Mosquito

I've often said that having five cockroaches in your house is preferable to one mosquito. Cockroaches, be they bigger, shinier, faster, creepier and prone to suddenly fly at you, can be humorous in a Keystone Kops kind of way. There's nothing funny about mosquitos though.

Their refined purposeness is but one of their hideous traits, including the way they fly with their legs splayed like a grappling hook, the way those limbs fold beneath them once they've landed, a squatting machine extracting resources, the way ones gradual sink into sleep is yanked upwards by the whirring of tiny wings, the fact that they're too small to dispose of easily.

The morning saw me engaged in combat with a particularly vile specimen - blue, with white band around its legs, the bite of which leaves an ugly red welt which is insanely itchy for about a day, then lingers looking foul. I lost this bout and saw the thing, weighed down after its meal, hopping across my desk, sunlight revealing its formerly slender abdomen, now bloated and red with my blood. The little shit.