.

The old man muttered something I couldn't understand, I think it was English. The younger man replied in the same language, and then turned back to me.

"Ariel, it seems your condition is linked to something like a case we have already seen. My colleague has been looking at the samples of the liquid that your doctor took when he opened up your skull, and it seems to be identical to a strange liquid we've found in the water around port towns. A large company has been dumping it here in Port-au-Prince, and also in Lisbon in Portugal, and we believe it to be part of a failed experiment in genetic modification."

"I don't see what this has to do with me."

"With your help we can expose this company and make sure it doesn't happen again. If you agree you will be taken to a school far from here where we will run a few tests on you and a young man from Portugal. In return we will give you an excellent education..."

He then leant closer and spoke in hushed tones, "...and we will help you to figure out how to perfect your ability. You're not the only one we know of with these powers and we're trying to help them all.

"Now I know this isn't for everyone, and if you say no we'll understand, I just want you to think of all of the people you could he-"

"It's okay," I interrupted. "I'll do it."

"Are you sure? This is a big commitment?"

"I could have died when the earthquake hit, but this thing in my brain saved my life. I don't want to waste the chance I was given.

"I just need to check with my mother, I'm the only one she has now so it'll be hard for her to find out I'm leaving."

"For a small island, we have an excellent postal service," said the man. "I can assure you and her that you'll be able to keep in touch, we wouldn't want to break up your family."

As soon as I saw my mother I frantically explained everything that I could. She was reluctant to let me go at first, but after I told her about the bugs that saved us she started to change her mind. When I told her that I could have saved my papa and my brother there was no way of her saying no.

I called the younger man on the number he gave me, and he came straight away. From there, he took me to the port with his older companion. There, we boarded a large wooden boat. I thought it would be perfect for termites, but what I brought were mainly spiders and wasps. I kept them hidden from my fellow travellers though, my little secret.

It was a very long journey, but I had plenty of company below deck with my insect friends. I met many more friends when I disembarked, ones I could communicate with a little more efficiently. But just like my bugs, they understood me, understood what I was going through with my power. But none of them understood as much as Necahual.

Anyway, that's how I got here. I'm kind of like a phoenix, starting a new life after all of the death and destruction I endured through. I think this life is shaping up a bit better.