
Scratch by Chip Livingston
I thought I had spider bites. The itchy dots on the edge of my shoulder blade popped up the day I found a dead spider crushed on my bedsheet, three eyelash-like legs and the crumpled corpse. The day before I had carried a live spider in tissue paper from my pillow out to an incense plant on my patio. It was summer in Uruguay, I slept with the doors and windows open.
Though I’ve carried a nickel-sized scar on my right kneecap almost forty years from brown recluse venom, I don’t kill spiders, intentionally, and could empathize with the one I’d flattened in my sleep. It was only fighting back. These fresh bites itched like the devil and the shower’s hot jets stoked a weird, exciting mix of pain and pleasure.
Over the next few days, no variety or amount of creams diminished the fury of the skin. A constant urge to rub or touch, if not just reach back and scrape my fingernails across my back distracted me from my desk chair. I’d get up and stretch, roll my shoulders so the cotton of my T-shirt would slide across the red skin. At the same time I was developing a pain in my left hip that felt like sciatica, so I’d bend, lunge, reach my forehead toward my knees, the right scarred in mutilation from the Florida brown recluse. I was leaving new red lines on my back where my fingernails dragged. I tried to get as close to the bites as I could without actually angering the wounds I inevitably reached and reopened.
I wondered if the spider was poisonous – the area looked like it was spreading. Like a slow venom? I didn’t want to overreact, sure my scratching had made it worse, preoccupation worsening the itch. But could they be getting infected? The spots didn’t swell and open up like the bite when I was young, but they weren’t healing with over-the-counter lotions. To scratch my shoulder bordered on ecstatic, the relief ripped with a burning, almost numbing heat. I didn’t know what spiders were poisonous in Uruguay. I started to itch all over. Or I thought I did. Maybe the satisfaction of scratching was simply contagious, but I was leaving red welts wherever I rubbed.
I booked a session with my massage therapist, to work on the hip pain, which had started shooting down my leg. I hadn’t been able to sit at my desk for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. When I took off my shirt at the clinic, I told her I’d been bitten by a spider, to avoid my shoulder, but she said she had an astringent oil she would apply, which did soften the itch, until later, at home, when I entered the shower and the fire heated up again.
It’s easy and affordable, if not free, to get a doctor’s appointment in Uruguay, but I’m from North America, not used to it, never saw a medical doctor unless it was a last resort. I’d always used herbs, traditional medicine, spiritual sometimes, but usually self-diagnosed and self-treated. My Uruguayan doctor never understood why I waited days or weeks with a symptom or question before coming in. I opened the app on my phone for my hospital network and scheduled something with Dr. Selves the next afternoon. Maybe it wasn’t a bite but some kind of rash, an allergic reaction. While the massage had eased some of the pain in my hip, it had also loosened something; my left leg was twitching, throbbing, the muscles moving completely without my conscious direction. I would ask the doctor about that too, maybe a vertebra or something was touching a nerve.
“Look,” I told my boyfriend as I lay on the couch. “You can see the muscles jerking. I’m not moving them on purpose. It feels like two big snakes are fighting in my leg.”
Later, in bed, I couldn’t sleep on my left to curl into the spoon of my boyfriend, couldn’t sleep on my back for the burn of the shoulder, finally turned on my right and put two pillows between my knees, lay there counting leg spasms, it was like my leg had the hiccups. I dreamed of snakes, my childhood obsession. I was back at snake camp in Apalachicola. That week two particular obsessions: two Florida species I’d never seen wild, never seen live, never touched: an eastern indigo and a ringneck snake.
To see a snake always came with a compulsion: to catch it, pick it up, feel its scales slide around my hands and wrists, its huglike constrictions. Much later I considered the snakes, thought how terrible it must be to be lifted from the ground, grabbed behind the head, so I made a pact, would only allow myself to pick up one a year, became choosy, wouldn’t grab the first garter that slid along, passed over hognosed snakes knowing they’d play dead as soon as I lifted them, holding out for a corn snake or, that one year I’d resisted catching any all summer long and was rewarded with a real tiny ringneck of my own. I held it several minutes before carrying it from the grass to the garden.
