Fiction: The Wasp's Nest by G.C. Collins

Photo Source: Pixabay

The surface of the rain barrel used to bounce summer light from the morning sun into will-o’-wisps in the shadowy corner of the house. The venik, always reeking of pine and eucalyptus, now smelled of dirty sticks and barely held together. The old house that my grandparents used to live in before I was born was always a solid, imposing cottage, frozen in time. But I could see that over the years it seemed to lean further and further, threatening the patch of potatoes planted nearby. The neighbor’s mean wiry mutt Sharik barked and snarled year after year, soccer and tennis balls forever lost to her territorial tyranny, then there was silence the next. And alarmingly, in the corner of their property always populated by several tall bushes of jungle-green stinging nettles – all of that was suddenly gone, leaving behind a half-rotted fence post.

I didn't realize until later that was just what growing up meant. Everything changed, even the things that you thought impossible. Sure, I knew that metal rusted, wood rotted, hinges broke, and even pickles disintegrated. You fixed it and the door swung open noiselessly, and there was always another jar to open up even more sumptuous than the last. Sure, grandma hunched, grandpa coughed, and our husky played less and less, but they all got some medicine, slept and then got better.

There was too much love to hold onto, I thought one night, unable to sleep. It was a powerful combination of words. I don’t know what it meant exactly but I felt like I had finally dug up a hidden well that I could steal away to when things started to make less and less sense. A single cupful of that water and the scary thoughts flowed by just a little bit faster.

This was the summer before my last visit. The kids in the neighborhood, scrawny and taller than me, would ride their bikes past my grandparents’ lot and yell for me to come out, let's play, chuvak, davai. Still freshly jet-lagged, I threw on my Keds and left the house right after breakfast. I approached the gate, the whir of the chain on the fixed gears dancing through the air, and then stopped cold. The yelling continued until one of them stuck their head over the fence, following my eyes. We stood in silence, trying to understand what we were seeing.

The corner of my grandparent’s lot was occupied by a wasp nest the size of a dog house. It looked like a giant, unripe pine cone the color of a faded birch tree, layers of off-white and gray paper tapering down to a single, black eye at its bottom. I ended up running back to the house, shouting for my grandparents.

Oh that? they said. It's been there all year. Don't worry, there's nothing inside. The wasps moved on. Just leave it alone and it’ll go away.

My friends were muted the next few times they rode over, careful with their volume, worried of waking up the last few hornets that, who knew, could still be asleep inside the nest. Having been stung in the ear in the States, it was not an experience I wanted to consider again, so I avoided looking at it or coming near it and successfully filtered it from my thoughts. Summer passed by too quickly.

When the school year started, it was like waking from a long, vivid dream. My English suddenly felt barbaric, and the endless suburbia with barely a birch tree, let alone an ancient, towering forest surrounding on all sides, shocked me to the core. But these thoughts did not last long and the mundane American schoolboy routine easily took hold. I lived out tragicomedies on worn-out soccer fields, concrete schoolyards, and copy-pasted strip malls.

The growing summer heat dragged the end of the school year into a bad mood. I blinked and was in the airport with a headache coming on. It bloomed over the Atlantic, punctuated by painful, dragging hours in European airports that all bled together until I was finally in grandpa’s car, driving to their lot out of the city, into the deep forest, leaning into the sharp right turn down a dirt road that separated us from the rest of the world. Gritting my teeth, I decided that I was tired of the changes that had built up over the years like sloppily laid bricks, bitter mortar spilling all over my nostalgic memories.

We finally arrived. I lumbered up the stone path to my grandparents with my luggage. I could not help but look towards the post where the wasp nest had terrorized me even though I was certain that it was gone. Something that size, that shape, that ugly? It was a blight on the property and an offense to the world – it had to go.

So I looked, and realized with horror that it had grown, crawled along the ground somehow!

No, the cloud moved, and daylight spilled onto it and gave it grotesque clarity. It had just fallen off the post. It was still as big as last year.

From my grandparents I learned that Timur, Sasha, and Pasha had moved to the city and Elya, my dark-eyed crush who flitted in and out of my summers like a ghost from a folk tale, had moved to Moscow for secondary school. I stared into my grandma's kasha, fed lovingly to me first thing, knob of sweet butter already half-melted on top. I could see the writing on the wall. The friends that made it worth it were almost all gone and the romantic hopes of my pubescent mind were dashed to pieces. My despondency must have been well-reflected on my face because my grandpa sighed and said, if you’re going to sulk, do it outside.

