The Wasps

Ozzie was a light sleeper, and he jumped suddenly when he thought he heard a buzzing sound. He had always been deathly afraid of bees, but wasps in particular.

It was a wasp!

In his panic he cut his finger running to the corner of the room. He didn’t have many ancillary items, but always made sure he had on hand the jet stream wasp killer. He reached for it from the cluttered kitchen counter and fired it recklessly at the insect, hitting the walls of his small efficiency apartment, leaving them dripping the poison in several places. The wasp, now sensing menace, approached circuitously, which made Ozzie panic. He rolled up a magazine as a secondary weapon. It circled him a few times, like a shark circling its prey, then stopped three feet in front of him and hovered right at eye level. This was a warning, a communication, directly between the wasp and him, as the black insect seemed to look him right in the eye. Finally, it homed straight in on him, the spray flying in the insect’s direction but missing. Ozzie swatted the wasp with the magazine, which caused it to fall to the ground, almost too easily. He pounced on it, stomping the small creature ferociously until there were counter-knocks from the apartment below.

“I hate those things!” he shouted, jittery and sweaty. And then, “And I’m not crazy about you, either!” to the tenants below.

He wadded up about three feet of paper towel to pick up the smashed wasp. He examined it to make sure it was dead, and he noticed this was the blackest thing he had ever seen. It reflected back none of the visible world. He let it drop from the paper such that the carcass fell into the garbage disposal. He turned it on for a full thirty seconds.

“God, how I hate those things.” For the rest of the evening he started every time any droning-like sound was heard or imagined. His heart raced, but finally he fell asleep and didn't even dream about wasps.

***

Ozzie Jenkins, Jr. nearly jumped out of his skin when he noticed the three black wasps that sat on the kitchen counter as he was washing the few dishes he recycled for every meal he ate in his small efficiency apartment.

“What the fuck! Where are these goddamn things coming from?” he shouted. He wasn't in a great state of mind, as his last kill as a contracted hitman was still fresh in his mind.

His skin crawled. They were within inches of him, to his right. When he was composed enough to stand frozen at the sink, he slowly turned his eyes toward them. As he did, they slowly pivoted in unison toward him, choreographed solely for his benefit. This sent a chill down his spine, sensing as he did the team work evident in their stand-off with him. He inched a bit toward his left and, as he did, they did also, moving sideways, each of the three maintaining their relative positions, furthering the eerie effect of a conjoined mission. Finally, he jumped backwards, away, looking to run for his jet stream wasp-and-hornet killer.

They took to flight, now each taking different airborne paths. They circled around the ceiling as three moving points that defined a plane of terror that tilted this way and that over his head. He misjudged his grasp of the can of poison at first, sending it rolling onto the floor. He slammed his back against a wall and watched their tease, suffering. He planned to make a run for the door, but he remembered it had been dead-bolted. After all, this was a dangerous city. The keys were in a pocket of a pair of pants draped over a chair, and fishing for them would prove impossible before any attack would indeed bear down upon him. The circling of the three wasps seemed to get closer, or maybe the wasps just seemed bigger. He didn’t notice at first because of their motion in flight, but he finally had to look harder at them as there seemed to be an alteration of the air and things seen through the air in the background, in a sphere of distortion around each one. It was not unlike seeing the street background wavering through the hot air radiating from a car hood in the sun. He blinked several times.

He dove for the can, this time successfully procuring it. He fired, but not having taken the time to aim correctly, the spray caught his right eye. He nervously spun the can around, trying to see where the small targeting arrow pointed. He fired again with one hand, his other hand jammed into his blinded right eye. Poison flew everywhere. He cried out, blurting a short shriek of terror. The wasps seemed bigger yet. And blacker—much more deeply black, like the blackest of hearts, reflecting back none of the visible world.

He collapsed on the floor again, putting his hands in the air, swatting furiously. He closed his eyes as he did, but when he opened them, still the right eye stinging, the bees were much too big for any of this to be real.

But it was real. As real as the stings that he was being promised.

He knew this was no dream; but these wasps were no wasps, he thought. They’re worse than wasps, and worse than that, they were wasps, too! His conclusion didn’t even come close to the reality. These were avengers sent from the blackest of a place, the emptiest of a place, a place as inhospitable as a black hole.

He closed his eyes again, determined to never open them again. The three marauders fanned their large wings now, filling the small apartment with the sound Ozzie Jenkins, Jr. hated the most in his life. The drone became fervid and deafening, driving the crumpled man out of his murderous mind. He could stand it no longer and opened his eyes again.