There were so many different kinds of snakes in my dream, and I realized it was the second night in a row that I’d dreamed of them. In the mirror the next morning, after the shower, the welts on my back seemed to be spreading, despite being diligent about not scratching the last 24 hours. Maybe I was allergic to the laundry detergent. My soap. My leg cramped while bending over to dry my feet, my hip so tender. What could be wrong with me, I wondered as I dressed, as I stood at my desk while I worked. Sitting felt like plugging the hipbone into an electric socket. I tried to stretch intermittently until my three o’clock date with the doctor.
My doctor’s office is on the third floor of a fancy shopping center in Montevideo. As I rode the escalator, a photograph from five or so years earlier flashed into mind. My stepfather’s legs and torso covered with welts and red sores. Shingles. The image, the diagnosis, and my mother’s words, “A pain he wouldn’t wish on an enemy.” Did I have Shingles? My mom had emailed the photos; my stepdad’s skin had looked leeched.
I checked in at the digital kiosk and waited for my ID number to flash on the screen directing me to a consultation room. I sat in the waiting area, thumbed open my cell phone and Googled how to say Shingles in Spanish. Up came the images, the mildest cases much like my rash and the worst like my stepfather’s photos. Fuck, I thought. Herpes zoster virus, or varicela zoster, also known as adult chickenpox. I read Shingles was a nerve infection, maybe that could be affecting my hip? My leg?
“Buenas tardes, Charles. Cómo estás?” Dr. Selves closed the door behind me and offered me a seat, took her own behind the desk. As she pulled up my medical chart on the computer, I told her I thought I had a spider bite. But it hadn’t healed. I told her my hip, my sciatica nerve or something, was tingling with weird sensations down my leg. I was about to say, maybe it could be herpes zoster, when she said, “Quitáte la remera,” and stood up as I pulled off my T-shirt.
“Culebrilla,” she said at the same time I asked, “Herpes zoster?” She nodded then puzzled her face in search of the English translation. “How would you say it? Shingles?”
I told her I thought Shingles was supposed to be more painful, more painful than cancer, my stepfather had said. Mine was terrible at times, the itch, but ultimately more curious than unbearable, the way the rash pained like an Indian sunburn, but ouch, do it again. She examined my body and found the virus emerging on my chest, a new red rise above, and “Look, here too,” also below, the ribcage, a trail along my waist and near my eye that she didn’t like the look of. “When did this start?” she asked.
“Two weeks ago,” I said, “like a little bite I thought was a spider.”
“You thought this was a spider bite?” She gave me the side-eye, sat back at her desk, and shook her head as she typed a prescription for antivirals and creme for the current spots. She typed in a “pass” or electronic request for an in-network X-ray of the hip if, she said, the nerve pain continued after a few days on the antivirals, but that if the cosquillas (I wouldn’t have called them tickles) were caused by the Shingles, by culebrilla, it would ease up on the medicine. The itching would decrease, almost certainly.
As a prescription ticket printed out near her computer, Dr. Selves explained the doses, to watch the area near my eye and to tell her if it got worse. She told me I just had to scan the receipt at the robotic pharmacy next to the lobby. She said to come back in a few days if I didn’t see a major improvement.
It was almost worth needing a prescription to watch the pharmacy in action. The meter read my ticket and the robotic arm woke up, sprung up and slid down, zigzagging side-to-side to retrieve my box of pills, then zipping back and off again to find the tubes of ointment, select them and drop them in the slot for me to pick up. I laughed at perceptions of socialized medicine held by lots of people back home in the States, how my parents imagine me living in an undeveloped country. I bought a bottle of water and swallowed my first two antiviral tablets on the bus ride home from the doctor’s.
