Maria Kozic’s Parasite

Taking Maria Kozic to lunch at the Prahran Markets, I suggest we split a tray of oysters. Some of her recent paintings feature mutant blob creatures. Oysters, I think confidently, are a Maria Kozic food. How wrong I was. She doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, but she admits that she doesn’t eat oysters or raw fish because of the flesh-eating parasites and brain worms that they can harbour. Kozic is a young sixty-seven-year-old bundled in a comfy black hoodie. The problem with these types of parasites, she tells me, is that they eat you alive, killing off limbs and organs without you knowing. It’s terrifying that something inside you is killing you, and you can’t do shit about it because you won’t realise it’s there. She tells me ruefully that her friends think she’s nuts. But I bring up Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain-worm, and the similar parasite my high school math teacher got that made him forgetful and temporarily altered his personality. “See!,” she says vindicated by my two examples, “it happens all the time!”