I left through the back, avoiding the nest. The air was unseasonably cool for a Siberian summer and rain clouds slid past each other above. We used to bike down at full speed on this side road, slamming the pedals on our fixies to see who could leave the longest tire marks. It was pockmarked with puddles. I kicked pine cones and gave myself more points for hitting smaller targets. Soon I was standing in front of my grandparents gate halfway through my loop. I felt something like bravery, but it was mostly arrogance, and I wanted to see the nest up close. Passing through the gate, I grabbed a sturdy stick and tucked my pants legs into my socks to be safe. I approached the disgusting aberration of nature in a half-crouch.

Getting closer, I looked above the bloated papier-maché pine cone with its terrible black eye. The piece of nest still clinging to the post was made of layers pressed against each other like wet sheafs of paper stuck to each other and left to rot. The nest itself was looking deflated as well with dark discolorations all over and depressions in the middle.

That this fucked-up thing was still here... I ran up and kicked as hard as I could. My foot connected with the bottom, near its pitch-black hole, and sank into it with a sickening crunch. I pulled it out instantly, horrified by the flesh I felt through the layers of rubber, canvas, and my sock. I turned away before I could see the hole I made in full, awful detail.

After wiping off my shoes against the grass, I realized that it was barely noon and I was already exhausted. There was nothing else to do but wait for darkness to fall so I grabbed my assigned reading for my first year of high school, climbed the narrow, creaking steps to the second floor of the banya and sat heavily into the rocking chair on the balcony. From my higher vantage point, I could see that monstrosity peaking up behind the raspberry bushes, but I turned my chair away and looked towards the sunset, having The Crucible open but not having read beyond the first page. It was quiet. I remembered the chorus of dog barks that would echo endlessly across the village. I remembered construction equipment and machinery clanging and groaning, building new houses deep in the forest, expanding the village. Now, nothing but a whisper of a plane overhead. The hours dripped past like tar.

The next day was hot and dusty. I wrapped a bandana around my face, grabbed some shears and gardening gloves from the old shed, and began to cut. There seemed to be layer after layer of rotted paper, and even though I was waiting for the odor of death to assault me, nothing came. The shears were dull and work was slow, but I had nothing else to do and no friends to bother me. I worked through the morning until I had made a fairly clean line from the top of the horrible hole to the top of the nest, where it had been glued by its former occupants to the post. After I made that cut, I dropped the shears on the grass nearby and began to pull the sides, pulling with all of my weight, to crack the nest like a pistachio shell.

A thousand branches broke in rapid succession, and then all at once. I fell to the ground, crying out as the nest shell fell on top of my legs. But it was no heavier than if I had spilled a stack of paper over my feet. Getting back up, I approached the cracked nest cautiously, holding the shears open like oversized scissors, ready to snip at anything that jumped out. In spite of the afternoon heat, I was shivering. I had watched The Fly with some friends in the middle of the night not long ago so when I suddenly remembered mean old Sharik—

But there wasn't anything at all. Underneath thousands of paper layers, all that was left in the center of the nest was a crumbling, desiccated honeycomb, some dead wasp bodies that immediately blew away with the slight breeze, and a single wasp queen entombed, perfectly preserved with rich, shiny blacks, antennas and fuzz still on its head, and vibrant, almost neon, yellows on its legs and circling its abdomen. It was as if the worker wasps had decided to die at her feet as a final act of loyalty.

All violence drained out of me. The breeze blew again and the wasp rocked and forth in the small depression of her chamber. I ran back to the shed and grabbed a rusted trowel and dug a small grave near where the hole of the wasp's nest used to be, now just a half-circle of a channel that led up in undulating waves like the banks of a river to the queen's tomb. I gently scooped the queen into the trowel and buried it into the grave. After moving the dirt on top, I somehow knew that as soon as I turned around, this would all disappear and I would be staring at a bare patch of grass next to a wooden fence post, in the corner of my grandparents’ lot where nothing else would grow.

G.C. Collins is a writer living high in the mountains of the US. One day they will finally come down, move to the coast, and fulfill their destiny as a senior surfer/writer.