Two young head lice, one female, one male. Sensing the proximity of another warm scalp they made the short but arduous journey across a shock of dark hair to a tangle of white. A perfect mating ground, the new head's similarity in colour to their supple but miniscule bodies would hide the two of them and their future eggs until they had gorged themselves and turned red. Ideal.
They settled down to mate and two days later she laid her first ever egg, close to the heat of the scalp, and glued it near the root of a particularly robust hair. Again they mated, and several times more, and then a week later their children began to hatch.
We can't know for sure but observations to date would suggest that head lice do not possess the same moral qualms as humans and so, once these little offspring were nine days old, they began to multiply too, both amongst themselves and with their progenitors. In almost no time at all there was a sizeable assembly of little creepy crawlies, all nibbling at the head of one poor woman who was already old before her time.
It's hard for lice to recognise each other. They have only one pair of eyes, no ears and no sense of smell, as far as can be ascertained, so when the original Adam thought he saw his precious Eve penetrated and killed by an over-enthusiastic youngster, he nearly lost his grip, and when three young and impressionable nymphs perished on the end of a large pink digit, the shock sent him flying off to the ends of the white hair and from there to the cold tiles of a dingy enamel bathroom. Or was it just the particular vigour of the fingers scratch which dislodged him? We'll never know. In any case it was there that he perished of starvation and hypothermia. His body was then scooped up on a stringy mop, along with some nail clippings and some nose hair, and deposited without ceremony down a sink. Eventually, I suppose, he may have made it to the sea where his remains would be eaten by plankton. I certainly hope so.
The white head was Annie's. Continued ...
