Lovers' Lips

As near as they could tell, and they had some pretty sophisticated modeling to back them up, the whole thing started with a flower. A little red flower from Ecuador. They call it chaqua-tika. Lovers' Lips. Pretty thing. Bright red and glossy, like a lipsticked kisser all puckered up. Thing is, chaqua-tika's not just pretty to us. There's a flea that's just mad for it. And this love-struck flea has a nasty habit of carrying with it a bacterium that, well, let's just say it damages people's nervous systems.

There's whole books about Recticulum hayesii, and in between the deserts populated by nothing but long words and statistical analyses, there's some rough going. Some passages will keep you up at night, and that's a fact. No need to get into all that here. R. hayesii has some evil intentions, we'll say, and leave it at that. And R. hayesii seems to have caused this whole deal.

It spread out like blossoms from a small but cheerful apartment in the Bronx. Clara Ramirez had had a visitor—her uncle Manuel. Tio Manuel is from Ecuador, and he was visiting his neice on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the big Northern City. Clara had written a hundred letters if she'd written one, and the family had crowded into Señor Marti's front room. Señor Marti was an educated man. He had lived in Mexico City for twenty years and had a degree in engineering. He was happy to read the letters out loud to Clara's humble relations. But I'm losing the thread here, aren't I?

The point is, Tio Manuel brought with him a gift from Clara's old sweetheart. One perfect chaqua-tika, and he planted it right on her cheek, the second he met her at the airport. That's where it began, or so the hunched-over fellas think. Something about DNA recombination and comparison. No need to get into that. All I'm saying is within one month, some eight thousand citizens of the concrete town of Bronx had trouble walking. And within three months, there were no less than twenty thousand feisty New Yorkers who couldn't figure out how to light a cigarette. All because Clara had pretty brown eyes and a nice young man in Ecuador couldn't get them out of his mind.