Venom at Midnight

The zipper sounded like a chainsaw in the quiet. I froze with my hand on the pull, listening. Across the clearing, my mother's tent was a dark mound under the pines, no light inside, no sound. The fire had burned down to orange eyes blinking in the ash. Somewhere out past the tree line, a loon called once and went quiet, like it had embarrassed itself.

I'd been holding it for an hour. That's the thing nobody tells you about camping. You drink a beer around the fire, you drink a bottle of water because your mouth tastes like smoke, and then you're lying in a sleeping bag at midnight doing math on how long you can wait before your bladder stages a coup. I'd done the math. The math said now.

The air hit me like a wet towel. Cold for August, the kind of cold that lives in the ground and seeps up through the moss. I found my sneakers by feel, didn't bother with socks, and crawled out into the dark. The campsite was a small clearing ringed by hemlock and white pine, and the ground was a mattress of needles that swallowed my footsteps. Good. My mother slept light. She'd always slept light, even before the divorce, even when I was a kid and she'd wake at the crack of my bedroom door. I didn't want to explain myself. I was twenty-three years old. I could piss in the woods without a permission slip.

I walked past the fire ring, past the cooler we'd left out because there was nothing in it worth stealing, and stopped at the edge of the clearing where the ground dropped toward the creek. The moon was half gone, and the stars were the kind you only see when you're far enough from a city to remember they exist. I unzipped my fly.

That's when the pain hit.

It was not a sting. A sting is a warning. This was a verdict. A white-hot needle drove up through the tip of me and kept going, a burning wire threaded from the head of my cock straight into my gut, and I made a sound I'd never made before, something between a gasp and a gag, and my knees did the thing where they forget their job. I grabbed a birch sapling and held on. The world went swimmy. I looked down and saw something on the ground, a dark curl, a scorpion maybe, or one of those centipedes that get big in the mountains. It was already gone into the leaves. I didn't care what it was. I cared about the fire.

I'd been stung by bees. I'd stepped on a wasp barefoot when I was nine and screamed for an hour. This was different. This was a hot coal pressed against the most sensitive skin I had, and it was spreading, a slow bloom of heat moving up into my pelvis, and my stomach rolled over like a dog showing its belly. I zipped up, badly, and started walking. Not toward my tent. Toward hers.

The zipper on her tent was louder than mine. I didn't care. I was breathing through my teeth and my hands were shaking and I said her name twice before she answered.

"Mom. Mom."

"What." Her voice was thick, dragged up from sleep. Then sharper. "What's wrong."

"I got stung. I need. I need help."

The zipper went up from inside, a fast ripping sound, and her face appeared in the gap, hair flattened on one side, eyes narrow and alert. She was forty-eight and looked younger in the dark, the way everyone does. She'd been pretty once in a way that made men stupid, and she was still pretty in a way that made them careful. She looked at my face and whatever she saw there made her sit up fast.

"Where."

"I can't. It's. It's down there."

She was quiet for one second. Then she said, "Get in. Close it behind you."

Her tent was bigger than mine, a four-person dome she'd bought for herself after the divorce, because she said she was done sleeping in things built for children. It smelled like her, like lavender and the cedar chips she kept in a sachet in her duffel. The air mattress sighed under my knees. She'd already found her flashlight, and she pointed it at the nylon wall so it wouldn't blind us both. Her face was all shadow and cheekbone.

"Show me."

"Mom."

"Don't be a baby. I've seen it before. I diapered it."

I turned away from her and unzipped. The pain had settled into a steady throb now, a heartbeat in a place that shouldn't have one, and every pulse sent a fresh lick of fire up through me. I pulled my jeans down past my hips and sat back on my heels, and the cold air in the tent found me and made it worse.

She leaned in with the flashlight. I heard her breath catch.

"Oh, honey."

"That bad."

"Something got you good." She was quiet, studying. "I don't see a stinger. No barb. This was a bite, not a sting. Probably a spider. Maybe one of those big wolf spiders. They get mean when you step on them."

"Great. So I'm gonna die in a tent with my mom."

"You're not gonna die." She said it flat, the way she said everything when she was thinking. She'd been a nurse for six years before she married my father, back when nursing was still a thing you could do with a two-year degree, and she'd kept the knowledge even after she stopped using it. She reached out and touched the skin just above the bite, two fingers, gentle. I flinched anyway.

"It's swelling fast," she said. "See how the skin's gone shiny? That's the venom. It's already spreading."

"Spreading where."

"Up the lymph. Toward the groin. If it gets to the nodes there, you'll be sick for a week. Fever. Nausea. You'll wish you were dead."

I put my forehead on my knees. The tent wall was cool against my back. I could hear the creek, and under it, faint, the sound of my mother breathing through her nose, thinking. She'd always done that. Thinking sounded like a machine in her.

"There's a way to do this," she said finally. "Old way. But it works. You have to get the venom out before it goes any further."

"How."

She didn't answer right away. I lifted my head and looked at her. The flashlight was off now, and in the dark her eyes caught a little moonlight through the tent fabric, and she was looking at me the way she used to look at a problem when I was a kid, a broken toy, a bad grade, something that needed fixing and she was the only one in the house who knew how.

"You're not gonna like it," she said.

"Mom. Just tell me."

She took a breath. Let it out slow. And then she told me.