Household Gods

Nothing seems to do much good. Just about everybody has ‘em. Nicole hated bugs of any sort. She could deal with them, but she hated them. The idea that she had bugs living on her would make her scalp crawl if it hadn’t been crawling already. She’d felt dirty before. Now she felt unclean. She’d never known what that meant before, or how much worse it was than merely being filthy.

“Lice carry disease,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t have. It wouldn’t get her anywhere. But she couldn’t stop herself.

Sure enough, Julia looked at her as if she’d gone around the bend again, and said what she’d expected, as predictable as a sitcom script: “I never heard that before. Bad air or evil spirits or getting your humors out of line some way, yes, but lice? Beg pardon for saying so, but you sure have been coming up with some funny ideas lately, Mistress.”

“Ha, “ Nicole said in a hollow voice. “Ha, ha.” Convincing Julia she was right wasn’t the most important thing in the world – and that was lucky, too, because she could tell at a glance she wasn’t going to convince Julia, any more than she’d convinced her lead was poisonous. Julia had that every-body-knows look on her face again, the one impenetrable to everything this side of a baseball bat.

And there it was again, the script according to Julia: “How could lice carry disease? Like I said, almost everybody has ‘em. If they carried disease, people would be sick all the time, wouldn’t they? And they aren’t. So lice can’t carry disease.” The slave hugged herself with glee. “Listen to me, Mistress! I’m reasoning like a philosopher.”

Nicole sighed and went back to grinding flour. Julia’s logic was as good as she thought it was – if all lice carried disease all the time. If some lice carried it some of the time, no. But how could Nicole show that? She couldn’t, not by mere assertion, which was all she had going for her here.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Lice weren’t bad only because they carried disease. They were bad because they were disgusting. They were bad because they were lice. And she had them in her hair. In her hair. Every time she itched, she scratched frantically. Sometimes she drew blood. Every once in a while, she squashed something. She wiped her hands on her tunic, again and again.

When she found half a moment, she yelled for Aurelia. The little girl fidgeted more under her hands than Lucius had. She was just as lousy as her brother. As she had with Lucius, Nicole plucked nit after nit from her hair, and killed a couple of live ones for good measure.

But she didn’t have time to do anything even close to a proper job, not with baking and cooking and dealing with customers. It wouldn’t have mattered even if she had had time, because the children’s bedding was sure to be full of nits – and probably full of lice, too. Julia’s, too. And her own. Dear God in heaven, her own too.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Squish – a chitinous yielding under her fingernail. Got one. Five minutes later… Scratch, scratch, scratch.

No matter how she scratched, no matter how she picked through the kids’ hair, she couldn’t keep up. Long before sunset, she understood why Umma hadn’t been able to keep the kids’ heads even halfway clean. She went on anyhow, with the kids getting more and more fractious every time, till she had to light a lamp to see the nits; then even the lamp wasn’t enough. The kids went up to bed in visible relief – there, they probably figured, they’d be safe from her pinching, prodding fingers.

She followed them not long after, tired to the bone. She thought seriously of stripping the bed – but there was still the mattress under the sheets. And the floor wasn’t clean either. Nothing short of a house fire was going to get rid of every louse in the place.

She undressed and washed up as best she could, missing toothpaste the most – her teeth felt as if they were coated in flannel. She rubbed them, and tried not to think of lice. The bed waited for her, deceptively tidy, as she’d made it in her innocence, just this morning. How many newly hatched baby lice would crawl onto her, once she lay down?

She couldn’t sleep propped up against the wall. For that matter, she couldn’t live if she went on like this. She’d been walking the edge of hysteria since Lucius found the louse in his hair. She had to stop. She had to stop now – or go straight screaming out of her mind.

Nicole hated nothing so much as a silly, screaming woman. Snakes, spiders, scorpions, two-inch roaches in the kitchen – no, she didn’t like them, but she could handle them. She’d never known anything but contempt for women who couldn’t handle the crawly things in life. What was a louse but another damned crawly thing?

But it was on her. It was laying eggs on her. It was -