It was just past midnight, and the summer air was thick with humidity. Beneath a flickering streetlamp, Maria sat on the porch, legs stretched out, sipping tepid BOP Ceylon tea. She was alone, or so she thought.
A high-pitched whine buzzed past her ears. She swatted absently, eyes half-closed in drowsy defiance. The buzzing returned, louder and more insistent. She groaned.
“Damn you, come on,” she muttered. “Haven’t you guys had enough already?”
The mossie hovered just inches from her cheek. A delicate creature, barely more than a speck with wings, it seemed to hesitate in mid-air. Then, astonishingly, it spoke.
“May I?” the mossie asked.
Maria’s eyes snapped open.
“What…?”
“I said, may I? Just a drop only. I promise I won’t make you itch.”
Maria blinked, staring at the insect. Either she was hallucinating, or this was a very elaborate prank. She leaned forward, intrigued rather than alarmed.
“You… can talk?”
“In a manner of speaking,” the mosquito replied, its voice like a whisper passed through reeds. “You’ve tuned in to me. Most other humans don’t bother.”
“Well, this is new,” she muttered. “You’re the first mosquito I’ve ever considered interviewing instead of squashing.”
“And I thank you for that mercy. May I explain myself?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead. Enlighten me. Why do you insist on being such a nuisance to us humans?”
The mosquito landed gently on the railing in front of her, folding its wings like a nun adjusting her black robes.
“It’s not about nuisance,” it began. “It’s about necessity. My name is Mina. I am a female, and I need blood, not for pleasure, but for purpose. For eggs. For life.”
Maria snorted. “So the old excuse holds, maternity.”
“It is more than maternity,” Mina said patiently. “You see only the prick, the itch, the discomfort. But in that small act, I’m playing my part in the grand design of life.”
“By stealing my blood?”
“Borrowing,” Mina corrected. “You have pints to spare. I need but a trace. That single meal allows me to lay hundreds of eggs. Those eggs become larvae, wriggling in water, cleaning it as they grow. They eat decaying matter, bacteria, filtering, refining. We’re custodians of still water, recyclers of rot.”
Maria raised her cup to her lips, sipped the hot brew, thoughtfully. “You’re telling me mosquitoes are janitors?”
“Among other things,” Mina replied. “But beyond larvae, think broader. We are food. For bats, for birds, for frogs, for dragonflies. Without us, the chain frays.”
Maria tilted her head. “You’re saying your existence keeps other creatures alive?”
“Yes. And your blood, strange though it sounds, sustains not just me, but ecosystems you never see. That blood becomes wingbeats. Those wingbeats become nourishment. We are tiny transfers of energy in the vast dance of Shiva.”
Maria was quiet for a moment. The air pulsed with cricket chirps and distant traffic.
“You know,” she said finally, “most people wouldn’t care. They’d still swat you on sight.”
“I know,” Mina said with a sigh. “But care is often born from understanding. That’s why I speak now, because you are listening.”
Maria leaned forward. “So… why does it have to be blood? Why not nectar, like bees?”
“We do drink nectar,” Mina said. “Both males and females. That’s how we feed ourselves daily. But to make eggs, to create new life, we need the proteins and iron found only in blood. It’s not about violence. It’s biology.”
She rubbed the back of her neck, suddenly aware of how simplified her view of mosquitoes had been.
“But the diseases,” she said. “The viruses, the parasites, you do cause suffering.”
Mina nodded slowly. “Yes. Some of us are vectors. Not by choice. We carry what we touch. Just as humans can spread sickness through air or surface, we do through blood. But remember: we existed long before these pathogens. Malaria, Dengue, and Chickungunya, found us, not the other way around."
Then she added, with gentle emphasis:
"Every creature has a shadow. Yours is pollution, war, extinction. Ours is disease. But that is not the whole of us." “We simply move from point to point in search of survival of our species and in that process we do transmit many virus’ and diseases, true, but not by choice. You, on the other hand, create hate, fight wars, commit genocide, sow destruction, and harbor evil on earth, simply because you are greedy and seek more power and control over others.”
In those words, Mina offered a powerful truth: that suffering does not come from malice by choice, but from proximity, survival, and complexity, and that no living being should be entirely defined by the harm it may cause during its sojourn on our planet.
The streetlamp above her buzzed faintly, drawing moths into its amber glow. Maria sat in silence, listening to the layers of the night, the rustle of leaves, the chirping of crickets, and somewhere far off, the echo of a distant owl.
She glanced at the sky, wondering how many other stories like Mina’s went unnoticed. How many tiny beings buzzed, crawled, or scurried through the world, dismissed as pests or background noise, when in truth they carried ancient wisdom and quiet purpose?
The door creaked behind her.
“You talking to yourself again?” came a sleepy voice.
Her roommate, Jenna, stood there wrapped in a blanket, squinting into the night.
Maria smiled. “No. I was having a conversation.”
“With…?”
“A mosquito.”
Jenna snorted. “Right. Must’ve been that strong tea you are snorting.”
Maria didn’t argue. “Go back to bed. I’ll be in soon.”
When Jenna disappeared back inside, Maria stood and walked barefoot to the edge of the porch. She looked out at the overgrown lawn, where wildflowers had claimed territory over manicured order. Somewhere in that chaos, Mina would find a place to lay her eggs.
She imagined the larvae in the still puddle at the corner of the garden. She pictured them wriggling like tiny question marks, feeding, growing, and being fed upon. That one drop of blood from her arm would ripple through an unseen chain, turning into wings, hunger, music, death, and life again.
We simply are who and what we are. Mina’s words echoed softly.
Maria thought of how often people demanded a reason for discomfort, a villain to blame for every inconvenience. Yet so much of life wasn’t malicious, it was just life, doing what it had to in order to continue.
She stepped down from the porch, barefoot in the dew-damp grass. A breeze stirred the leaves of the lemon tree by the fence, and fireflies blinked among its branches.
“Good luck, Mina,” she whispered.
The next morning, Maria dug a shallow bowl into the garden soil, filled it with water, and placed a few pebbles inside for the larvae to perch on. She tucked it near the bushes, in dappled shade where it would stay cool and undisturbed.
It was a strange thing to do, she admitted, nurturing the birth of mosquitoes. But somehow, it felt like a gift, a small act of reciprocity.
Over the days that followed, she found herself pausing before swatting. She observed. Listened. Once, she saw a dragonfly snatch a mosquito mid-air and whispered a quiet thanks for the balance of things.
She even wrote about it. “The Last Sip”, she titled the essay, posting it to a nature blog with only a hint of the actual conversation, enough to stir wonder without sounding delusional. The post went modestly viral, sparking debates in the comment section. Some laughed, some raged, but many, unexpectedly, paused.
One reader wrote: “This made me hesitate before I crushed a spider today. I let it be. Thanks.”
Another: “I still hate mosquitoes, but maybe I’ll hate them less now.”
That was all Maria hoped for: less hate. A little more understanding. A brief window into the miracle of even the smallest life.
Weeks passed. One twilight, as she watered the garden, a whisper brushed past her ear, soft, familiar.
“We remember.”
She froze, then smiled.
“I’m glad.”
She didn’t know if it was Mina again, or one of her descendants. It didn’t matter. The voice was real enough to her.
She turned back toward the house, the light from the kitchen casting golden rectangles across the grass. She carried the watering can like a relic, her thoughts far beyond the fence line, into the thickets of time, where blood became wings, and wings became life.
From a simple conversation came a revelation: even the smallest bite can leave behind more than an itch. It can leave behind understanding. And sometimes, that’s the beginning of something better.