I text-messaged my massage therapist to tell her the rash on my back had been the culebrilla virus, in case she was worried about contagion, though Dr. Selves had said it was only transmittable through open skin. The therapist replied gracias, to take care of myself, ending with the quick advice to go see a curandera. I said thanks back and didn’t think more of her recommendation to see an herbalist. I had my pills and ointments – three medications and a doctor’s visit for half the price of her twenty-five-dollar massage.
I sent a text to my boyfriend and another to my best friend telling them it wasn’t a spider bite: it was shingles, herpes zoster virus, culebrilla.
I was already feeling relief, just to have accurate and professional diagnosis not to mention treatment.
My friend wrote back first. “Qué bajon! Amigo, you have to go see a bruja. They say it’s the only way to cure culebrilla.”
My boyfriend replied before I could respond to Gabriel. “Did they give you medicine, amor?”
I wrote to Lenín first: “Sí! And I already took the first dose.” He sent back a thumbs up and red heart emoticon. To Gabriel, I responded, “What do you mean witch?”
Gabriel sent a voice memo, that in Uruguay, when people get culebrilla, they go to a witch to get scratched with a stick. “You have to get a witch to blow smoke on you and make an offering to the culebrilla, so it will leave your body.”
“Do you know a witch?”
“I’m going to write to Yanira, but I don’t think her religion does that kind of magic. I’ll ask my abuela if she knows someone.”
“Gracias, but I already have medicine. Pills. A lotion for the itch and a cream for my face.”
“For the doubts.”
“Yes, just in case,” I wrote back.
When my boyfriend came over after work, he asked me to take off my shirt and then Hmm’ed to himself when I showed him the marks. I told him Gabriel said I needed to see a witch.
“I wasn’t going to tell you that, amor, but yes, in Venezuela, too, everyone goes to a witch when they have culebrilla. They have to draw a circle around the rash to keep it from moving.”
“You weren’t going to tell me?”
“I didn’t want to scare you.” He took my shoulder, turned me 360 degrees for inspection.
“Why would I be scared?” I faced him. “I’ve gone to healers and alternative doctors my whole life.”
“Well,” Lenín said, “because if the snake bites its tail, or makes a complete circle around your body, they say you’ll die. But your spots aren’t connected so you’re okay.”
“Why did you call it a snake?” I asked.
“Because the culebrilla is a snake, amor. It’s a little culebra.”
The dots were connecting, at least in my mind, and my various thoughts began to coalesce – or coil. Of course culebrilla and culebra were connected, though I’d never thought about the literal translation. “But I told you it felt like there were snakes in my leg and you didn’t think about culebrilla?”
“You told me it was sciatic nerve. You told me you got bit by a spider.”
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “What do the witches do in Venezuela?”
“They offer the snake a frog and scratch a circle around it with a stick.”
“Did you ever go to one?”
“A witch? Of course. But not for culebrilla. My grandmother was a curandera.”
“Your abuela was a bruja?”
“When I was little, I had really sweaty hands. My grandmother sent me to find a white frog in the woods near our house, and then hold to it in each hand for thirty minutes. And they never sweated again.”
I took his hands. “A white frog? You never told me that either.”
He squeezed my fingers and let them go. “But I think since your doctor gave you medicine, it will work just the same.”
“Was it hard to find? The white frog?”
“Qué? No. There were tons of them where I lived.”
“Okay, I thought maybe it was just a grandma’s task to keep you busy. So what happened to the frog?” I imagined it sacrificed.
“I don’t know. We let it go.”
I was already feeling better with just the first two pills. “How do you say psychosomatic in Spanish?”
“Psicosomático.”
“One time I went to a psychic dentist in Florida and he healed my teeth.”
My boyfriend kissed me.
I dreamt of snakes again, but this time, I wasn’t catching them. I was releasing a tiny ringneck into the spider plants on my patio. Later the next day, I saw a neighbor and shared my diagnosis when she asked how I’d been. She’s a fourth-grade history teacher so I wanted to demonstrate what I learned about the local customs, told her how everyone said I needed to be scratched by a witch.
“Did you go to one?” she asked.
I said I saw my regular doctor and was taking antivirals. “It itches much less.”
