Here sleeps little Murki, curled atop a boulder cloaked in moss. The morning light has just now begun its descent into the glen, slanting spears of gentle gold and white perforating the canopy and playing across the forest floor. Everywhere the light touches, life begins. Dew-dropped leaves and tentative flowers unfurl slowly and reach towards the warmth. The solitary song of the dawnbird is overwhelmed by the glorious arpeggios and arias of her daytime adversaries. Critters stir awake, and begin to trace the winding paths of their lives across the padded forest floor. The glen throbs with life.
	Nearby, a creek happily babbles. It gracefully bends and snakes through the forest. One such bend sloughs through a thicket of reeds. Inside that thicket, clinging to the surface of the still water, is the curved pupae of some insect. It trembles once like the flutter of a nervous heart. Then it trembles again. The thing inside has awakened.
	Slowly, painfully, a split appears along the curve of its back, making its way from its head to the base of its tail. The split widens, and out from that yawning abyss emerges the shoulders of something smooth and sleek. Next out comes its head, tucked to its chest, and then finally its legs, thin and long and sharp like spindles.
	The mosquito struggles free of its pupal carapace and stands on the surface of the water, drying its diaphanous wings in the morning light. It unfurls its proboscis experimentally, flicking its head in terse, birdlike motions. The air smells sweet and fresh, suffused by pollen and flowers. But something else has captured its attention—the delicious scent of sour breath and sweat of something much more tempting. It buzzes its wings once, twice, then lifts up off the water. It slowly ascends out of the thicket of reeds, rising up and up through the specks of pollen and shafts of golden light. It banks its flight first left, then right, then tracing figure-eights in the air above the creek far below.
	But the slow, dark hunger blossomed and grew within the mosquito. It meandered gently through the wide open air, turning this way and that, but always drawing ever nearer to that deliciously sour scent. It was quite close now, the miasma overwhelming and irresistible. The hunger howled inside the mosquito, Go down! And so the mosquito descended, alighting on a lump of something warm and soft, every nerve in its body electric screaming with anticipation.
	The hunger knew what to do. The mosquito unsheathed a long, sharp blade from its proboscis and reared its head back. The blade plunged into the soft warm flesh, flooding it with such overflowing flavor and pleasure its abdomen began to shake in delight. Yes yes yes yesyesyesyesyes.

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	WHAP! Murki's hand slapped down on her leg. She righted herself on the boulder with her other arm as she languidly blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Murki turned her palm towards herself and looked at it. “Ah son of a bitch. It got me!”