Animal Tale #7

An eye for an eye

It always began with a handwritten note the teacher handed me at school.

At first, I never paid them much attention. Boring notes, for parents: nothing for me to worry about.

Most of them were harmless anyway. So harmless, in fact, that even now I couldn’t tell you what they were about. Probably something to do with school trips, upcoming events, or parent-teacher meetings. This was long before the online register was introduced, when using kids as messengers was still one of the best options.

Some of those notes, however, were a threat to me, and more importantly, to my pets.

The teacher would write something along the lines of: “Check your kid’s head, lice are back.”

I hated lice, especially because they loved me so much.

No kid wants to be liked by lice.

No kid wants to be a pidocchioso. And I think this Italian word, meaning lice-ridden, truly captures the nasty reality of temporarily hosting a family of lice on your head.

I was so terrified of getting lice that I started showering almost daily. Unfortunately, and contrary to popular belief, lice aren’t especially drawn to dirty hair. To this day, I still don’t understand why lice liked me so much, and I still feel deeply ashamed.

However, once the note was out, our house descended into madness. My mum would bring out her specialist tools: the much-dreaded tiny comb - the first sign of a possible outbreak. She’d check me first, then my sister, and if she found even a single egg, the process would begin.

She would pick each egg out of our hair by hand, and we’d be forced to shower with vinegar twice a day. 

I remember lying in the bathtub, feeling like a piece of cold, vinegary lettuce, just waiting for salt and pepper.

Anyway, the shame, the vinegar, and the itchiness weren’t the worst consequences of those little notes — which, I have to admit, I started hiding from my mum, only making things worse for me and much better for the lice, who happily settled in.

We were quite a big family, so we kept an extra freezer downstairs; the kind you see in movies where people hide dead bodies. The only difference was that ours was usually packed with ice cream, meat, and homemade soups. 

Yet, the moment that note reached my mum’s hands, the food in the freezer would be replaced by bodies. 

After washing all the bedsheets and every single piece of fabric in the house, my mum would take all of my stuffed animals and put them in the freezer. As if in exchange, an eye for an eye, a life for a life, only once all the lice were gone, my poor animals could come back

Stiff, frozen, and each time, with fewer and fewer hairs.

↩