The head of one of the wasps was as big as his, and its face, with its large multi-faceted dark hairy eyes, was only an inch away! Its antennae preened its face, which unnerved him further, because it was such a waspy thing to do for something that just couldn’t be a wasp. Next, it used its antennae to preen Ozzie’s face. He suffered its fleeting, flickering touches as his heart pounded madly. Might it burst?

Ozzie shimmied up his wall, but the insect beast mounted him, its added weight bringing both back down to the floor. Ozzie Jenkins, Jr.’s immortal soul suffered some of his scheduled Hell during the brief time that the wasps’ antennae now flitted about his face. The feelers examined every feature of his frozen, wild-eyed, horrified face. Their examination became more forceful until they scratched as they explored, and the man began dying of fright. He felt so much of the fear and panic—the approach and descent of the frenzy of alarm, courtesy of the god of everything. The wasps laughed distortedly through insect mouths. Ozzie cried out again, but now with a sound he would never have thought possible could come out of anyone. He began to feel some skips in his newly arrived heart palpitations.

The wasp on top of him began to use its forelegs to scratch feverishly into his scalp, incessantly, with the unrelenting motion of a mindless insect driven instinctively to accomplish a predetermined goal. This torture continued until Ozzie could hear a different type of scratchy sound, signaling the completion of this step—reaching the bone of his skull. His scalp began bleeding profusely, and the blood poured over his face. With the breach in his scalp so, the monster began another step toward its mission, and incessantly drove its forelegs into the plane, then back out, then back in, in a drilling rapidity, wedging the defect briskly and incessantly until his scalp was completely cleaved away from the bone. The wasp’s saliva burned like alcohol, and he repeatedly had to spit out the bitter blood that rolled into his mouth from above.

The smell of the attackers was of the sickly-sweet smell of their saliva.

Suddenly he felt a terrific searing sensation over his head, and he heard the thud. He looked in horror to see that his scalp had landed on the floor next to him. The burning gave way to a painful cold against his denuded skull.

Am I dead? he asked. He knew he must be in Hell now. Can you be alive and in Hell at the same time?

One of the other wasps began stinging him on his legs, seemingly aimlessly, but the aim improved until each sting demonstrated excellent aim. It repeatedly stung him while the third hovered in flight over him. The tremolo drone provided a horror soundtrack of semiquavers, entrenching him squarely into Hell with all five senses now.

He screamed from the mental torture of tangibly being subjected to the one thing in all of his life he had always carefully avoided. Physically, the stings were excruciating in their own right. He jolted with each barb that was delivered into his skin.

“I thought you could only sting once!” he shouted at last.

That stinging began to move up, while the wasp on him, the one which had scalped him, began scratching ferociously at his very skull. He heard the scraping noise not only with his ears, but also through the bone conduction which radiated the sound so bizarrely.

Suddenly, one particular wasp popped up into the air and reversed itself as it plopped back down, its stinger waving threateningly in front of his harrowed and howling eyes. It tested several areas of his forehead, probing for a suitable spot, then drilled right through the bone. The stinger pivoted this way and that while embedded there, as if to ascertain the correct angle at which to sink it farther in. It stopped the shifting and was still, when Ozzie saw the large, black beast contract at its abdominothoracic joint to drive the stinger home. It entered his brain at a specific target and stung:

Mom is bringing in my birthday cake and setting it up on the table. Julie is two years younger, fourteen, and eager to join in the celebration. She’s so pretty, dark hair and clear blue eyes. She waits, as I do, for Dad to get home. I so want this to go well, after the falling out I had with my Dad the month earlier. He had hit my Mom—I don’t know about what. I dove into it, slapping and punching at him. I was crying, and as he hit me back, he said I was no man with all the cry-baby stuff. Julie never got a single punch in, pushed down onto the floor—I just remember his hairy, powerful arms shoving her away, then rapping at me. He caught my mouth with one of his forearms, and I could taste those bushy forearm hairs, along with the blood from my lip.

I hate this. Why am I reliving this?

“Because it is you. It is what you are,” said a harsh whispered voice that pinned him down with the urgency in its tone.

The last thing he said before he stormed out was, “I’m gonna kill you all, piece of shit family.” Mom didn’t talk for the month until my birthday. Julie arranged it—him to come on my birthday. She told him it would be a good thing to forgive and forget—something simple, just celebrating a birthday. She told him to bring a surprise, just like he used to do in the old days.

“Please no,” Ozzie begged. It was more than just remembering. He relived it, re-suffered it, and now had the particularly terrifying opportunity to anticipate the experience as he relived it. The hissing sibilants, the wasps, did their task expertly. The mounted one retracted its stinger only a bit, and repositioned it with a new sting in a cluster of neurons and inch or two away. Its poison was the neurotransmitter which allowed the memory to replay in real time, connecting the previous episode to the next in that spatially arranged consortium of organic chemicals and electropotentials known as memory.

