Microneedles

Her grandmother once told her the story about an old lady who was sewing late at night and lost track of a needle. It got stuck in the couch. She sat on it and the needle went right into her. It found its way into a vein and then slowly traveled towards her heart and punctured it. It is a strange story. It has a moral: always use a pincushion. But the story has more to do with the grandmother than the moral. Little girls don’t think like old ladies. Little girls have good blood running through their veins. When a needle pokes them, they feel it. It’s a grandmother's tale about a grandmother’s fear. A hard needle can’t travel through a vein like a missile launched at a city. But the idea is frightening. It’s like a sperm bringing death to the egg. Any one of us could have any number of needles in our veins, even our arteries. They could be magnetizing us as they circulate, collecting in places and building dams to destroy us. A wrench can be thrown into a machine. Honey into a fuel tank. In Crime And Punishment, Illuysha wraps a needle in a piece of bread and feeds it to a stray dog. The real moral of the story is this: there are showers of invisible needles in the air, microscopic needles, spring needles, needles made for little creatures who sew the broken wings of flies (Queen Mab’s needles), needles made to remove dirt from microchips (Jack Kilby’s needles), microneedles that enter the pores of our skin, filling us with metal, building a reserve and plotting our death like dust pneumonia.