2nd Place Judge Selection
No one noticed when the Harvest began. The nearly microscopic mites moved in swift silence inside the passengers ears, and back out again with mounds of their stolen flesh and thoughts to take back to their nest in the bottom of the boat. They got there somehow, thriving inside the Long Island Ferry vessels. For the most part, the preyed-on passengers leave relatively unharmed and unaware of their minuscule missing brain matter.
It only took the young woman a month and a half of boarding the 4:45 Friday to notice a change. The mites never cared to learn her name. They recognized her by the dull glow of her auburn hair against the sun on the top deck, and the tantalized look in her eyes as she tapped her sneakered foot against the green rubber cement. They longed for the sweet bits of her pink tissue, buzzing with impulses, scraps of undeveloped frontal lobe against their lips. The girl longed for something else, the lover she stole away on these voyages to meet. They were truly an escape. She would spend the next two days cooped up in a wood paneled dorm room, full of football players and cans of vodka seltzers, stand on the pube-lined shower floor in an attempt to get clean, and sleep on the twin sized mattress crammed between the wall and his two hundred and ten pound body. At first she was sure of what drove her to endure these things. Love, right? But as the weeks passed, and the mites stripped more and more of her away, she found herself needing to fill those blank spaces with him.
Soon the lines began to form each week at 4:00 sharp: two single file atop the back of her usual bench. They extended for hundreds of mites, and though they could hardly be seen, there was an air among the other passengers that affirmed the sudden safety of their brains against the tiny creatures. They watched as the woman became more forgetful, less focused on her books and looking more dreamily into the water. There were no more podcasts in her ears, or unkempt hair styles. There was only the emptiness in her head and the fullness of her heart. She stopped arguing with his friends when they made comments about women’s bodies, and started to take shots on Saturday evenings before their games. She stuffed whatever she could into the cavernous region at the front of her skull, and the thoughts of him stayed with her long after she departed the 12:00 Sundays. She couldn’t remember what was there before, all she knew was the faint feeling of misalignment inside her. Each departure grew harder, and as she sat facing the distant coast away from her football playing love, she wept, feeling the emptiness grow vaster and stronger within her. She knew that one day she would be a pile of rusted bones, carved into the ship alongside the pieces of her stolen personality and the mites who tried to warn her.
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