A surprise. Perhaps his Dad, so disciplined and forthright in his work but a terror in his home, would bring a surprise, just like in the old days. Dad would come in and say, “Here, look what I have for you, birthday boy,” and whip out a treat from behind his back.

When the car roars up the driveway, we all stiffen up, uneasy about his arrival, praying the event would be the success Julie set it up to be. There were a lot of bad feelings—so bad that none of ‘em could have ever been worked out. Only forgiven. But forgiven and forgotten, too?

Never.

The door opens. In he walks. My Mom doesn’t say a word. The candles are still burning.

Can you smell that?

I can smell the wax. Julie is crying.

“I told him to bring a surprise,” she stutters. His surprise for me and us is an instrument of finality for all of us, then him.

“I’m going to kill you all,” had been the last thing out of his mouth, and he didn’t even have a chance to take it back. I dive at him and his surprise, meant for us, goes off and he falls instantly to the ground, stung—felled—with the stinger of the bullet.

Julie takes in a deep breath and blows out my candles. No sense making any wishes.

The huge, heavy wasp removed its stinger and then lifted away, that horrible droning adding to the one that hovered all the while, but which now took its place. Like the last one, it fought at Ozzie’s bone furiously with its forelegs, then assumed the stinging position.

“Learn from this, defiler, killer, solipsistic malcontent,” it seethed.

“Learn from what!” Ozzie shouted back. “I’m glad he's dead and gone. I was real happy to kill him. You understand? The gun must have fired by accident—right! Like I’m an idiot or something. The bullet blew his brains out. Who cares! So I’m gonna learn? Yea, I’m gonna learn—from a bunch of bugs!” The third wasp stung him again on his shin. The new one on him drove a stinger into his brain after searching for that right spot.

I’m in the goddamn hospital again, waiting for some doctor to tell me again someone I love is dead. This time it’s Julie. On the fucking corner talking with friends when she went down because of me. Someone wanted me, so they did her. But, yea, they got me, alright. They got me better than anyone coulda got me.

The doctor comes out with that goddamn face on him.

“Your sister, I’m afraid—” Wham! I slug him. I don’t know why—I just do. About a hundred people pull me off of him. Broke his nose, like it was his fault. And it ain’t. No, it really ain’t his fault. I just hit him—just random hit ‘im. It came out of me for nothing, just like Julie went down for nothing. Random. Nothing in this world really matters. All random. We’re all just bumpin’ into each other. Some of us bump harder, that’s all. Who cares?

“Learn now that you are older. Purge yourself. Suffer and purge.”

“Did you hear me? I said, ‘Who cares?’“

The third wasp, the one who had been stinging him on his legs, now assumed the position. There was a special place in his brain that he wanted to sting:

It’s the dream I’m having after I killed the first time. I can’t believe it. I’m dreaming that I can’t believe it. I ended someone else’s life.

That person had plans, didn’t he?

How do I know? Just in the way. But here in my dream I feel the shame. Who the hell do I think I am?

How dare I? A wife, a baby on the way.

Easy. Just in the way. Can’t think about that. Oh, but the shame—must get rid of the shame. I can’t afford to feel like this. Not me. It won’t do. Kill that feeling. Stomp on it like a bug. My dream shows me that I care—but I won’t. I mustn’t.

“But you can,” he heard.

“I won’t!” he shouted out loud.

“You must. Or you sin against God and the universe. It is haughtiness. It is arrogant!”

“I don’t care what it is.”

“You’ve had your chance.” And then the buzzing stopped.

Ozzie Jenkins, Jr.’s eyes darted in all directions. He smelled the lingering toxic perfume of the wasp killer dripping all over the walls. He reached up to grab his head. He shrieked from the pain and brought down his bloodied hands. Horrified, he saw his scalp on the floor. He rushed to the freezer and placed some ice cubes in a bowl. He picked up the scalp and put it in the bowl. When he was wondering how he was going to explain this to the Emergency Department personnel, he spied them. Three dead wasps on the floor—small and lifeless. He cried loudly as he raised his foot over and over to crush them into the linoleum. Again the apartment below banged back, and he stopped.

Four hours later he was back from the hospital. His arm was sore from the tetanus shot, his rear was sore from the thick antibiotic placed there, too. His head was the worst, like it was on fire under the turban of bandaging that covered over a hundred stitches.

“Iffy,” was what the doctor had said, regarding whether the reattachment would take. There was a message blinking on the old answer machine he still had hooked up. He hit the listen button. The message was clear. It was merely a monotonous droning.

He undressed, cursing when he lifted his shirt over his ridiculously bandaged head. Ozzie realized he his homeschooling wasn't over—and he also cursed himself that he was a slow learner.