“You know they say that if the culebrilla completes a circle around the body, you’ll die. But it can never happen. The nervous system doesn’t connect like that, so it will never make a complete circle. It’s not physically possible.”
“Yeah, I read on the Internet that you don’t really die from the Shingles. But just in case it doesn’t go away, do you know a witch?”
No one I asked knew a bruja directly. None of my friends had ever had culebrilla, and I decided not to look for a stranger, though botanicos, the herb and magic shops, are common in the city. I’d wait to see if it got worse or better.
I thought a lot about the name culebrilla, and the feeling of the snake or the snakes in my leg. The twitching was easing. I thought the snake must be leaving my body, or at least falling asleep. Dr. Selves had said the Shingles virus never actually leaves the body, just normally lies dormant until awakened by stress, a weak immune system, or contact.
I thought about my stepfather describing the Shingles as the worst pain of his life, and how, even before what I learned about South American approaches to the virus, I sort of appreciated mine, at least once I knew what it was. The curious pain and itch, not to mention the way it moved, were so unique and interesting that it was worth the knowledge I gained. I could sit in my desk chair again and work without interruption.
I sat on my patio, stretching my legs, arching the feet from my flipflops. There was something bright orange on the tile near my toe. A tiny plastic bead, the kind I had stitched around prayer feathers back home. I picked it up. The tangerine shaped bead made me wonder where it came from. To arrive on my patio, enclosed on all sides by cement walls, the bead could have only been dropped from above. By a bird? I looked toward my triangle of the sky.
I am bird clan, and for some reason, looking up for the bird made me think of my grandparents, my great-grandparents, the wild turkey beards and talons lining the wall of my great-aunt’s garage, the beliefs my people held in Florida and Alabama. I thought of advice from a holy person there, who told me to look for and trust my own medicine. I held the orange bead on the tip of my finger, saw myself threading it onto a needle, imagined a stick, a prick, then a ring-necked snake curling into my hand and flicking its tongue toward a drawn drop of blood. But not real blood, just the bright orange seed bead. I thought of witches scratching a ring around the culebrilla, circling the rash before it could bite its own tail.
I could make a scratch, make my own medicine to pacify and coil the serpent. My tribe uses gar teeth to scratch our arms after completing certain ceremonies. I didn’t have gar teeth, but in my own bead box, gifted to me by another aunt when I was about 15, I had some old owl talons. I could scratch myself, perform my own prayer and magic. I cleaned the owl talon with rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball, then dried it in the smoke of a cedar incense stick.
I had to use the bathroom mirror and change hands, but I managed to scratch a ring around the rash on my shoulder. The small marks on my belly and chest were easy to circle. My skin rose with the scratching, tingled, burned, turned red, but I could only imagine how intense it would have felt if I’d scratched myself with the talon two weeks before, when the itch was first hot, first ripe, so rewarding to be tortured. I hadn’t remembered, until I opened the bead box, how my uncle made turkey-feet back scratchers. I could have used one of those redneck contraptions.
Outside on my patio I poured tobacco in my left palm and closed a fist around the orange bead in the middle. I held it to my chest, twisted my arm to reach behind me and place the fist against the rash. I brought my hand back around and circled the spot on my waist and chest, waved it in front of my eyes, said a silent thanks for what I learned from the serpent. To the little culebra, I closed my eyes and said, “How about a nice long siesta?” I opened my eyes, glanced up, and whispered thanks to whatever bird dropped the bead on my patio, for the reminder to use my own clan’s medicine, and to the owl from which I had taken the talons.
I learned something new from the culebrilla and I had remembered. I spoke my grandparents’ names out loud as I released the tobacco and tiny bead into my spider plant. I rubbed my palms together. I looked up, almost expecting to see a bird flying by with a snake in its claws, but the patch of sky was clear.
Chip Livingston is the mixed-blood Creek author of two poetry books, a novel, and a story collection. His most recent work appears in The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, Juked, and New American Writing. Chip teaches in the Institute of American Indian Arts’ MFA program. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
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